Ethos |
Concept (from Greek) introduced into anthropology by Benedict (see 1934), and later used famously by Bateson (1938), and Geertz (1957). Ethos attempts to capture the emotional communality or "ambience" that a group shares, as opposed to the cognitive (thought-centered, logical) communality, which Bateson called "eidos", but some later researchers such as Keesing (1974), use synonymously with culture. It might, e.g., be meaningful to say that a group has an "agressive" ethos, though Bateson has pointed out that such simple labels are probably insufficient to characterize any real-world ethos, which would as a minimum be bi-polar (e.g. "dominant-submissive"). Benedict spoke of ethos in terms of cultural configurations. Later researchers have investigated linguistic analogies, and (since the late 1970's) links between social memory, emotion and the body (Bourdieu, Connerton).