mhmmmm... me too. I think typically, children raised more touch deprived than others are characterized as more agressive. Is our culture as a whole considered more agressive as others? Is a nontactile society more likely to produce serial killers? I wonder...
I bet many of the touch societies are caused by decades or centuries of fear & war. You learn to hang on to people, out of fear that something might happen to them or you; you cling, in other words. Larger groups, holding eachother, are at less threat than individuals walking apart. America doesn't share a deep commonality with the rest of the world, when it comes to history - we have the least traumatic history out of any major civilization that has ever existed (as in, France having 12 constitutions in the time we've had one; or any given third world country having a revolution every other week; Europeans worrying for hundreds of years about their peasant villages getting slaughtered (e.g. in Germany you'll find their old town layouts based around defense); or thousands of years of brutality in Russia or China that continues to this day). Imagine how that kind of history of brutality shapes a culture and the people in it. I suspect you'd find that during the 75 years of Communist reign in the USSR, people there touched far more
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Hey you! Here's another point of view I think you can appreciate.
A few days ago I made the acquaintance of a professor, a psychoanalyst sociocultural anthrolopologist (somehow our random stranger to stranger conversation turned to anthropology), and this is what he thought:
"I think it's related to a puritanical streak that runs deeply through American culture. And the value placed on individualism and self sufficiency. Which combine to make us think we are "weak" in some way if we need other people, including their nearness and touch. From an anthropological point of view, the Philippines is much closer to the human norm that we are. After all, we evolved as a social species. Most higher mammals use a lot of touch and grooming with each other. Sadly, we deprive each other of all that."
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A few days ago I made the acquaintance of a professor, a psychoanalyst sociocultural anthrolopologist (somehow our random stranger to stranger conversation turned to anthropology), and this is what he thought:
"I think it's related to a puritanical streak that runs deeply through American culture. And the value placed on individualism and self sufficiency. Which combine to make us think we are "weak" in some way if we need other people, including their nearness and touch. From an anthropological point of view, the Philippines is much closer to the human norm that we are. After all, we evolved as a social species. Most higher mammals use a lot of touch and grooming with each other. Sadly, we deprive each other of all that."
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