In Harmonium

Being in the main the musings of a Symbolic Anthropologist

Ethics, honour and the dangers of over-ritualization, part 3

| July 13, 2010

In the previous part of this series, I really concentrated on the environment of role expectations and especially, on the boundaries of these.  As I was reading the CBC.ca news this morning, I found a story that just illustrated many of the points I made in the last post, especially the points about communications and [...]

Ethics, honour and the dangers of over-ritualization, part 2

| July 11, 2010

In the part 1, I tried to establish certain guidelines for how I am looking at ethics, morality and, to a much lessor degree, group dynamics surrounding these issues.  The overarching model I use for this is taken fairly directly from Wm. Calvin’s work on Darwinian bootstrapping (op.cit.) which I have found to be both [...]

Ethics, honour and the dangers of over-ritualization, part 1

| July 10, 2010

This set of posts is a first cut at integrating some ideas I have been working on in one form or another for several years now.  While I am really interested in the general case of the evolution of moral and ethical systems within groups, for this specific set of posts, I will only be [...]