504 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



be maintained by rethinking all one knows in terms of a totally un- 

 familiar old system. It is, in fact, quite possible that the great in- 

 tellectual freedom and flexibility of Renaissance man was the direct 

 outcome of the new habit of rethinking that which he had first 

 learned in a medieval frame of reference, in terms of the Greek frame 

 of reference which, though ancient, was new to Renaissance man. 

 Today, due to the homogenization of occidental culture, neither the 

 frame of reference of some other modern nation, nor the frame of 

 reference of the occidental world's historical forebears, is sufficiently 

 different from the present world view to require a radical reorien- 

 tation when one seeks to think through familiar data in terms of 

 Athenian, medieval, or French frames of reference.^^ 



Given this state of affairs, the frame of reference most likely to 

 produce a real shift in our way of thinking would be one borrowed 

 from an alien culture, such as that of the Mohave. The study of, 

 e.g., Mohave psychiatric thought is, thus, useful because it provides 

 a new frame of reference for thinking through once more one's entire 

 knowledge of psychopathology, in order not to become too indissolubly 

 wedded to one's current thought habits and thought models. Even if, 

 after thinking through one's storehouse of data in Mohave terms, one 

 decides in the end that the INIohave system is entirely inadequate, 

 one will have had the experience of seeing one's old data in a new 

 light and might, in the end, either develop new insights in terms of 

 one's existing frame of reference, or else modify that frame of refer- 

 ence in various useful ways. Speaking for myself, while writing the 

 present work I was forced to rethink all of psychiatry in startlingly 

 unfamiliar ways, which, in the end, appreciably deepened my under- 

 standing of the classical psychoanalytic frame of reference. 



^' It would be a profitable and revealing undertaking to demonstrate the extent to which 

 both Fascist and Marxist totalitarian systems— once believed to represent "The Wave of 

 the Future" — are actually pale and distorted copies of the basic occidental pattern. 

 This is shown, e. g., both by Red China's difficulties in blending occidental Marxism Into 

 the old Chinese culture pattern, and by the repeated changes in official Marxist doctrine 

 regarding the extent to which Occidental feudalism and Oriental despotism are slmUar, 

 respectively dissimilar (Wittfogel, 1957). 



