Research Reports

ARTICLE

by Rona 56-B-1 FPE

Somebody ought to write a properly researched book or paper on TV in history and in other societies, maybe complete with foot and note disease, which is a common academic ailment. It won't be this baby, because life is too short. But I set down, for the record, a few scattered thoughts, and examples from scattered

sources.

The roles of the sexes are of course basically determined by nature, but they do vary enormously in different societies. This has been studied and documented in depth, by Margaret Mead and umpteen other authorities. The classic book in this field is the oddly named "The Golden Bough" by Sir James Frazer a tome of 19th century scholarship, but to be seen around in abridged reprint form. And the fascinating book is "The Mystic Rose" by Ernest Crawley, again readily available. And of course once one gets into something, she gets to chasing up other works refered to, and the difficulty is in knowing where to stop before being indelibly branded as an expert and an egghead. That is a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy.

The topic of TV crops up again and again in such books. The "primitive" societies, namely, those which have not been so fat-headed as to hitch their happiness to expressways, IBM, and the mass media, had all sorts of ways in which they recognized the basic man/woman relationship. They were not necessarily similar to ours. Why should they be? Ways of life are relative; we happen to live in one particular society at one particular stage of its growth. We have no reason whatsoever to assume that our way of life is a fixed and absolute quantity. It just ain't so. Our customs

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