Friday, November 14, 2014

A seductive book

I completed a first reading of "The explanation of ideology: Family structures and social systems" by Emmanuel Todd. Lot of it went over my head and I am not sure about lot of the details and Freudian overtones. But it always seemed to me that childhood is important in forming one's outlook of the world and some of it stays with one throughout out one's life. But the processes are not clear. Todd starts with family systems and builds up a theory of its influence on one's ideology and the propensity of different regions for different ideologies depending on the prevalent family systems. As expected, the processes of change are complex depending on different family systems in the same area, growth of literacy, particularly female literacy, and various other factors like economic, war, migratory factors. I got only glimpses of some of the ideas but it already seems to have an effect on the way I look at various parts of the world, particularly the Moslem world. It is book that I will keep going back to for a few years.
Earlier links to Emmanuel Todd here, here and here.
P.S. A flavour of Todd here

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