I don't think the taboo example works. In the society of e.g. fearers of the rhesus monkey, the rhesus monkey is feared e.g. because it is a favored animal of the god Mooga-Mooga (or what have you) and so it is dangerous to offend it. There is thus a rational reason for the fear within the society's system of understanding the world. It is not a phobia any more than my fear of being burned alive is beingburnedaliveaphobia. Whereas my fear of heights is irrational within the context of my belief system.
--- On Sun, 3/1/09, Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't buy it. First off, in my opinion every
> "psychological" reaction is
> constituted or at very least given its meaning by some sort
> of "social"
> force. So this point is simply rhetoric masking as
> terminological pedantry -
> most people with decent sociological and psychological
> knowledge can see
> that many of the times the two necessarily overlap, and
> that differentiation
> between them is usually a matter of communicative clarity.
> Secondly,
> claiming that other phobias have no social causes is just
> empirically wrong.
> Take a tribe in Indonesia with a taboo set on some sort of
> animal. This
> taboo takes the same shape as a phobia among this tribes
> members. Although
> this isn't as distinguishable in more advanced
> civilisations, its very clear
> that different cultures show different inclinations towards
> various types of
> phobia - a classic example from the old psychoanalytic case
> histories is
> that an irrational fear of having one's hand chopped
> off is far more likely
> to occur in Saudi Arabia than in Brazil... I wonder why.
>
> I mean I could almost see the argument for re-naming
> "homophobia" along the
> lines of the gay equivalent of misogyny as the two seem to
> be quite similar
> - certainly more comparable than spider phobias... although
> couldn't we
> equally well coin a term to designate misogyny as a phobia?
> - but, to be
> quite frank, I don't really see the point. Whatever you
> call it it exists -
> and if we haven't yet learnt the lesson that slapping
> PC terms onto things
> generates as much trouble as it solves, then we've
> learnt nothing.
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