Posted by so on May 22, 2005, at 19:29:57
In reply to Re: team effort » so, posted by Dinah on May 22, 2005, at 18:49:26
> I trust Dr. Bob completely.
Yes, I recall a recent post in which you compared him to god.
He says he would rather have members than peers share administrative duties because "they know the culture". That got me to thinking about the etymologies of "cult" and "culture".
Each derive from Latin "colere" -- to till -- but by the 19th Century, in English, cult had come to refer to worship, and eventually "devotion to a person or thing", whereas culture evolved to mean the collective customs and achievements of a people.
In modern usage, the words can describe similar concepts, but there are implicit differences. "Cult" usually describes groups that might be ideologically isolated even in a social milieu where they are otherwise integrated, that are governed by a lone individual whose authority is absolute at least in the context of the group, whose beliefs are original and idiosyncratic, and where members are required by the nature of group processes to take-it or leave-it when it comes to trusting the group leader even though social processes develop to encourage members to take-it instead of rejecting the leaders' authority and leaving.
A useful difference in how the meanings evolved might be how one describes "a people". In modern internet culture, any anonymous group that shares an archive of their own writing tends to define their group as a "community" but I wonder if that rises to the level of "a people". Maybe that's where various measures of isolation becomes useful, especially the extent to which group culture differs from the culture at large in the places from which members are recruited.
I'm not sure how I may say that fits here, but this site sure provided food for thought. And I was thinking, how is this culture something other psychiatrists couldn't, wouldn't or don't understand in the same way participants do?
poster:so
thread:491889
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20050517/msgs/501365.html