2 Books Like Land Between the Rivers

I am an academic economist (retired) whose career always has had a strong interdisciplinary orientation. Among other fields, I have long been interested in psychology, especially social psychology, but also been skeptical of the tendency among its practitioners to use convenience samples of handy crowds of U.S. (or otherwise "western") undergraduate students to draw grand conclusions about human behavior. Prof. Henrich, a cultural anthropologist (and aerospace engineer!), shares this skepticism. In particular, he presents in this book theory and evidence of how WEIRD people in the Western world are relative to the majority of peoples elsewhere. (WEIRD = people in western, educated, industrialized, rich, developed countries.) This matches my own experiences across the world, and so I was curious to read this book. Culture, Prof. Henrich writes, influences brain development and results in persistent ways of seeing the world, and vice versa. Culture and psychological form and reform each other… show more.

Not only, but perhaps especially in the United States, people seem far more uncomfortable thinking about sexual relations ("sex") than its overt presence in the arts, media, religion, and politics might suggest. The discussion in this book, written by a retired Oxford professor, starts about a thousand years before Christ, to capture the underlying currents of the existing mores of Christ's time. Thus, you get an erudite reading of some 3,000 years of argument about sex and how the evolving church (or rather churches, for there were and are many branches) has struggled to read and interpret its holy scripts in regard to intimate relations among humans. I won't be giving anything away here. Or perhaps just this nugget: did you know that marriage in church, still an aspiration, and even norm, for modern-day couples today, is an invention that dates back only about one thousand years? How and why… show more.