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In this book Melford Spiro further advances his lifelong project of clarifying the relationship between cultural, social and psychological domains of human action, addressing two specific questions, a general theoretical one and an empirical, ethnographical one. The theoretical question is that of cultural reproduction: how does it happen that actors in new generations are motivated to put into practice the cultural propositions they have acquired by transmission from their predecessors, with the result that there is a certain degree of stability and continuity of practices in a human social community over time despite the mortality of the people who compose it? To answer this theoretical question, Spiro takes as a test case two ideological propositions about gender held by the men in the village in Burma in which he conducted anthropological fieldwork three decades ago (when Burma, now ‘Myanmar’, was still accessible to outside researchers).
The two ideological propositions Spiro contends are held by Burmese male villagers (he was not in a position to obtain adequate information to generalise about women's beliefs and attitudes on these subjects, although he did collect some data on the subject) are that males are inherently superior to females, and that women are dangerous to men, both because their sexuality is in itself polluting and destructive, and because they are