Turner and Frontier Values: Optimistic Postindustrial Enclaves in China and Silicon Valley (original) (raw)

1994, Comparative Civilizations Review

's spirit, if not his ghost, is still around.'" 1993 was the centennial year of Frederick Jackson Turner's Chicago premiere of the frontier thesis, engendering a century of debate. Noting that enduring controversy, the Twelfth Oklahoma Symposium on Comparative Frontier Studies set an agenda to reexamine Turner from the vantage points of anthropology, archaeology, geography, and history in regional arenas as diverse as Imperial Rome, medieval Germany, Apachean America, Polynesia, and the postmodern frontiers in China and Silicon Valley. 2 This exploration into the multidisciplinary world of comparative frontier research was provocative. The seminal argument made a century ago by Frederick Jackson Turner still echoes in several areas of my own discipline, psychological anthropology. Although there are many flaws in Turner's models of causation, and his data, nonetheless the attempt to understand the connection between parental homeland and frontier, the former being a mature, often more closed system and the latter characteristically being more open. Further, he was concerned with the impact of that transformation on national character. Such issues are of critical interest to psychological anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists. My objective here is to apply some of the insights of anthropology and psychology to the Turner's frontier thesis. The strands of his argument are varied and intertwined. Some statements attempt to explain causal relationships; other reveal the worldview of the historian's people or the people studied. Additionally, the latter, an idealized description of worldview must be distinguished from the lived behavior of actual people. A hypothesis postulating the generation of innovation on frontiers is not the same as the valuing of innovation as a ideal virtue. Nor does the existence of innovative people require that the trait be highly valued in a particular culture. These distinctions will be explored using two case studies of postindustrial frontiers-advance enclaves of high technology in previously agrarian arenas. These case studies will be taken from ethnographic studies of modern intellectuals in China and the self-styled cyberfrontier of Silicon Valley in California.