Psychological Anthropology for the 21st Century

Jack David Eller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429951404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to psychological anthropology, covering both the early history and contemporary state of the field. Eller discusses the major themes, theories, figures and publications, and provides a detailed survey of the essential and enduring relationship between anthropology and psychology. The volume charts the development, celebrates the accomplishments, critiques the inadequacies, and considers the future of a field that has made great contributions to the overall discipline of anthropology. The chapters feature rich ethnographic examples and boxes for more in-depth discussion as well as summaries and questions to support teaching and learning. This is essential reading for all students new to the study of psychological anthropology.

Part I

The development of psychological anthropology

Chapter 1

Psychology in the formation of anthropology

Key figures:

Edward Burnett (E. B.) Tylor (1832–1917)

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939)

Franz Boas (1858–1942)

William Halse Rivers (W. H. R.) Rivers (1864–1922)

Key texts:

Primitive Culture (1871)

How Natives Think (originally published as Les fonctiones mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, 1910)

The Mind of Primitive Man (1911)

Totem and Taboo (1913)

Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927)

The eminent twentieth-century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology, more specifically ethnology or the description and analysis of humankind’s diverse cultures, “is first of all psychology” (1966: 131). We hope that he is wrong as this would make anthropology redundant or reduce it to a branch of another discipline, and indeed, he is wrong as anthropology has a different mission and different methods than psychology. Yet anthropology and psychology have been close companions since the 1800s, when both fields began to coalesce into their modern forms. Many of the early contributors to anthropology were professional psychologists, and many early professional anthropologists asked explicitly psychological questions while borrowing psychological theories and tools, like intelligence tests and Rorschach inkblots.

Especially in the United States but also in France and Germany, psychological concerns have pervaded anthropology and continue to do so; in fact, they may do so more today than at any time since the 1970s. American cultural anthropology in particular has actually spawned a number of specializations and subdisciplines, from psychoanalytic anthropology to culture-and-personality to ethnoscience or componential analysis to cognitive anthropology and neuroanthropology. The heyday of psychologically oriented anthropology was probably the 1960s and 1970s, when Francis Hsu (1972b: 6) proposed a new and more inclusive name for the subdiscipline—psychological anthropology.

Over the past century, anthropology has constructed, critiqued, transcended, and sometimes strenuously rejected this sequence of psychologically focused schools or theories, but psychological anthropology is not just the story of one failed and discarded paradigm after another. First, psychological anthropology from its inception offered an alternative to other dominant approaches, such as functionalism and structural functionalism. Second, even in its failures or excesses, each wave or generation of psychological anthropological thought can claim its accomplishments and insights, and has left its mark on the discipline. Third and ultimately, psychological anthropology speaks to the deepest issues of human culture and of the human individual, recognizing the essential connection or interpenetration of the two. In this way, it seeks to fulfill the promise of anthropology to be a true science of humanity and not mere antiquarianism or the collection of cultural oddities.

Setting the question

Everyone (well, almost everyone) can agree that culture and the individual are intimately linked: culture shapes individual thought, feeling, and behavior, while individual action produces and reproduces cultural ideas, norms, relations, and institutions. It is of course possible to investigate cultural and social phenomena without appeal to psychology—just as it is possible to study, say, mathematics without referring to brain processes, although to be sure, doing math requires brain processes—and most ethnographic research makes no specific mention of it. However, culture only exists because of certain evolved human mental capacities and tendencies (see Chapter 10), and, as psychologists have also discovered, human psychological processes are not independent of culture—are not “precultural”—but are reciprocally influenced by social experience.

What then is psychological anthropology? Hsu gave a very broad answer, asserting that it includes any work

by an anthropologist who has a good knowledge of psychological concepts or by a member of another discipline who has a good knowledge of anthropological concepts [By this definition, psychologists or neuroscientists doing cross-cultural research are in effect psychological anthropologists.]

Any work that deals with the individual as the locus of culture

Any work that gives serious recognition to culture as an independent or a dependent variable associated with personality [that is, culture may be explored as cause or effect of personality factors]

Any work by an anthropologist which uses psychological concepts or techniques or by a scholar in a psychological discipline which provides directly pertinent data in forms which are useable by anthropologists.

(1972b: 2)

Among the most persistent topics in psychological anthropology, particularly in its early to mid-twentieth-century manifestation, have been

(a) the relation of social structure and values to modal patterns of child rearing, (b) the relation of modal patterns of child rearing to modal personality structure as expressed in behavior, (c) the relation of modal personality structure to the role system and projective aspects of culture [i.e. art, myth, religion, etc.], and (d) the relation of all of the foregoing variables to deviant behavior patterns which vary from one group to another,

(2–3)

including mental illness and altered states of consciousness, like dreams and trance.

Finally, acknowledging that anthropologists are not the only scholars interested in social influences on thought or in cross-cultural differences in cognition, Hsu contrasted psychological anthropology with social psychology in the following ways:

1. Psychological anthropology is cross-cultural in approach from its inception while social psychology has traditionally drawn its data from Western societies
2. Social psychology is quantitative and even, to a certain extent, experimental in orientation, while psychological anthropology has paid little attention to research designs and only lately awakened to the need for rigor in the matter of hypothesis formation and of verification
3. Psychological anthropology deals not only with the effect of society and culture on psychic characteristics of individuals (a basic concern of social psychology) but also with the role of personality characteristics in the maintenance, development, and change of culture and society.

(12–13)

Admittedly, these distinctions are not as sharp today as they were half a century ago: some psychological research is truly cross-cultural, even ethnographic, while some anthropological research is quantitative and methodologically rigorous.

Defining “culture” and “personality”

In the noble and ambitious calling of psychological anthropology, a major obstacle has been deciding on and defining key terms for identifying and differentiating the collective and the individual, the external and the internal, the social and the mental, variables of behavior. The initial decades of the twentieth century, as we will soon see, leaned heavily on the concepts of “culture” and “personality,” although especially in regard to the latter, many rival, overlapping but not synonymous, terms vied and still vie for a place in the discourse, including “mentality,” “mind,” “character,” “self,” “person,” “cognition,” and so forth. Neither anthropologists nor psychologists are entirely unanimous on the meaning of these terms nor, therefore, on their interrelation.

Beginning with culture, anthropologists recognize Edward Burnett (E. B.) Tylor as probably the first scholar to give an anthropological definition of culture in his 1871 Primitive Culture, where the opening sentence of the book reads, “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1958: 1). The noteworthy features of this definition are its reference to mental content like knowledge and belief, its emphasis on acquisition or learning, and its appreciation of social membership—and thus, potentially, the differences in knowledge, belief, and learning in different societies.

Others have defined culture in similar but varying ways. In his 1963 Culture and Personality, Victor Barnouw characterized it as

the way of life of a group of people, the configuration of all of the more or less stereotyped patterns of learned behavior which are handed down from one generation to the next through the means of language and imitation.

(1973: 6)

Ralph Linton, one of the champions of culture-and-personality analysis at mid-century, characterized culture as “the configuration of behavior and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society” (1945: 32), reflecting a Tylorian view; emphasizing the place of the individual in culture, Linton went on to state that “real culture” is the sum of the behavioral configurations of all the members of a society (in other words, add up all the individuals, and you have “culture”), while the “culture construct” is a creation of the anthropologist who intuits (if not invents) “the mode of the finite series of variations which are included within each of the real culture patterns and then uss this mode as a symbol for the real culture pattern” (45). In a later summary of the field, Anthony Wallace rephrased his definition of culture to designate “those ways of behavior or techniques of solving problems which, being more frequently and more closely approximated than other ways, can be said to have a high probability of use by individual members of society” (1964: 6).

Assuredly, there are many other definitions of culture, some stressing thought and others stressing action, some including material objects and others not. If anything, the situation is even more fraught when it comes to the subject of personality—for which one might substitute (and many have substituted) mind, character, or other words. Barnouw considered personality to be “a more or less enduring organization of forces within the individual associated with a complex of fairly consistent attitudes, values, and modes of perception which account, in part, for the individual’s consistency of behavior” (1963: 10). Wallace defined the term simply to mean “those ways of behavior or techniques of solving problems which have a high probability of use by one individual” (1964: 7), but Linton expanded considerably on the concept; for him, personality referred to

the organized aggregate of psychological processes and states pertaining to the individual. This definition includes the common element in most of the definitions now current. At the same time it excludes many orders of phenomena which have been included in one or another of these definitions. Thus, it rules out the overt behavior resulting from the operations of these processes and states, although it is only from such behavior that their nature and even existence can be deduced. It also excludes from consideration the effects of this behavior upon the individual’s environment, even that part of it which consists of other individuals. Lastly, it excludes from the personality concept the physical structure of the individual and his physiological processes. This final limitation will appear too drastic to many students of personality, but it has a pragmatic, if not a logical, justification. We know so little about the physiological accompaniments of psychological phenomena that attempts to deal with the latter in physiological terms still lead to more confusion than clarification.

(1945: 84)

For his part, Robert LeVine made an effort to unpack the term a bit, asserting that personality “is the organization in the individual of those processes that intervene between environmental conditions and behavioral responses,” adding that it consists of many variables, such as “perception, cognition, memory, learning, and the activation of emotional reactions—as they are organized and regulated in the individual organism” (1973: 5). Articulating the concept further, he distinguished between “observable behavioral consistencies” which he called “personality indicators”; the underlying psychological complex of “motivational, affective, and cognitive components and multiple forms of expression” which he called “personality dispositions”; and the structured “personality organization” in which those dispositions are embedded (9).

The relationship(s) between culture and personality

Given the imprecision of its two fundamental terms, it is little wonder that anthropologists (and others) disagree about the actual relationship between culture (or shared, public processes and content) and personality (or individual, internal processes and content). British social anthropologist S. F. Nadel, for instance, was quick to insist that scientists

may take it for granted that there is some connection between the make-up of a culture and the particular personality (or personalities) of its human carriers. Yet in taking this connection to be a simple and obvious one, so simple and obvious that one can be inferred from the other, we run the risk of arguing in a circle

(1951: 405)

—in fact, probably two inverse circles: one in which culture causes personality and the other in which personality causes culture.

LeVine hypothesized that observers had advocated at least five different positions on the question of the relationship between culture and personality or, more generally and less argumentatively, between culture and the individual. First were those positions that were frankly disinterested in, if not hostile to, the issue of personality/individual altogether. Among these are Alfred Kroeber’s view of the “superorganic” nature of culture—that is, that culture has its own level of reality apart from and above the individual—and the “culturology” of Leslie White, who believed expressly that anthropology should be the study of culture and not of the individual (see Chapter 3). Alongside Kroeber and White, LeVine counted the symbolic interactionists who explained behavior in terms of meanings and situations, both external to the individual; we might add the behaviorists, who considered personality as at best a “black box” of unknown and unknowable factors and at worst an academic fiction, and at least some Marxists, who viewed individuals as less relevant than—even as mere instantiations of—class and economic relations.

Second, LeVine posited the “psychological reductionists” for whom culture could and should be explained (away?) simply in terms of personality: in the reverse of anti-personality theories, psychological processes and forces are real, and “culture” is a mere epiphenomenon of that internal world. LeVine indicted Freudian psychology as the “major contemporary reductionism” (1973: 48) for claiming to find the root of sophisticated cultural matters like art and religion in child-rearing practices and, even more reductively, in psychological (or biological) drives and mental structures like the id, ego, and superego.

Ironically, this psychol...