Psychological Anthropology

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Psychological anthropology is a subdiscipline of anthropology which investigates the psychological conditions that encourage endurance and change in social systems, with the goal of better understanding the relationship between culture and the individual. It covers approaches which examine anthropological investigations that make use of psychological concepts and methods.

Some social scientists argue that all anthropology is psychological (Bock, 1988, 1). Defined simplistically as "the science of behavior", psychology encompasses the field of anthropology, which focuses on "the science of humanity". It logically follows that without human behavior, the field of anthropology would not exist. However, many anthropologists have studied the behavior of human systems without an explicit interest in psychological theories. Most notable was Leslie A. White, who viewed culture as a material system of objects and symbols that determined human behavior so completely that differences among individuals could be ignored (White, 1949: 121-145). However, if psychology is denied consideration from anthropology, as critics White and Marvin Harris have suggested, it would be necessary to eliminate reference to perception, motivation, development, and learning.

There is another, more practical, reason why psychology needs to be considered when approaching anthropology. Collecting ethnographic data necessitates that a two-sided relationship be formed between the fieldworker and the people being studied. Anthropologists' varied personalities often account for the differences in observation and interpretation of the information gathered and the ability of fieldworkers to get along with the groups and people they investigate (Bock, 1988, 4). As Bertrand Russell once noted "All the data upon which our inferences should be based are psychological in character; that is to say, they are experiences of single individuals." (Devereux, 1967).

The History of Psychological Anthropology

TABLE 1: Major Schools and Approaches of Psychological Anthropology

(after Philip K. Bock, Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, 1988)

School	Approach and Dates	Leading Figures
Psychoanalytic Anthropology	Orthodox (1910 -	Freud, Roheim, Flugel, Ferenczi
	Later Freudian (1930 -	Fromm, Erikson, Bettleheim, LeBarre, Devereux
Culture and Personality	Configuralist (1920-1940)	Benedict, Sapir, M. Mead, Barnouw, Hallowell
	Basic and Modal Personality (1935-1955)	Kardiner, Linton, DuBois, Wallace, Gladwin
	National Character (1940 -	Kluckhohn, Bateson, Gorer, Hsu, Caudhill, Inkeles
	Cross-Cultural (1950 -	Whiting, Spiro, LeVine, Spindler, Edgerton, Munroe, D'Andrade
Social Structure and Personality	Materialist (1848 -	Marx, Engels, Bukharin, Godelier
	Positionalist (1890 -	Veblen, Weber, Merton
	Interactionist (1930 -	G. H. Mead, Goffman, Garfinkle
Cognitive Anthropology	Primitive Mentality (1870 -	Tylor, Levy-Bruhl, Boas, Levi-Strauss
	Developmental (1920 -	Piaget, Cole, Price-Williams, Witkin
	Ethnosematic (1960 -	Conklin. Frake, Kay, Berlin, Hunn
Behavioral	Human Ethology (1970 -	Erkman, McGrew
	Sociobiology ( 1975 -	Wilson, Barash
Self and Emotion	(1947 -	Murphy, Shweder, LeVine, Lutz

Psychology has been interwoven with anthropology since its beginnings. With the rise of evolutionary theory in the mid- to late-nineteenth century it was believed that human beings progressed in three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. These notions were also applied to the psychology of the people studied. It was assumed that the members of a group at any given evolutionary stage shared common psychological characteristics, including ways of experiencing the world, distinctive needs and way of thinking.

German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt was a pioneer in the field of folk psychology. He had the goal of finding psychological explanations with facts supplied by ethnology on the beliefs, and actions of primitive man. He contrasted stages, such as "totemic stage", "age of heroes and gods" which lead to an "enlightened age of humanity" and associated each with a distinctive type of thinking. Unlike other theorists of the time, he believed that primitive and civilized man had the same intellectual capabilities, they just exercised it differently (Bock, 1988, 18). His students included Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, on the other hand, considered the mentality of primitive man to be pre-logical because he believed that they were indifferent to logical contradictions in their thinking and were incapable of abstract thought.

In America, cognitive differences between primitive and civilized people were considered immaterial to the relevant goals of the discipline. Boas, considered by many to be the father of American anthropology, was opposed to the seeming reductionism of psychology which minimized complex historical phenomena to a few basic ideas. He also against the racism that went along with the much of the psychologically influenced anthropological thought of the time. In The Mind of Primitive Man Boas said "If anthropologists can show that mental processes among primitive and civilized are essentially the same, the view cannot be maintained that the present races of man stand on different stages of the evolutionary series and that civilized man has attained a higher-place in mental organization than primitive man."

While Boas was defining the limits of anthropology, Sigmund Freud's influence was being felt in the field of psychology through his work in psychoanalysis. Up until the turn of the century, anthropology and psychology had always been two distinct fields. Anthropology was more concerned with historical and evolutionary trends, while psychology was ahistorical and acultural. Psychoanalytic psychology bridged the two and gave psychology a historical element by anchoring patients in their own histories which provided a link with the anthropological notions of the time (Spiro, 1968, 559). Freud's excursions into anthropology, still heavily psychological in nature, included his book Totem and Taboo, and essays in Civilization and Its Discontents. His insights into psychocultural analysis allowed anthropologists to recognize that much of what is done by individuals in their in everyday lives is influenced by the desires of their unconscious minds. However, the psychoanalytic approach has been criticized for amplifying the importance and meaning behind cultural institutions and symptoms, such as Freud did with religion.

In the 1920's a psychological approach to studying culture moved into the forefront of American anthropology, with the formation of the culture and personality approach, founded by Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. In 1934, Sapir posited that "the more one tries to understand a culture, the more it seems to take on the characteristics of a personality organization." (Sapir, 1949, 201). He went on to assert that patterns of culture are connected by "symbolism or implication" and that an ethnographer must get beyond the superficial categories usually explored, such as kinship or ritual to fully understand the connections that make up these patterns. He encouraged anthropologists to focus their studies on individuals, because he believed that individuals look for and create meaning in their world, acting as a microcosm of the culture in which they live. Sapir's ideas became the foundation on which culture and personality theory was built.

Gestalt psychology also greatly influenced anthropologists who turned to a configuralism, or cultural patterning, in reaction to the atomistic approach of historical particularism which emphasized cultural traits. Anthropologists such as Benedict, Mead and Sapir felt that culture had to be looked at in forms or patterns, rather than as individual elements. "For example, when we recognize a musical melody, we perceive a pattern of relationships rather than individual tones....A melody is not present in its separate notes, for the notes can be rearranged to produce a number of other melodies...The meaning is in the pattern (Bock, 1988, 45) rather than the individual elements. Analyzing the elements separately destroys the meaning of the pattern. Benedict, Mead and Sapir felt similarly about culture.

A second approach taken by Culture and Personality theorists was based on the concepts of basic personality structure and modal personality. Psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner and anthropologist Ralph Linton, divided culture into primary institutions (such as subsistence type, child training) which produced a common denominator of basic personality which then translated into secondary institutions such as religion, ritual and folklore. The notion of basic personality structure places the focal point of culture integration in the common denominator of the personalities of people who participate in culture. It also attempted to comprehend the causal relationship between culture and personality rather than just taking for granted, as configuralism did, that they combined in similar ways. Culture is integrated because all of the members of a society share experiences that produce a basic personality structure which in turn creates and sustains other aspects of culture.

The concept of modal personality was conceived of by Cora DuBois, one of the first ethnographers trained in psychological methods, in her book, The People of Alor. Psychological anthropologists found this approach more acceptable than basic personality structure because it expressed the character of a group as being the most frequent type encountered, rather than generalizing that traits were absolute or that all of the members of a culture have the same personality structure. This was better suited to the ethnographic data collected because of the wide range that the data encompassed. Other anthropologists who worked to refine Modal Personality included Anthony F. C. Wallace, Thomas Gladwin and Seymour Sarason.

Projective tests, taken from mainstream psychology, were used to study personality in non-western cultures and included the Rorschach test and Thematic Apperception Test. These tests were intended to let the subjects to project themselves into a situation, which gave the ethnographer a window into the person's psyche. The Rorschach tests consists of white cards with an inkblot on them in varying shades or colors which subjects are asked to look at and report what they see in each card. In the Thematic Apperception Test subjects are shown a picture of a human figure and are then asked to tell a story about each card. The use of these methods came under fire because of the subjectivity of their scoring and emphasis on western interpretations.

With the beginning of World War II Culture and Personality began applying its methods to larger social units, assuming that an entire culture can be characterized in terms of a typical personality. This lead to the study of national character which was founded on the assumption that there is validity to national stereotypes, such as Germans being industrious or the English being reserved, which are difficult to prove. Working on the Committee for National Morale during the war, Mead, and Gregory Bateson recruited Benedict and Clyde Kluckhohn to develop techniques for studying cultures at a distance, which included studying literature, films, newspapers, government propaganda and recent immigrants.

Around 1950 the culture and personality approach began to decline in popularity. Critics attacked the culture and personality as being untestable and unverifiable. The assumption that each society could be characterized in terms of a single personality type allowed cultures to be oversimplified and led to the assumption that individuals are uniform and perpetuate a static culture (Bock, 1988, 98). Even Wallace, a proponent of the psychological approach said that cultures need diversity in order to survive. Also, it was impossible for anthropologists to describe the psychological characteristics of a culture without expressing their western biases, most notably seen in the national character studies which were based on stereotypes.

After the criticism of the 1950's psychological anthropology turned towards the cross-cultural correlational approach which was a product of psychologists and anthropologists at Yale University, including Clark Hull, John Dollard, G. P. Murdock and John Whiting. These people felt that previous culture and personality approaches used their hypotheses as proven theories to interpret specific case materials rather than test them. In correlational testing method a condition is looked for as it occurs or fails to occur in a culture. Then a condition which is considered to be related to the first is documented as present or absent in their culture. The practitioners of this approach believed it was possible to determine whether there was a consistent relation between the two conditions which would confirm or negate a hypothesis. However, this suffered from the same problem as the earlier culture and personality approaches, it was impossible to convince skeptics that objective individuals could be found to judge the degree to which a culture had a certain custom or trait. It also necessitated drawing strict, and somewhat arbitrary boundaries for cultures.

Psychological Anthropology since the 1960's

Francis Hsu proposed a change in the title of the field for Culture and Personality to Psychological Anthropology in his 1972 volume Psychological Anthropology. He found the former title cumbersome and out of date because many anthropologists considered personality to be indistinguishable from culture or it required a much deeper examination than the average anthropologist was willing to dig, thus misrepresenting the field (Hsu, 1972, 6).

The social structure and personality school, which chronologically followed the correlational approach, encompasses three approaches: materialist, positionalist and interactionist, which were most popular in the 1960's and 1970's. They share the feature of rejecting the idea prevalent in previous approaches that there is a one to one relationship between a culture and personality. Most of the individuals in this school were sociologists and social psychologists rather than anthropologists.

The materialist approach is Marxist in nature. They believed that the primary force in people's lives is the awareness of shared material interests. This applies class psychology to anthropology and cuts across nationalist and ethnic boundaries, looking at class structure.

The positionalist approach is broader than the materialist approach because it treats social class as only one of a number of social positions, such as ethnic group, age, that influence individual behavior. They believe that behavioral and personality differences found in members of groups can be traced back to particular socialization practices in childhood and later in life.

The assumption that the self is an entirely social product is conveyed by the interactionist approach and is different from other psychological anthropology by insisting that a person's self of identity is constructed from ongoing interactions and focus on factors of the immediate situation that produce regularities in behavior. Erving Goffman used interactionism to point out that in a social situation some information must be revealed and other hidden in order to define yourself as a certain type of person (professor, mechanic) but claims to identity can be false. He looked at the implications of deception on everyday social interaction and showed that some frauds may be more convincing than the legitimate players at presenting a believable self (Goffman, 1959).

In the 1970's and 1980's psychological anthropology began focusing on human behavior in a natural setting through human ethological and sociobiological approaches. Human ethologists use concepts and methods developed in the study of animal behavior in an attempt to rid anthropology of its implicit western biases, which the field has been critiqued of since its emergence. Sociobiology, which has developed in the last fifteen years, analyzes observations in terms of evolutionary biology and patterns of adaptation, asking what behavior contributes to the reproductive success of the species. Current work in psychological anthropology is focused in the areas of cognitive anthropology, self and emotion and alternative states of consciousness.

Psychological anthropology has changed enormously from its Freudian beginnings in the 1920s. While psychoanalysis once was the driving influence on the field, now biology, developmental psychology, linguistics, praxis theories and cognitive science are having more of an influence. This, as well as attempts by postmodernists to dissolve the subject, has led psychological anthropology's popularity to decrease. However, The Society for Psychological Anthropology remains an active part of the American Anthropological Association and work continues to be carried out at University of California, San Diego, Emory University and the interdisciplinary centers of the University of Chicago, Harvard University and University of California, Los Angeles. The resilience that psychological anthropology has shown throughout its century of existence may finally be the hard evidence that proves its approach has important and valid insights to add to anthropology.

Bibliography

Bock, Philip K., Ed.

1994 Handbook of Psychological Anthropology. London: Greenwood Press.

Bock, Philip K.

Rethinking Psychological Anthropology. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Devereux, George

1967 From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton.

Goffman, Erving

1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor.

Hsu, Francis L. K., Ed.

1972 Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc.

Sapir, Edward

1949 Culture, Language and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schwartz, Theordore, White, Geoffrey M., Lutz, Catherine A., Eds.

New Directions in Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sills, David, Ed.

1968 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Article by Melford Spiro. 4: 558-563. New York: MacMillian and Co. and The Free Press.

White, Leslie A.

1949 The Science of Culture. New York: Grove Press.

Major Works

Benedict, Ruth,

1934 Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

DuBois, Cora,

(1944) 1960 The People of Alor: A Social-Psychological Study of an East Indian Island. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kardiner, Abram,

1939 The Individual and His Society: The Psychodynamics of Primitive Social Organization. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kluckhohn, Clyde et al. (editors),

(1948) 1953 Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. New York: Knopf.

Mead, Margaret,

1939 From the South Seas: Studies in Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow.

Sapir, Edward,

(1910-1944) 1949 Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, edited by David Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wallace, Anthony F. C.,

Culture and Personality. New York: Random House.

Whiting, John W. M., Child, Irvin L.

Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Society

Society for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropology Association

http://www.ameranthassn.org/spa.htm

Journal

Ethos Washington D.C.: American Anthropological Association

1973 - Present

http://www.cwru.edu/affil/spa/ethos.html