The definition of psychological anthropology and its proper concerns have been more closely associated with *American anthropology than with anthropologists elsewhere in the world, who appear to be less inclined to define their interests in sub-disciplinary terms. Indeed, it can be argued that the carving out of such a domain led main-stream anthropologists to consider psychological anthropology a parochial concern, of only marginal interest to themselves.
Psychological anthropology was initially an outgrowth of *culture and personality studies—the new title for the sub-discipline having been proposed by †Francis L.K.Hsu in his 1972 introduction to his edited collection, Psychological Anthropology. There Hsu argued that:
[a] sound theory which aims at explaining the relationship between man and culture must not only account for the origin of psychological characteristics as they are molded [sic] by the patterns of child rearing, social institutions, and ideologies, but must also account for the maintenance, development, and change in the child-rearing practices, institutions and ideologies.
(1972:13)
Nevertheless, even while he argued that cultural, social and psychological anthropology were all concerned ultimately to study the same phenomenon—human behaviour—he also maintained that:
[it] is probably desirable, however, for the student from one viewpoint to hold on to his particular viewpoint as he probes deeper and deeper into his data…the field worker who shifts from one viewpoint to another…is likely to bring back little that is of coherent signficance.
(ibid.: 14)
So those who continued to define themselves as cultural anthropologists tended to take the view that, in so far as psychology was an attribute of ‘the individual’ and culture an attribute of ‘society’, they were, by definition, covering more ground than any psychological anthropologist possibly could—a view that appears to be endorsed by psychological anthropologists themselves. In general they accept the characterization of psychology and culture as phenomena that occur at different ‘levels’—a position that has militated against any attempt to forge a psychological anthropology that denotes a coherent theoretical perspective. So ‘psychological anthropology’ is most often used as a catchall which, in broad historical terms, takes in culture and personality studies, *socialization theories, *psychoanalytic approaches, ethnosemantics, *ethnopsychiatry and cognitive anthropology.
Bock’s survey of the development of psychological anthropology makes the problems inherent to the sub-discipline clearly apparent. He begins his book with the statement that ‘all anthropology is psychological’ and ends with a discussion of the limitations of a psychological perspective: ‘Failure to recognize the origins of Western psychology in our own cultural tradition, with its unconscious values, biases and habits of thought, is the crudest kind of ethnocentrism’ (1988:212). In other words, as Bock points out, ‘all psychology is cultural’.
One of psychological anthropology’s most influential theorists, Melford E.Spiro, has struggled throughout his career to overcome the problems posed by the Cartesian separation of matter and mind. In 1978 he argued that:
the nature/history dichotomy is a false dichotomy …even a radical cultural determinism does not imply a radical cultural relativism; however much societies may differ, they must all cope with man’s common biological features.
([1978] 1987:27)
Despite this eminently useful insight, however, Spiro continued to hold to ‘culture’ as an analytical category, a position that inevitably rendered ‘biology’ and ‘the individual’ as analytical categories in their own right. So, some years later, we find him asserting that:
‘culture’ designates a cognitive system, [but] it is not the only…source of the cognitions and schemata held by social actors. The other source, of course, consists of their own experience.
(1984:324)
This distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘experience’ implies that a set of historically specific concepts exists independently of the people whose behaviour at once constitutes and expresses them. So, in so far as it refers to a system of meanings, ‘culture’ can only be an abstraction. But this is problematic, because meaning does not reside anywhere ‘out there’. Rather, meaning is manifest in behaviour—in what people do and in what they say (and write)—only in so far as living persons make it so.
That psychological anthropologists still hold their domain of investigation to be distinctive is clear in White and Lutz’s assertion in their introduction to New Directions in Psychological Anthropology that ‘psychological anthropology…remains the field most centrally concerned with putting people and experience into theories of culture and society’ (Schwartz et al. 1992:1). But this is a tall order, because ‘people’ and ‘experience’ refer us not only to actual persons’ actual lives and to their ideas about themselves and the world, but to their engagement in the world as visceral, passionate, lived. And because living seems to us to be more about process and transformation than it is about static structures, we are thrown back on the problem of how, exactly, we can deal with the messy complexity of living in terms of theoretical abstractions like ‘culture’ and ‘society’.
It is thus unsurprising that the papers in the New Directions collection (referred to above) are characterized by pleas for the necessity of addressing problems arising from a continuing inability to deal effectively with Cartesian distinctions. So, for example, we find discussions of the theoretical schism between biological and psychological anthropology (James S.Chisholm), the relationship between ‘knowledge structures and their conceptual and situational contexts’ (Janet Dixon Keller), the question of how ‘cultural models get elaborated during the course of human development’ (Sara Harkness), and ‘the divide between views of human behaviour as determined or emergent’ (Carol M.Worthman).
This is the complete article, containing 875 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
