Psychological anthropology
Encyclopedia
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural
and mental processes
. The subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation
within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition
, emotion
, perception
, motivation
, and mental health
. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
and other psychoanalysts as applied to social and cultural phenomena. Adherents of this approach often assumed that techniques of child-rearing shaped adult personality and that cultural symbols (including myths, dreams, and rituals) could be interpreted using psychoanalytical
theories and techniques. The latter included interviewing techniques based on clinical interviewing, the use of projective tests such as the TAT
and the Rorschach
, and a tendency towards including case studies of individual interviewees in their ethnographies.
Some practitioners look specifically at mental illness cross-culturally (George Devereux
) or at the ways in which social processes such as the oppression of ethnic minorities affect mental health (Abram Kardiner), while others focus on the ways in which cultural symbols or social institutions provide defense mechanisms (Melford Spiro
) or otherwise alleviate psychological conflicts (Gananath Obeyesekere
). Some have also examined the cross-cultural applicability of psychoanalytic concepts such as the Oedipus complex
(Melford Spiro
).
Others who might be considered part of this school are a number of scholars who, although psychoanalysts, conducted fieldwork (Erich Fromm
) or used psychoanalytic techniques to analyze materials gathered by anthropologists (Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson
, Géza Róheim
).
Because many American social scientists during the first two-thirds of the 20th century had at least a passing familiarity with psychoanalytic theory, it is hard to determine precisely which ones should be considered primarily as psychoanalytic anthropologists. Many anthropologists who studied personality (Cora DuBois
, Clyde Kluckhohn
, Geoffrey Gorer
) drew heavily on psychoanalysis; most members of the "culture and personality school" of psychological anthropology did so.
In recent years, psychoanalytic and more broadly psychodynamic theory continues to influence some psychological anthropologists (such as Gilbert Herdt
, Douglas Hollan, and Robert LeVine) and have contributed significantly to such approaches as person-centered ethnography
and clinical ethnography
. It thus may make more sense to consider psychoanalytic anthropology since the latter part of the 20th century as more a style or a set of research agendas that cut across several other approaches within anthropology.
See also: Robert I. Levy
, Ari Kiev.
, Ruth Benedict
, A. Irving Hallowell, and Margaret Mead
.
and Beatrice Whiting, Cora DuBois
, and Florence Kluckhohn.
.
, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo
, Renato Rosaldo
, Charles Nuckolls and Dorinne K. Kondo
in its model of the mind
. A basic premise is that people think with the aid of schemas
, units of culturally shared knowledge that are hypothesized to be represented in the brain as networks of neural connections. This entails certain properties of cultural models, and may explain both part of the observed inertia of cultural models (people's assumptions about the way the world works are hard to change) and patterns of association.
D'Andrade (1995) sees the history of cognitive anthropology proper as divisible into four phases. The first began in the 1950s with the explicit formulation of culture as knowledge by anthropologists such as Ward Goodenough
and Anthony Wallace
. From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, attention focused on categorization, componential analysis
(a technique borrowed from structuralist linguistics), and native or folk systems of knowledge (ethnoscience
e.g., ethnobotany
, ethnolinguistics
and so on), as well as discoveries in patterns of color
naming by Brent Berlin
and Paul Kay
. During the 1950s and 1960s, most of the work in cognitive anthropology was carried out at Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, and the Harvard Department of Social Relations
. The third phase looked at types of categories (Eleanor Rosch
) and cultural models, drawing on schema theory, linguistic work on metaphor (George Lakoff
, Mark Johnson
). The current phase, beginning in the 1990s, has seen more focus on the problem of how cultural models are shared and distributed, as well as on motivation, with significant work taking place at UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Berkeley, University of Connecticut, and Australian National University, among others.
Currently, different cognitive anthropologists are concerned with how groups of individuals are able to coordinate activities and "thinking" (Edwin Hutchins
); with the distribution of cultural models (who knows what, and how people access knowledge within a culture: Dorothy Holland, A. Kimball Romney
, Dan Sperber
, Marc Swartz); with conflicting models within a culture (Naomi Quinn, Holly Mathews); or the ways in which cultural models are internalized and come to motivate behavior (Roy D'Andrade
, Naomi Quinn, Charles Nuckolls, Bradd Shore, Claudia Strauss). Some cognitive anthropologists continue work on ethnoscience (Scott Atran
), most notably in collaborative field projects with cognitive and social psychologists on culturally universal versus culturally particular models of human categorization and inference and how these mental models hinder or help social adaptations to natural environments. Others focus on methodological issues such as how to identify cultural models. Related work in cognitive linguistics
and semantics
also carries forward research on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
and looks at the relationship between language and thought (Maurice Bloch
, John Lucy, Anna Wierzbicka
).
, Robert Edgerton, Sue Estroff, Arthur Kleinman
, Theresa O'Nell, Marvin Opler
); to the training of mental health practitioners and the cultural construction of mental health as a profession (Charles W. Nuckolls Tanya Luhrmann
). Some of these have been primarily trained as psychiatrists rather than anthropologists: George Devereux
, Abram Kardiner, Arthur Kleinman
, Robert I. Levy
, Roberto Beneduce.
At present, relatively few universities have active graduate training programs in psychological anthropology. These include:
Also, social medicine and cross-cultural/transcultural psychiatry programs at:
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
and mental processes
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
. The subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation
Enculturation
Enculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture. As part of this process, the influences which limit, direct, or shape the individual include...
within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
, emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
, perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
, motivation
Motivation
Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...
, and mental health
Mental health
Mental health describes either a level of cognitive or emotional well-being or an absence of a mental disorder. From perspectives of the discipline of positive psychology or holism mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life and procure a balance between life activities and...
. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Psychoanalytic anthropology
This school is based upon the insights of Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and other psychoanalysts as applied to social and cultural phenomena. Adherents of this approach often assumed that techniques of child-rearing shaped adult personality and that cultural symbols (including myths, dreams, and rituals) could be interpreted using psychoanalytical
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
theories and techniques. The latter included interviewing techniques based on clinical interviewing, the use of projective tests such as the TAT
Thematic Apperception Test
The Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT, is a projective psychological test. Historically, it has been among the most widely researched, taught, and used of such tests...
and the Rorschach
Rorschach inkblot test
The Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning...
, and a tendency towards including case studies of individual interviewees in their ethnographies.
Some practitioners look specifically at mental illness cross-culturally (George Devereux
George Devereux
George Devereux was an American - French ethnologist and psychoanalyst, born in a Jewish family from Banat. He was one of the pioneers of ethnopsychoanalysis and ethnopsychiatry.-Biography:...
) or at the ways in which social processes such as the oppression of ethnic minorities affect mental health (Abram Kardiner), while others focus on the ways in which cultural symbols or social institutions provide defense mechanisms (Melford Spiro
Melford Spiro
Melford Elliot Spiro is an American cultural anthropologist specializing in psychological anthropology. He is known for his work on the Westermarck effect, and for his studies of the kibbutz. He has conducted fieldwork among the Ojibwa, on Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia, in Israel, and in Burma...
) or otherwise alleviate psychological conflicts (Gananath Obeyesekere
Gananath Obeyesekere
Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. He completed a B.A. in English at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D at the University of Washington...
). Some have also examined the cross-cultural applicability of psychoanalytic concepts such as the Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
(Melford Spiro
Melford Spiro
Melford Elliot Spiro is an American cultural anthropologist specializing in psychological anthropology. He is known for his work on the Westermarck effect, and for his studies of the kibbutz. He has conducted fieldwork among the Ojibwa, on Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia, in Israel, and in Burma...
).
Others who might be considered part of this school are a number of scholars who, although psychoanalysts, conducted fieldwork (Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a Jewish German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.-Life:Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am...
) or used psychoanalytic techniques to analyze materials gathered by anthropologists (Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson was a Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on social development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T...
, Géza Róheim
Géza Róheim
Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist. Originally based in Budapest, he is often credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology, since he was the first psychoanalytically trained anthropologist to do fieldwork...
).
Because many American social scientists during the first two-thirds of the 20th century had at least a passing familiarity with psychoanalytic theory, it is hard to determine precisely which ones should be considered primarily as psychoanalytic anthropologists. Many anthropologists who studied personality (Cora DuBois
Cora DuBois
Cora Alice Du Bois, was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally.-Biography:...
, Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.-Early life and education:...
, Geoffrey Gorer
Geoffrey Gorer
Geoffrey Gorer, English anthropologist and author , noted for his application of psychoanalytic techniques to anthropology.He was educated at Charterhouse and at Jesus College, Cambridge. During the 1930s he wrote unpublished fiction and drama. His first book was The Revolutionary Ideas of the...
) drew heavily on psychoanalysis; most members of the "culture and personality school" of psychological anthropology did so.
In recent years, psychoanalytic and more broadly psychodynamic theory continues to influence some psychological anthropologists (such as Gilbert Herdt
Gilbert Herdt
Gilbert H. Herdt is Professor of Human Sexuality Studies and Anthropology and a Founder of the Department of Sexuality Studies and National Sexuality Resource Center at San Francisco State University.-Biography:...
, Douglas Hollan, and Robert LeVine) and have contributed significantly to such approaches as person-centered ethnography
Person-centered ethnography
Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques and theories from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context. The term was first used by Robert I...
and clinical ethnography
Clinical Ethnography
Clinical ethnography is a term first used by Gilbert Herdt and Robert Stoller in a series of papers in the 1980s. As Herdt defines it, clinical ethnography...
. It thus may make more sense to consider psychoanalytic anthropology since the latter part of the 20th century as more a style or a set of research agendas that cut across several other approaches within anthropology.
See also: Robert I. Levy
Robert I. Levy (anthropologist)
Robert I. Levy was an American psychiatrist and anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal and on the cross-cultural study of emotions. Though he did not receive a formal degree in anthropology, he spent most of his adult life conducting anthropological fieldwork or teaching in...
, Ari Kiev.
Configurationalist approach
This approach describes a culture as a personality; that is, interpretation of experiences, guided by symbolic structure, creates personality which is "copied" into the larger culture. Leading figures include Edward SapirEdward Sapir
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics....
, Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict was an American anthropologist, cultural relativist, and folklorist....
, A. Irving Hallowell, and Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
.
Basic and modal personality
Major figures include John Whiting (anthropologist)John Whiting (anthropologist)
Jonh Wesley Mayhew Whiting was an American sociologist and anthropologist, specializing in child development....
and Beatrice Whiting, Cora DuBois
Cora DuBois
Cora Alice Du Bois, was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally.-Biography:...
, and Florence Kluckhohn.
National character
Leading figures include sociologist Alex Inkeles and anthropologist Clyde KluckhohnClyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.-Early life and education:...
.
Ethnopsychology
Major figures: Georges Devereux, Catherine LutzCatherine Lutz
Catherine Lutz is an anthropologist who is currently Chair of the Anthropology Department at Brown University. She is also a director of the Watson Institute's Costs of War study, an attempt to calculate the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars....
, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo
Michelle Rosaldo
Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo , known to her friends and colleagues as Shelly, was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot tribe in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.-Life:Born in New York...
, Renato Rosaldo
Renato Rosaldo
-Life:He graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in 1971.He is emeritus professor at Stanford University.He teaches at New York University, and is a New York Institute for the Humanities Fellow....
, Charles Nuckolls and Dorinne K. Kondo
Dorinne K. Kondo
Dorinne K. Kondo is a Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the University of Southern California. Kondo is author of Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater...
Cognitive Anthropology
Cognitive anthropology takes a number of methodological approaches, but generally draws on the insights of cognitive scienceCognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
in its model of the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
. A basic premise is that people think with the aid of schemas
Schema (psychology)
A schema , in psychology and cognitive science, describes any of several concepts including:* An organized pattern of thought or behavior.* A structured cluster of pre-conceived ideas....
, units of culturally shared knowledge that are hypothesized to be represented in the brain as networks of neural connections. This entails certain properties of cultural models, and may explain both part of the observed inertia of cultural models (people's assumptions about the way the world works are hard to change) and patterns of association.
D'Andrade (1995) sees the history of cognitive anthropology proper as divisible into four phases. The first began in the 1950s with the explicit formulation of culture as knowledge by anthropologists such as Ward Goodenough
Ward Goodenough
Ward H. Goodenough is a U.S. Anthropologist, who has made contributions to kinship studies, linguistic anthropology, cross-cultural studies, and cognitive anthropology. Born May 30, 1919, in Cambridge Massachusetts, he attended Groton School in Groton Massachusetts. He then earned a B.A. in 1940...
and Anthony Wallace
Anthony F. C. Wallace
Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace is a Canadian-American anthropologist who specializes in Native American cultures, especially the Iroquois. His research expresses an interest in the intersection of cultural anthropology and psychology...
. From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, attention focused on categorization, componential analysis
Componential analysis
Componential analysis, also called feature analysis or contrast analysis, refers to the description of the meaning of words through structured sets of semantic features, which are given as “present”, “absent” or “indifferent with reference to feature”. The method thus departs from the principle of...
(a technique borrowed from structuralist linguistics), and native or folk systems of knowledge (ethnoscience
Ethnoscience
Ethnoscience has been defined as an attempt "to reconstitute what serves as science for others, their practices of looking after themselves and their bodies, their botanical knowledge, but also their forms of classification, of making connections, etc." .-Origins of Ethnoscience:Ethnoscience’s...
e.g., ethnobotany
Ethnobotany
Ethnobotany is the scientific study of the relationships that exist between people and plants....
, ethnolinguistics
Ethnolinguistics
Ethnolinguistics is a field of linguistics which studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world. It is the combination between ethnology and linguistics. The former refers to the way of life of an entire community i.e...
and so on), as well as discoveries in patterns of color
Color
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
naming by Brent Berlin
Brent Berlin
Overton Brent Berlin is an American anthropologist, most noted for his work with linguist Paul Kay on color, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution .He originally received his Ph.D...
and Paul Kay
Paul Kay
Paul Kay is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He joined the University in 1966 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, transferring to the Department of Linguistics in 1982 and now working at the International Computer Science...
. During the 1950s and 1960s, most of the work in cognitive anthropology was carried out at Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, and the Harvard Department of Social Relations
Harvard Department of Social Relations
The Department of Social Relations for Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies, more commonly known as the "Department of Social Relations" was an interdisciplinary collaboration among three of the social science departments at Harvard University beginning in 1946...
. The third phase looked at types of categories (Eleanor Rosch
Eleanor Rosch
Eleanor Rosch is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology...
) and cultural models, drawing on schema theory, linguistic work on metaphor (George Lakoff
George Lakoff
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
, Mark Johnson
Mark Johnson (professor)
Mark L. Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as...
). The current phase, beginning in the 1990s, has seen more focus on the problem of how cultural models are shared and distributed, as well as on motivation, with significant work taking place at UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Berkeley, University of Connecticut, and Australian National University, among others.
Currently, different cognitive anthropologists are concerned with how groups of individuals are able to coordinate activities and "thinking" (Edwin Hutchins
Edwin Hutchins
Edwin Hutchins is a professor and former department head of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Hutchins is one of the main developers of distributed cognition....
); with the distribution of cultural models (who knows what, and how people access knowledge within a culture: Dorothy Holland, A. Kimball Romney
A. Kimball Romney
A. Kimball Romney is a social sciences professor and one of the founders of cognitive anthropology. He spent most of his career at the University of California, Irvine....
, Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the...
, Marc Swartz); with conflicting models within a culture (Naomi Quinn, Holly Mathews); or the ways in which cultural models are internalized and come to motivate behavior (Roy D'Andrade
Roy D'Andrade
Roy Goodwin D'Andrade is one of the founders of the theory of cognitive anthropology.Born in New Jersey, D'Andrade matriculated at Rutgers University but left to fulfill his military service. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut. He then studied in the Department...
, Naomi Quinn, Charles Nuckolls, Bradd Shore, Claudia Strauss). Some cognitive anthropologists continue work on ethnoscience (Scott Atran
Scott Atran
Scott Atran is an American and French anthropologist.-Education and early career:Atran was born in New York City in 1952 and he received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. While a student at Columbia, he became assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of...
), most notably in collaborative field projects with cognitive and social psychologists on culturally universal versus culturally particular models of human categorization and inference and how these mental models hinder or help social adaptations to natural environments. Others focus on methodological issues such as how to identify cultural models. Related work in cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms...
and semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
also carries forward research on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Linguistic relativity
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
and looks at the relationship between language and thought (Maurice Bloch
Maurice Bloch
Maurice Bloch is a British anthropologist.He attended the Lycée Carnot in Paris and the Perse School in Cambridge, moving to Britain at the age of eleven. His move to the UK was because his father had been killed by the Nazis when in the French Army and his mother, a marine biologist, had...
, John Lucy, Anna Wierzbicka
Anna Wierzbicka
Anna Wierzbicka is a linguist at the Australian National University. She also lectures at Warsaw University and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. She studied at Warsaw University. From 1972 she moved from Poland to Australia.Wierzbicka is famous for her work in semantics,...
).
Psychiatric anthropology
While not forming a school in the sense of having a particular methodological approach, a number of prominent psychological anthropologists have addressed significant attention to the interaction of culture and mental health or mental illness, ranging through the description and analysis of culture-bound syndromes (Pow-Meng Yap, Ronald Simons, Charles Hughes); the relationship between cultural values or culturally mediated experiences and the development or expression of mental illness (Thomas Csordas, George DevereuxGeorge Devereux
George Devereux was an American - French ethnologist and psychoanalyst, born in a Jewish family from Banat. He was one of the pioneers of ethnopsychoanalysis and ethnopsychiatry.-Biography:...
, Robert Edgerton, Sue Estroff, Arthur Kleinman
Arthur Kleinman
Arthur Kleinman is a prominent American psychiatrist and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University, USA. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture, was the chair of the Harvard Department of...
, Theresa O'Nell, Marvin Opler
Marvin Opler
Marvin Kaufmann Opler was an American anthropologist and social psychiatrist. His brother Morris Edward Opler was also an anthropologist who studied the Southern Athabaskan peoples of North America. Morris and Marvin Opler were the sons of Austrian-born Arthur A. Opler, a merchant, and Fanny...
); to the training of mental health practitioners and the cultural construction of mental health as a profession (Charles W. Nuckolls Tanya Luhrmann
Tanya Luhrmann
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist best known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. She received her AB summa cum laude in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah...
). Some of these have been primarily trained as psychiatrists rather than anthropologists: George Devereux
George Devereux
George Devereux was an American - French ethnologist and psychoanalyst, born in a Jewish family from Banat. He was one of the pioneers of ethnopsychoanalysis and ethnopsychiatry.-Biography:...
, Abram Kardiner, Arthur Kleinman
Arthur Kleinman
Arthur Kleinman is a prominent American psychiatrist and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University, USA. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture, was the chair of the Harvard Department of...
, Robert I. Levy
Robert I. Levy (anthropologist)
Robert I. Levy was an American psychiatrist and anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal and on the cross-cultural study of emotions. Though he did not receive a formal degree in anthropology, he spent most of his adult life conducting anthropological fieldwork or teaching in...
, Roberto Beneduce.
Psychological anthropology today
During most of the history of modern anthropology (with the possible exception of the 1930s through the 1950s, when it was an influential approach within American social thought), psychological anthropology has been a relatively small though productive subfield. D'Andrade, for instance, estimates that the core group of scholars engaged in active research in cognitive anthropology (one of the smaller sub-subfields), have numbered some 30 anthropologists and linguists, with the total number of scholars identifying with this subfield likely being less than 200 at any one time.At present, relatively few universities have active graduate training programs in psychological anthropology. These include:
- Australian National University - Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Program
- Brunel University, West London - MSc program in psychological and psychiatric anthropology
- Case Western Reserve University - MA, PhD in cultural anthropology
- Duke University - Cultural Anthropology
- Emory University - Anthropology
- London School of Economics - Anthropology
- University of Bergen, Norway - Social Anthropology
- University of California, Berkeley - Anthropology and Linguistics
- University of California, Irvine - Anthropology
- University of California, Los Angeles - Anthropology
- University of California, San Diego - Anthropology and Cognitive Science
- University of Chicago - Human Development
- University of Connecticut - Anthropology
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill - Anthropology
Also, social medicine and cross-cultural/transcultural psychiatry programs at:
- Harvard - Department of Global Health & Social Medicine
- McGill - Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry
- Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso - Master in Ethnopsychology
- Università degli Studi di Trieste - Department of Ethnopsychology
See also
- Cognitive anthropologyCognitive anthropologyCognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians,...
- Cognitive scienceCognitive scienceCognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
- Cultural psychologyCultural psychologyCultural psychology is a field of psychology which assumes the idea that culture and mind are inseparable, and that psychological theories grounded in one culture are likely to be limited in applicability when applied to a different culture...
- EgocentrismEgocentrismEgocentrism is a personality trait which has the characteristic of regarding oneself and one's own opinions or interests as most important or valid...
- EnculturationEnculturationEnculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture. As part of this process, the influences which limit, direct, or shape the individual include...
- Evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
- Development of religionDevelopment of religionThe development of religion describes the stages in the evolution of any particular religious system from a social sciences perspective. It includes such considerations as the evolutionary origin of religions and the evolutionary psychology of religion; the history of religions, including...
- Harvard Department of Social RelationsHarvard Department of Social RelationsThe Department of Social Relations for Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies, more commonly known as the "Department of Social Relations" was an interdisciplinary collaboration among three of the social science departments at Harvard University beginning in 1946...
- Social psychologySocial psychologySocial psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
- Symbolic interactionismSymbolic interactionismSymbolic Interaction, also known as interactionism, is a sociological theory that places emphasis on micro-scale social interaction to provide subjective meaning in human behavior, the social process and pragmatism.-History:...
Selected Historical Works and Textbooks
- Bock, Philip K. (1999) Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, 2nd Ed., New York: W. H. Freeman
- D'Andrade, Roy G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Hsu, Francis L. K., ed. (1972) Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc.
- Wilhelm Max Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, Leipzig (1917); 2002 reprint: ISBN 978-0-543-77838-3.
Selected Theoretical Works in Psychological Anthropology
- Bateson, Gregory (1956) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
- Hallowell, A. Irving (1955) Culture and Experience. New York: Schocken Books.
- Kilborne, Benjamin and L. L. Langness, eds. (1987). Culture and Human Nature: Theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Nuckolls, Charles W. (1996) The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
- Nuckolls, Charles W. (1998) Culture: A Problem that Cannot be Solved. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
- Quinn, Naomi, ed. (2005) Finding Culture in Talk: a collection of methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Sapir, Edward (1956) Culture, Language, and Personality: selected essays. Edited by D. G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Schwartz, Theodore, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine A. Lutz, eds. (1992) New Directions in Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Shore, Bradd (1995) Culture in Mind: cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Shweder, Richard A. and Robert A. LeVine, eds. (1984). Culture Theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Strauss, Claudia and Naomi Quinn (1997). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Wierzbicka, Anna (1999) Emotions across Languages and Cultures: diversity and universals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Selected Ethnographic Works in Psychological Anthropology
- Benedict, Ruth (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
- Briggs, Jean (1970) Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- DuBois, Cora Alice (1960) The people of Alor; a social-psychological study of an East Indian island. With analyses by Abram Kardiner and Emil Oberholzer. New York: Harper.
- Herdt, Gilbert (1981) Guardians of the Flutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Levy, Robert I. (1973) Tahitians: mind and experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Lutz, Catherine (1988) Unnatural Emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist (1980) Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1979) Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: mental illness in rural Ireland. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Swartz, Marc J. (1991) The Way the World Is: cultural processes and social relations among the Swahili of Mombasa. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Selected Works in Psychiatric Anthropology
- Kardiner, Abram, with the collaboration of Ralph Linton, Cora Du Bois and James West (pseud.) (1945) The psychological frontiers of society. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Kleinman, Arthur (1980) Patients and healers in the context of culture: an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- -- (1986) Social origins of distress and disease: depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Kleinman, Arthur, & Good, Byron, eds. (1985) Culture and Depression: studies in the anthropology and cross-cultural psychology of affect and disorder. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2000) Of two minds: The growing disorder in American psychiatry. New York, NY, US: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
- O’Nell, Theresa D. (1996) Disciplined Hearts: History, identity, and depression in an American Indian community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Beneduce, Roberto (2007) Etnopsichiatria. Sofferenza mentale e alterità fra Storia, dominio e cultura, Roma: Carocci.
External links
- Society for Psychological Anthropology
- Ethos Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology
- Psychological and Psychiatric Anthropology Resources
- The Foundation for Psychocultural Research
- Psychological Anthropology essay at Indiana University
- Georges Devereux: Introduction on Ethnopsychiatry (fr.)