Psychological Anthropology
Psychological
Anthropology approaches the comparative study of human experience, behavior,
facts, and artifacts from a dual socio-cultural and psychological most often
psychodynamic perspective. It emerged
in the early twentieth century as an attempt to understand our common humanity,
led by such figures as Franz Boas and his students Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict,
Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits. Psychological anthropology displays an arc
of theoretical approaches ranging from scientific positivism, which embraces
objectivity and the scientific method, through various hermeneutic humanisms
that emphasize the role of subjectivity in fieldwork and writing (Suárez-Orozco
1994). Psychological anthropology, or the study of individuals and their
sociocultural communities, helps us to understand what Jackson (1998: 21)
refers to as “the many refractions of the core experience that we are at one
and the same time part of a singular, particular, and finite world and caught
up in a wider world whose horizons are effectively infinite.”
While
critiques of ethnocentrism have brought attention to the politics of identity
and equality, as well as to the mutual recognitions and attunements that are
necessary for coexistence, the relationship and balance of the particular and
the universal, the individual and the global, as examined through various life
processes, vary dramatically among individuals and across communities.
Psychological anthropologists bring unique approaches to these dynamic
relations. Ethnopsychological research, in-depth case studies, studies of
transference and counter-transference, person-centered ethnographies, and
ethnographies of communication, enable psychological anthropologists to draw
out the experiential lives of subjects and informants who shape, and are shaped
by, their communities.
Psychology and cultural anthropology: Issues and Challenges
There
are certain assumptions that make the ground for the disciplinary convergence
of psychology and anthropology:
1.
We cannot explain cultural meanings unless
we see them as created and maintained in the interaction between the extra-personal
and intrapersonal realms. The force and stability of cultural meanings, as well
as their possibilities for variation and change, are the outcome of this
complex interaction.
2.
Intrapersonal thoughts, feelings, and
motives, on one side of this interaction, are not simply copies of extra-personal
messages and practices, on the other side, and the dynamics of these realms are
different.
3.
Therefore, we need to know how the mind
works in order to understand how people appropriate their experience and act on
it, sometimes to recreate and other times to change the public social world.
4.
We need to examine socialization in
greater detail to learn the concrete forms of extra-personal culture in
learners' worlds and to examine what learners internalize at different points
in their lives from experiencing these things.
Anthropologists who work at the interface of
psychology and anthropology are by and large committed to anthropology as
science. Because of the separate epistemological domains of anthropology,
psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, ad biology scientists in the
latter half of the twentieth century found themselves having to work hard to
put the pieces back together again – body and mind, for example. As is often
the case, however, new subdisciplinary domains intended to overcome conceptual
difficulties served rather to entrench them. The 1970s saw the invention of
psychological anthropology, the 1980s brought us cultural psychology, in the
1990s we rediscovered the body and phenomenology, and at the same time
witnessed the resurgence of cognitive anthropology which, during the first
decade of the twenty-first century would appear to dominate the field,
contribution to the development of what is today called cognitive science. Even
after all of the fascinating works that has been done in the various sub-fields
of anthropology, and despite the explosion of knowledge in other sub-disciplinary
domains- neurobiology and neuroscience, for example – the interface between
anthropology and psychology at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first
century continues to throw into relief a question that remains fundamental to
the human sciences, including anthropology: how are we to conceive of human
beings? The answer we give to this question is important because it structures
not only what we currently know about ourselves and others but also what we are
capable of finding out.
A genealogy of psychological anthropology:
As
early as the mid-1800s, psychology and anthropology shared an interest in the relationship
between culture and psychology, and by the 1870s German anthropologists such as
Waitz and Bastian joined British anthropologist Edward Tylor in efforts to link
culture to psychology. In 1888, Franz Boas was hired by Clark University, where
he began his long study of the “mind of primitive man.” Empirical research on
this topic soon followed. British psychologist W. H. R. Rivers took part in
Cambridge University’s Torres Straits Expedition in 1898. He showed that the same
optical illusions that puzzled Europeans had little effect on the native
peoples. German psychologist Wilhelm Stern and anthropologist Richard Thurnwald
soon after carried out similar research in the South Pacific.
The Freudian impact:
The
first theoretical orientation to have an impact on this field came from Freud’s
psychoanalytic work. In 1900, he published his first great book, The
Interpretation of Dreams. By 1910, Freud had turned his interests to a
demonstration of how psychoanalysis could help to explain how cultural
institutions arise and how they function. His book Totem and Taboo, published
in 1913, had a dramatic impact, attracting to psychoanalytic theory such
influential “Freudians” as Erich Fromm, Ernest Jones, J. C. Frügel, Geza
Róheim, George Devereux, and Erik Erikson. In arguing that social prohibitions
– “taboos” – were comparable to the self-imposed inhibitions of “neurotic”
individuals, Freud sought to explain why taboos such as those surrounding
rulers and the dead came into being and how they were maintained.
The
Freudian impact focused psychological anthropologists on child training,
including such often criticized topics as toilet training, and on the general
question of the relationship between personality and culture. In 1928 one of
Freud’s disciples, Hungarian Geza Róheim, went to the Aranda of Central
Australia to describe what he called “delayed infancy,” the length of time that
humans are dependent on adults. He argued that each culture is founded on a
specific childhood trauma which produces the type of personality of people in
that society. Other Freudian scholars such as Weston LaBarre, Bruno Bettleheim,
and George Devereux produced influential work as well, but their psychoanalytic
writings were soon eclipsed by an emerging field known as culture and personality.
Culture and Personality School:
Culture
and personality was a broad and unorganized movement that brought together
anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who agreed on the mutual
relevance of their disciplines but lacked a common theoretical position, an
acknowledged leader, and an institutional base. Its founders were Margaret
Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir, all students of Franz Boas, whose
influential concept of culture had implied a psychological dimension they
attempted to spell out and translate into research. They argued that culture
played a role in individual psychological development (Mead) and in the
emotional patterns typical of particular cultures (Benedict), and also that
individuals of a particular society realized its culture in different ways
(Sapir). They criticized psychological theories that posited universals for the
human species without taking into account human variability as revealed by
anthropological fieldwork in diverse cultures. At the same time, they were
influenced by those psychological and psychiatric theories that emphasized
social influences on the individual, such as the neo-Freudian formulations of
Karen Horney and the interpersonal psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan. Although
the movement had no formal organization, its anthropological founders were
joined at seminars, conferences, and in publications by sociologists,
psychologists, and psychoanalysts
including W. I. Thomas, John Dollard, Erik Erikson, Abram Kardiner,
Henry A. Murray and by a growing circle
of anthropologists Ralph Linton, A.
Irving Hallowell, Gregory Bateson, Cora Du Bois, Clyde Kluckhohn, and John W.
M. Whiting, to name but a few. The field of culture and personality studies was
very active during the 1930s and in the postwar period 1945-50, as a new
generation of anthropologists conducted studies among Native American peoples
and in the Pacific.
Edward Sapir was the first to describe the unconscious
configuration of grammar and sound, and his work led to the study of how
personality and culture were configured. In her book Patterns of Culture, published in 1934, Ruth Benedict compared the
basic configurations of culture and personality among the Pueblo and Plains Indians,
the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast, and the Dobu of Melanesia. Portraying the
Pueblo Indians as “Apollonian,” the Plains Indians as “Dionysian,” the Dobuans as
“Paranoid,” and the Kwakiutl as “Megalomaniac,” Benedict argued each culture had
its own personality and that because some individuals could not cope with their
culture’s demands they became alienated and frustrated. Her book was enormously
popular, making her one of the best known anthropologists of all time.
Benedict’s friend and colleague, Margaret Mead, was also a
major psychological anthropologist. She helped to found configurationism, but
went on to make important contributions to many other areas of psychological
anthropology, including childhood development, sex roles and temperament,
personality and culture change, national character, and cross-cultural
socialization. Her first three books were based on her fieldwork in the South
Pacific: Coming of Age
in Samoa (1928), Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive
Societies (1935). Mead also
wrote numerous articles in popular magazines, her name becoming a household
word.
While
Mead was having her early impact on psychological anthropology, anthropologists
Cora DuBois, Ralph Linton, and Thomas Gladwin joined psychoanalyst Abram
Kardiner in the study of “basic” and “modal” personality. They posited a causal
chain from primary institutions such as household form, subsistence activities,
and child training to basic personality and then to secondary institutions
including religion, ritual, and folklore. Cora DuBois put this paradigm to the
test with 18 months of fieldwork in the Dutch East Indies in 1938–9. The result
was The People of Alor (1944), in which she argued that not
everyone in such a society developed the same basic personality. Instead, she
spoke of a “modal” or most frequent form of personality.
The attempt to measure modal personality led to the widespread
use of projective tests, especially the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception
Test (TAT). During the 1940s and 1950s the Rorschach was widely used. One of
the most widely known uses of this test was by A. F. C. Wallace among the
Iroquois Indians in New York.
He
found that only 26 of the 70 individuals tested fell into a modal class,
although another 16 were close to this class (Wallace 1952).
A year after Wallace’s study was published; anthropologist
Thomas Gladwin and psychiatrist Seymour B. Sarason collaborated to produce a
projective test study of people on the island of Truk. In a 650-page book, Truk: Man in Paradise (1953), Gladwin and Sarason described the
many anxieties about food and sexuality, as well as the pressure of much gossip
and fear of sorcery. They strongly recommended the use of the Rorschach and the
TAT as means of identifying personality attributes that might otherwise be
missed.
National Character Studies:
The
next major development in psychological anthropology was the study of national
character – the personality of most members of an entire nation.
Characterizations of the national character of the British, Germans, French,
Italians, and other Europeans go far back in history. In 1928, for example,
Salvador de Madariaga wrote Englishmen,
Frenchmen and Spaniards,
contrasting English “action” with Spanish “emotion” and French “thought.” But
it was the eruption of World War II that initiated the empirical study of the
national character of our enemies and even our allies. As early as 1939,
Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Eliott Chapple, and other anthropologists tried
to devise ways that psychological anthropology could support the war effort.
After the United States entered the war, others moved to Washington, where they
attempted to analyze the national character of the Japanese
and
the Germans.
Ruth Benedict did much research on the Japanese, trying to
reconcile their restrained aestheticism with their fanatical militarism.
Although her book The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) has been roundly criticized by Americans and Japanese
alike, it was studied by our military leaders and used by the postwar MacArthur
occupation forces. Benedict considered it her finest work. In Escape From Freedom (1941) Erich Fromm tried to explain the
appeal of Nazism to the German people in terms of their national authoritarian
personality. Such a person is obedient and subservient to superiors, but
overbearing and scornful to social inferiors. Walter C. Langer wrote The Mind of Adolf Hitler for the American Office of Strategic
Services soon after the war broke out, but it was not published for the public
until 1973. Erik Erikson also studied Hitler for our military, characterizing
him as a superhuman leader who created terror among his followers and involved
them in crimes which they could
not
deny.
After the war, national character studies focused on the
Russians. British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer and his collaborator John
Rickman wrote The
People of Great Russia (1948),
arguing that Russian infants were tightly swaddled and unable to move except
for a brief period each day when they were released, cleaned, and
actively
played with. This phenomenon was to produce the Russian propensity for mood
swings between long periods of introspective depression and brief spurts of
frantic social activity. The need for strong authority was also learned and
symbolized through swaddling. Clyde Kluckhohn followed Gorer and Rickman by
comparing
traditional
Russian personality with the new ideal Soviet personality type. There were many
differences. The traditional personality was warm, trusting, expansive, and
responsive, while the Soviet ideal was formal, controlled, distrustful, and
conspiratorial (Kluckhohn 1962).
Modal Personality studies:
Other
scholars studied American modal personality. Margaret Mead wrote And Keep Your Powder Dry in 1942 as a wartime morale booster.
Geoffrey Gorer wrote The
American People in
1948, arguing that the American and British national characters contrasted
dramatically. David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney followed with The Lonely Crowd in 1950, describing Americans as
“other-directed, constantly scanning their environment for cues to the correct
attitudes and behaviors. They also emphasized perceived American behaviors of
rivalry, jealousy, and individualism. Philip Slater, in his book The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970), suggested that our core of
individualism must be replaced in our value system if our society is to remain
viable, while the Chinese-born anthropologist Francis L. K. Hsu argued American
national character is one of self-reliance, the search for political, economic,
and social equality.
There were other studies of national character as well, but
this kind of approach increasingly came under fire from many quarters for its
political prejudice and lack of objectivity, as well as its assumption that
there was a causal relationship between culture and personality. The most
powerful criticism came from someone within culture and personality itself,
Melford E. Spiro. In 1951 he wrote a detailed article in the journal Psychiatry entitled “Culture and Personality: The
National History of a False Dichotomy,” arguing persuasively that the field of
culture and personality had failed to show any causal relationship between
culture and personality because the development of personality and the
acquisition of culture were a single process. In response to criticisms like
that of Spiro, the study of culture and personality fell by the wayside to be
replaced by a new cross-cultural comparative research strategy championed by G.
P. Murdock, who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of world ethnography.
Murdock established the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale, making
available a host of cross-indexed data on hundreds of non-Western societies.
One of Murdock’s students was John W. M. Whiting, whose earliest field research
in New Guinea provided rich empirical data about the process of socialization.
Joined by psychologist Irvin L. Child, Whiting then employed what they called
the correlational method of testing hypotheses utilizing HRAF data. This work
resulted in their influential book Child Training and Personality (1953). Other correlational research
appeared as well. At the same time, Robert A. LeVine and Melford E. Spiro, both
of whom were trained in anthropology and psychoanalysis, carried out
ethnographic field research on various ways in which people adapt
psychologically to the world in which they live. Spiro focused on Burma and
LeVine worked in East Africa. While they produced their stimulating findings,
John Whiting and his wife Beatrice were developing their highly influential
“Six Cultures Project.” Six pairs of investigators, usually husband and wife
teams, were sent to six different societies to observe the behavior of children
aged three to eleven as they interacted with infants, other children, and
adults, in an effort to learn in what ways culture impacts children’s lives.
Their findings were presented in three major books: Six Cultures (1963), Mothers of Six Cultures (1964), and Children
of Six Cultures (1974).
The research was the most meticulous yet conducted and it continues to attract
attention. However, it did not lead to any conceptual breakthroughs. At the
same time that the Whitings were carrying out their intensive data collection,
a team organized by Walter Goldschmidt was conducting controlled interviews and
observations with samples from eight populations in East Africa, searching for
psychological and behavioral differences between farmers and pastoralists. The Individual in Cultural Adaptation: A
Study of Four East African Societies (1971) is Robert Edgerton’s assessment of the changing lives of
individuals living in four of these eight East African societies. He
demonstrated the variability of psychological adaptations within and across
social and cultural settings.
Post-structural and Postmodernist studies in Psychological anthropology:
Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s “structuralism” posited human activity as constructed, rather
than natural or essential, with culture as a system of organization and of
structural differences homologous to Saussure’s concept of “langue.” Jacques
Lacan’s theory of the unconscious organized like a language also had affinities
to structuralism, drawing together psychoanalytic and linguistic perspectives
on psychology. A revival of psychoanalytic anthropology brought new approaches
to dreams, sexuality, religious symbolism, and psychopathology, integrating
psychoanalytic, linguistic, and social, historical perspectives.
In Black
Skin/White Masks (1967),
Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique and schooled in France,
described his personal experience as a black intellectual in a white world and
the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship became normalized as
psychology. Fanon wrote that being colonized by a language is to support the
weight of a civilization that identifies blackness with evil and sin. To escape
this, colonized people don a white mask so as to consider themselves universal
subjects equally participating in colonial and world societies. The cultural
values of the colonizers, internalized or “epidermalized” into consciousness,
created a fundamental disjuncture
between a black man’s consciousness and his body. Fanon integrated Jung’s
psychoanalytic notion of “collective unconsciousness” with embodied experiences
of colonization and racism in Algeria, locating the historical point at which
certain psychological formations become possible and begin to perpetuate
themselves as psychology.
During the 1960s and 1970s, “madness” and “badness,” as defined
by medical establishments and criminal justice systems, became early sites of
struggle for selfexpression, identity, and agency. Robert Edgerton, in The Cloak of Competence (1967), highlighted individual motives and
the social adaptations of people with mental retardation to expose the frailty
– even cruelty – of institutionalized forms of psychological assessment that
fail to consider one’s individuality in cultural life contexts.
In The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1969), A.F.C. Wallace traced the dramatic
revitalization of a demoralized people living in a shattered culture. The
struggle for life by terminally ill children received attention, as the work
with leukemic children by Myra Bluebond-Langer poignantly illustrates: The Private Worlds of Dying Children (1978). There was also a growing concern
with child abuse and neglect, as an edited volume by Jill Korbin in 1981
illustrates: Child
Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Work on this same issue has continued to
the present time with perhaps the most dramatic example coming from Nancy
Scheper-Hughes in her powerful book
Death
Without Weeping (1992),
in which she explored the mechanisms used by women in a Brazilian “shanty-town”
to cope with the high death rate of their children. Psychological
anthropologists continued with familiar topics such as dreaming, altered states
of consciousness, possession, trance, shamanism, fantasy, emotion, and mental
illness. Puberty rites and adolescence came under study as well, and so did
shame, guilt, and bereavement. Research on conceptions of personhood and self
continued. An influential example was provided by Geoffrey M. White and James
Kirkpatrick in their edited volume Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific
Ethnopsychologies (1985).
While research interests in the self, perception, cognition, emotion, language,
learning, decision-making, and other psychological concerns continued, a new
focus emerged as more and more psychological anthropologists turned their
attention to cultural change and urbanization, including global issues relating
to modernization.
Marc Manganaro describes a shift in the 1960s from fieldwork
based on principles of “science” to postmodern, discursive processes of
“text-making”: Modernist
Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text (1990). Repudiating the claims of “objectivism,” postmodern and
poststructural theorists began to address such issues as authorship, ideology,
power, and readership, contributing to a general trend toward meaningcentered,
self-reflexive, narrative accounts of people and their cultures (Geertz 1973;
Rosaldo 1989). “Experience-near” approaches to intersubjectivity, identity, and
other relational forms emerged as scholars recognized the primacy of lived
experience, meanings, and significance over analytic categories (Csordas 1994;
Desjarlais 1992; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994; Kleinman and Kleinman 1991; Levy
1973; Lutz 1990; Wikan 1991). Many psychological anthropologists shifted from
Darwinian, Marxist, and Durkheimian groundings of individual experience in
ecological adaptations and institutions toward ethnopsychological,
sociolinguistic, phenomenological, and symbolic approaches. In contrast to
standard ethnography, psychocultural scholars developed “person-centered
ethnography” to “represent human behavior and subjective experience from the
point of view of the acting, intending, and attentive subject, to actively
explore the emotional saliency and motivational force of cultural beliefs and
symbols (rather than to assume such saliency and force), and to avoid unnecessary
reliance on overly abstract, experience-distant constructs” (Hollan 2001: 49).
This approach was not meant to displace the power of ecological adaptions and
institutions in shaping one’s life, but to address the tensions between
individual agency and culturally hegemonic forms.
Psychological anthropology: contemporary concerns
More recent
concerns of psychological anthropology explores dimensions of mind and
socialization from several newer perspectives. In the following section such
issues are discussed in details.
The unified model of human being:
It is fundamental to give emphasis on the living aspect of
human beings and not to see human beings are information processing devices. The
new models for psychological anthropology as developed by Christina Toren (2002,
2007, 2009, 2011, and 2012) starts with human physical actuality: the fact that
each one of us is, like other libing things, biologically speaking autopoietic[1]
- self-creating, and self –regulating. A new born baby, infant or young child
requires other humans to look after its primary needs, making its ontogeny a
social process. Indeed, as living systems that are human, each and every one of
us needs others if we are to maintain our autonomy over the course of our own
lives and contribute to lives of others. There is nothing paradoxical about
this: rather it is given to us as human beings that the particular nature of
our autonomy resides precisely in the history of our relations with one
another. Or to put it another way, our uniqueness in evewry single case is
given in the fact hthat each one of us has a personal history that makes us who
we are.
A propensity for making sense of the environing world is a
crucial aspect of human being. It follows that ‘making sense’ or in other words
learning is a dynamic, spatio temporal process that at any given point
inevitably locates humans historically in relation to particular others in
particular places at particular times in the peopled world. Or to put it in
other way, any given human is, in every aspect of his or her being, the dynamic
transforming produyct of the past he or she has lived and is, at any given time
placed in relation to all those others whose ideas and practices are
contributing to structure the conditions of his or her present existence. ‘Any
given human’ here means any fetus, neonate, infant, child, adolescent, adult or
old person, because autopoiesis is a process that begiuns at conception and
ends only with death. We can think of ourselves therefore, as living and
manifesting the historical processes that engage us in literally every aspect
of our being. Therefore, in this model, mind is a function not of the brain,
nor of the embodied nervous system, but of the whole human being in intersubjective
relations with others in the environing world. Therefore consciousness cannot
be a domain or a level of psychological functioning, rather, it is that aspect
of mind that posits the existence of the thinker and the conceptual;
self0evidentiality of the world as lived the thinker. Intersubjectivity is
shorthand for “I know that you are another human like me, and so I know that
you know that because I am human, I know that you are too.” It is this capacity
for recursive thought that makes human learning (in its broadest sense) a
microhistorical process. Our intersubjective relationship to one another is
always bound to be historically prior because, whenever we encounter one
aohter, we do so as carriers of our own, always unique history. I make sense of
what you are doing and saying in terms of what I already know: any and all
experience is assimilated to my existing structures of knwing. This goes for
everyone – newborn babies and geriatric patients included. Masking sense of the
peopled world is a material, self-organizing process that at once transforms
new experience in the course of its assimilation and transforms my existing
structures of knowing in the course of their accommodation to new experience.
It is important to note that this model assumes every ideas and
practices of human being are social. The world of people and things that this
human inhabits crucially informs his or her entire constitution, specifically
the continuing constitution over time of those processes we call mind. It takes
for granted that intersubjectivity is emotional, that perceiving and feeling
are aspects of one another, and that intentionality is given in an openness
towards, and a felt engagement in, the peopled world. This model also argues for the fact that
understanding our biological substance is crucial to understanding not our
physical but also our psychological make-up; it makes a difference whether the
phenomena of mind are conceived of as neuorophenomenological[2]
processes or as computational
programs. However, recent works are more inclined towards the neuorophenomenological approach simply
because computers do not change its own physical substance over time.
Cultural models, schema theory and their problems:
"Cultural
model" is not a precisely articulated concept but rather it "serves
as a catchall phrase for many different kinds of cultural knowledge"
(Shore 1996:45). Also known as folk models, cultural models generally refer to
the unconscious set of assumptions and understandings members of a society or
group share. They greatly affect people’s understanding of the world and of
human behavior. Cultural models can be thought of as loose, interpretative
frameworks. They are both overtly and unconsciously taught and are rooted in
knowledge learned from others as well as from accumulated personal experience.
Cultural models are not fixed entities but are malleable structures by nature.
As experience is ascribed meaning, it can reinforce models; however, specific
experiences can also challenge and change models if experiences are considered
distinct. Models, nevertheless, can be consciously altered. Most often cultural
models are connected to the emotional responses of particular experiences so
that people regard their assumptions about the world and the things in it as
"natural." If an emotion evokes a response of disgust or frustration,
for example, a person can deliberately take action to change the model.
A closely related concept is that of schemata developed by
cognitive anthropologists and has been one of the most important and powerful
concepts for cognitive anthropology in the past twenty years. Bartlett first
developed the notion of a schema in the 1930s. He proposed that remembering is
guided by a mental structure, a schema, "an active organization of past
reactions, or of past experiences, which must always be supposed to be
operational in any well-adapted organic response (Schacter 1989:692). Cognitive
anthropologists and scientists have modified this notion somewhat since then. A
schema is an "organizing experience," it implies activation of the
whole. An example is the English term writing. When one thinks of writing,
several aspects come into play that can denote the action of guiding a trace
leaving implement across a surface, such as writer, implement, surface, etc.
However, a particular person’s schema may differ. When I think of writing, I
may envision someone using chalk to trace a series of visible lines onto a
chalkboard, but when you think of writing, you may envision someone using a
pencil to trace a series of visible lines across a piece of paper. The point is
that there is a common cultural notion of writing, but the schemas for each
individual may vary slightly. It is the commonality that cognitive
anthropologists are looking for, the common notions that can provide keys to
the mental structures behind cultural notions. These notions are not
necessarily culturally universal. In Japanese, the term kaku is usually
translated into English as writing. However, whereas in English, nearly
everyone would consider writing to imply that language is being traced onto a
surface, the term kaku in Japanese can mean language, doodles, pictures, or
anything else that is traced onto a surface. Therefore, schemas are culturally
specific, and the need for an emic view is still a primary force in any
ethnographic research (D'Andrade 1995:123).
The idea of schema-as-mental-representation has been later on
in 1990s incorporated in the connectionalist ‘neural network’ models of
psychological functioning. Connectionist models of mind attempt to make
computational theory consistent with what we know of the workings of the human
brain; they employ an idea of parallel distributed processing that allows for a
cognitivescheme that is always emergent, never quite fixed and thus provides
for a model of how cognitive processes respond to their own environment and are
modified by it. Nevertheless, as representation and as a component of the more
complexly configured ‘cultural model’ the schema that figures in works by
Holland and Quinn, D’Andrade and Shore is peculiarly static. Shore’s attempt to
distinguish between ‘conventional models’ and ‘personal models’ manifests
neatly the problem with the schema-as-representation idea of mental processes.
Because, the schemas that compos cultural models are conceived of as mirroring mental
representations of the world inside the human head, Shore’s cultural model
cannot intrinsically allow for the fact that in so far as we understand and
embrace what is conventional and the personal are bound to be aspects of one another
and that continuity over time is likewise an aspect of transformation.
Recent approach are more of the idea of continuity-in-transformation
approach. An example would be to note changes in a person (whole person)
including his/her ideas about the world is a dynamic system of transformations,
effect of aging so is reading a book or having a conversation. It is
interesting to note that even after the development of cultural psychology in
1990s the objective approach in the representational model did not go away.
However adopting a constructionist model, it is important to
note Shweder 1991: 156
“The constructive parts of a social construction theory are the
idea that equally rational, competent and informed
observers are, in some sense free… to constitute for themselves different
realities, and … that there are as
many realities are the way “it” can be constituted or described. … The “social”
parts of a social construction theory
are the idea that categories are vicariously received, not individually invented;
and are transmitted communicated and “passed
on” through symbolic action (Shweder 1991: 156).
Interestingly
in locating the constructive process in the person and what is social in an
abstract space between persons social constructionists reproduce the very
theoretical impasse they seek to dismantle[3].
Embodiment and Nurophenomenology:
While
issues of constructivism and essentialism is far from resolved anthropologists
are gaining momentum with the publication of Evan Thompson’s (2007) Mind in Life[4]
which argues for a
“Neurophenomenology… [whose] aim is to incorporate
phenomenological investigations of experience into
neuroscientific research on consciousness. Neurophenomenology focuses
especially on the temporal dynamics
of conscious experience and brain activity.” (2007:312)
One
of the best things about neurophenomenology is that it is open to coming to
grips with human historicity and, precisely for this reason, wants
anthropological inputs.
“The idea that phenomenology could stand in an explanatory
relation to biology… will sound odd to many readers.
What could phenomenology possibly exaplain in this domain? The answer is
nothing less that how certain
biological processes are also realizations of selfhood and subjectivity
(Thompson 2007:358)
Most writers
belonging to this camp still faces the daunting task of building culture into
their models, but this reintroduces the biology-culture distinction that has
for so long interfered with our ability to produce a unified model of human
being. It is important to note that intersubjectivity which has a big stake in explaining
the dynamics of consciousness and body is not to e confused with ‘social
interaction’, nor should the process of making sense intersubjectively of the
world be confused with social construction.Where learning is understood as a
microhistorical process, the peopled world – for all it operates according to
its own dynamics – cannot ever be understood independently of history of the
knowing subject. In other words, the validity of a given scientific study is
itself an historically constituted judgement – which is not to say that
scientific studies may not be arguably more, or less, valid. The point is that
if our categories are to work analytically, they have to be rendered such by
means of ethnographic analysis. They are not to be taken for granted, for they
too warrant investigation- society, individual, biology, culture, self, mind
and so on, and are cases in point.
Therefore,
doing anthropological investigation in the realm of cognitive or psychological
anthropology one should keep in mind:
A. Because of temporality inheres in
consciousness, learning instantiates the microhistorical processes that over
time given rise to the phenomena of consciousness as always open to further
differentiation.
B. Because transformation and continuity are
aspects of the microhistorical process of human autopoiesis, ethnographic
analyses of ontogenty can provide a way in to theorizing the mutual connections
between human evolution, history, contemporary lives, consciousness, and the
neurobiology of consciousness.
Note:
This material is prepared from the following books:
Thompson, Evan 2007. Mind
in Life. Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind, Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton. 2007. A
Companion to Psychological Anthropology Modernity and Psychocultural Change. Oxford:
Blackwell
Toren, Christina. 2012. Anthropology and Psychology, in
Fardon, R et al eds. Handbook of Social
Anthropology. London: Sage.
[1]
Autopoiesis"
refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself.
[2]
Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the
hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with
phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an
emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind. The field is very much
linked to fields such as neuropsychology, neuroanthropology and behavioral
neuroscience (also known as biopsychology) and the study of phenomenonology in
psychology.
The label was coined by C. Laughlin, J. McManus and E.
d'Aquili in 1990. However, the term was appropriated and given a distinctive
understanding by the cognitive neuroscientist Francisco Varela in the
mid-1990s,[4] whose work has inspired many philosophers and neuroscientists to
continue with this new direction of research.
[3]
Read: Hacking, Ian 1999. Social
Construction of What? Boston, M.A. Harvard University Press
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
[4]
Thompson, Evan 2007. Mind in Life.
Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University.