Anthropology and Psychology interface:
Contents
Anthropology and Psychology interface:
Beginnings – Culture-Personality:
Concepts developed through the interface
Embodiment and neurophenomenology:
Anthropologists who work at the interface of psychology
and anthropology have developed a field of Psychological Anthropology. It
approaches the comparative study of human experience, behavior, facts, and
artifacts from a dual sociocultural 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).
The 1970s saw the invention of psychological
anthropology, the 1980s brought us cultural sychology, 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, contributing to the development of
what is today called cognitive science.
Beginnings – Culture-Personality:
The origin of such approaches in rooted to
Culture and Personality school, which 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.
Concepts
developed through the interface
Models for humans:
Fundamentally,
its object is to be conceived of at the outset as living and as human, not as
an information-processing device. This model starts with human physical
actuality: the fact that each one of us is, like other living things,
biologically speaking autopoietic – self-creating, self-regulating. A newborn 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 the 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. In the unified 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. Implicit is a view of
consciousness as an aspect of human autopoiesis. Here 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 self-evidentiality of world as lived by 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. Whether,
over coming decades, cognitive anthropology will continue to dominate our
understanding of mind will have everything to do with the extent to which anthropology
as an intellectual project is able to realize and come to grips with the real political
implications of the ahistorical concept of human being that lies at its heart.
Cultural Models:
The
processes through which we know the peopled world, like the neurological
processes of which they are an aspect, are likewise autopoietic, characterized
by continuing differentiation through functioning. Once we understand this, it
becomes obvious that information-processing (or representational) models of
mind cannot capture its inherent dynamics. The idea of
continuity-in-transformation is interesting, one can think about onself – the whole
person, including the ideas about the world – as a dynamic system of transformations;
ageing, for example, is one aspect of the workings of this dynamic system, and
so is digestion, and so is reading a book, or having a conversation. One remains
autonomously oneself even though, from moment to moment and year to year, the continuity
through time is that of a dynamically transforming system. The representational
model of mind that mirrors objectively given properties of the world which do not
go away with the development in the 1990s of cultural psychology. Shweder,
however, did his best to move anthropologists away from what he characterized
as the ‘Platonic impulse’ that presumed mind to be a fixed and universal
property of the psyche. He argued for a cultural psychology that presumes
instead that the life of the psyche is the life of intentional persons,
responding to, and directing their action at, their own mental objects or
representations and undergoing transformation through participation in an
evolving intentional world that is the product of the mental representations
that make it up (Shweder 1991: 97).
Embodiment and neurophenomenology:
Anthropologists took encouragement from 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
…. (Thompson 2007: 312) Ethnographic studies of how children make sense of the
conditions in the world created for them by adults can contribute to the
dynamic systems perspective on human development over time as an autopoietic and
historical process – one that grounds the entire spectrum of individual difference
(within and across regions of the world) in the way that our biology provides for
sociality, specifically for empathy and intersubjectivity, as the bedrock
condition of human being. Furthermore, the details of ethnographic studies of
ontogeny as an historical process feed directly into the argument that the
development of the neural processes that characterize human conceptual development
is an emergent aspect of the functioning of an embodied nervous system for
which intersubjectivity is a necessary condition.
Further
reading:
Toren, Christina. (2012).
Anthropology and Psychology. In Richard Fardon et al. ed. The SAGE Handbook
of
Social
Anthropology,
(pp.27 – 41). Thousand oaks: Sage
D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. The
Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Schwartz, Theodore, Geoffrey M.
White, and Catherine A. Lutz. 1992. New Directions in Psychological
Anthropology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Read also the entry on Psychological
anthropology here: http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2013/11/psychological-anthropology-suman-nath.html
And
also on the Branches
of Social-cultural anthropology here: http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2014/11/branches-of-social-cultural-anthropology.html
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