Archaeology
by and large does not directly engage in the key political struggles of the
modern world. Archaeologists do not in any noteworthy way direct armies, shape economies,
write laws, or imprison or free people from bondage (McGuire, 2018). However,
archaeology has been and is being used by politics, ideology and identity in a
profound way. Hodder (2005) argues that On the one hand, ideology represents
the interests of the dominant group in society. The dominant perspective
becomes absorbed and ‘taken for granted’. We become mystified and duped. On the
other hand, ideology can be seen as enabling as well as misrepresenting. He
opined that it is important to take the second stand and investigate how
archaeological data are being misrepresented.
Gamble
(2004) suggests we can look at the idea of power and politics in archaeology
from at least two different perspectives, first, the entity of power as
embedded within the archaeological record, and second within the discipline of
archaeology, in its theory and practice.
We can
investigate the social inequality of the past societies from archaeological
records which range from grave goods and ornaments to the settlement pattern.
However, as we investigate them, we also need to keep it in mind that we are
using the categories and perceptions of our investigation from the kind of
experiences that we have in our present world. The major categories such as gender,
ethnicity, class positions, etc. can be derived along the axis of power.
Although, these categories of findings are often seen as ‘objective’ and
scientific in nature and are not really linked to existing socio-cultural
hierarchies, their use by the ruling dispensation like what Hoddar (2005)
argues are nevertheless part of politics, politics of identity construction and
formulation.
Perhaps
the second and more important category of understanding the political use of
archaeology is to look at the ways in which archaeologists have actively shaped
our understanding of the world. Trigger (1984) has described archaeologies as being
nationalist, colonialist or imperalist.
Archaeology
has been, and is still, important in the establishment of national identities.
Therefore, archaeological records are being vividly interpreted and used by the
competing political regimes to establish and rationalize their particular
ideology and frames of rule. Using this lens one can understand in what ways
Hindu Nationalism has proliferated in India in recent decade and has pushed the
secular forces towards the margins. One of the many reference points has been the
archaeological establishment of Hastinapur as a city connected to the epic
Mahabharata, or for that matter the construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya.
Colonial
archaeologies denigrate non-Western societies to the status of static yet
living museums from which the nature of the past might be inferred. The
unchanged and living museum like character has been used in legitimizing the
colonial rule over its subjects. In fact, the categories such as ‘primitive’, ‘native’,
‘barbar’, ‘savage’, and later on like ‘under-developed’, ‘backward’, has been ‘scienfically’
projected to not only legitimize the colonization but also to dehumanize the ‘other’.
Archaeology has been systematically used in such a process. Archaeologists,
most of them, during the colonial period has not only helped establishing and rationalizing
the colonial rule over the rest of the world, but also was directly responsibly
for establishing institutions which are carrying this legacy even in the
post-colonial period. The Archaeological Survey of India for example was
established during the British period. These institutions have also helped transporting
the archaeologically significant entities from their places of origins to the colonizers
museums, most famously, the British Museum.
Imperialist
archaeologies (largely those developed in Britain and America) exert
theoretical hegemony over research in the rest of the world through extensively
engaging in research abroad, playing a major role in training either foreign students
or those who subsequently obtain employment abroad, and in the dissemination of
texts. The American expression of the new archaeology, advocating high-level
generalization and a crosscultural comparative perspective, 'asserts the
unimportance of national traditions . . . and of anything that stands in the
way of American economic activity and political influence' (Trigger, 1984, p.
366). At an even more general level, Friedman (1986) has inserted archaeology
into what he claims to be world cycles of 'traditionalist-culturalist',
'modernist' and 'post-modernist' cultural identities or cosmologies.
It
is important to understand that archaeological facts which we use to explore
the concepts like identity, power, ethnicity and nationalism are quite abstract
in nature. The problems of archaeological records, therefore, is the fact that
the past is not a neutral subject. It is not something of interests to only the
researchers and readers, but it is also of the interests to lobbyists and
competing political forces. At one level of the identity spectrum is concered
with the construction of our personal identity, that sense of self. At another
we also belong to much larger communities that influence what that self will be
and against which it will be tested. Here lies the contestation of present and
past, and here lies the role of lobbyists and political players. As scholars
like Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar variously sees history as a result of the
interaction between past and present, archaeological records are being used and
interpreted in particular ways so as to go in line with the power groups. They
are helped in formulation of national identities and political identities in
present era. Similarly, they were used in constructing the multiple and often
derogatory identities of the ‘weak’ others.
Cultural
Relativism expresses the idea that the beliefs and practices of others are best
understood in the light of the particular cultures in which they are found. The
idea is predicated on the degree to which human behavior is held to be
culturally determined, a basic tenet of American cultural anthropology. This is
often joined with the argument that because all extant cultures are viable
adaptations and equally deserving of respect, they should not be subjected to
invidious judgments of worth or value by outsiders. Alternatively, some argue
that since all norms are specific to the culture in which they were formulated,
there can be no universal standards of judgment.
Cultural
relativism in American cultural anthropology is often attributed to the
critique of social evolutionist perspectives by Franz BOAS and his students,
especially Ruth BENEDICT, Margaret MEAD, and Melville HERSKOVITS. Boas
criticized the use of EVOLUTIONARY STAGES as the basis for organizing museum displays,
arguing that exhibits should display artifacts in the context of specific
cultures.
Most
societies are not relativist: they view their own ways as good, other people's
as bad, inferior, or immorala form of
ETHNOCENTRISM. However, the reverse is also possible, a syndrome Melford Spiro
(1992b: 62 7) termed "inverted ethnocentrism," in which some
anthropologists go well beyond relativism to assert that Western culture is
globally inferior to Primitive or Third World cultures.
Cultural
relativism as an approach can be contrasted with the search for human
UNIVERSALS, the latter often grounded in claims based on such analytic
perspectives as Freudian psychology, marxist political economy, Darwinian
natural selection, or technoenvironmental determinism. Strong cultural
relativists often see anthropology more as an art than a science and prefer to
interpret symbolic meanings rather than explain social mechanisms. Clifford
GEERTZ (1984b) has been an influential spokesman for this approach.
In the
broader philosophical context, cultural relativism is sometimes merged with
cognate forms of relativism (moral, ethical, cognitive, linguistic, historical,
etc.) under the general rubric of Relativism, which is then seen in opposition
to Rationalism, or occasionally, Fundamentalism (see M. Hollis & Lukes
1982). In treating the lively debates on cultural relativism in anthropology
and philosophy, Spiro (1992b) discussed cultural relativism in relation to both
cultural diversity and cultural determinism. Taking the existence of cultural
variation as well documented, as do most anthropologists, he distinguished
three types of cultural relativismdescriptive, normative, and epistemologicaleach with its attendant subtypes.
These
detailed distinctions have not become conventional within the discipline. Most
anthropologists remain content to distinguish the first-order methodological
use of cultural relativism in anthropology from insensitive ethnocentric
attempts to arrive at final ethical, moral, or scientific judgments.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Ethnology is the attempt to develop rigorous
and scientifically grounded explanations of cultural phenomena by comparing and
contrasting many human cultures. By contrast, ethnography is the systematic
description of a single contemporary culture, often through ethnographic field.
The two concepts are often combined in anthropological writings and they have a
close and complex historical relationship.
The words "ethnography" and
"ethnology" appear to have been introduced in the late eighteenth
century. Hans Vermeulen (1995) cited the German historian and linguist August
Ludwig Schlözer's Allgemeine nordische Geschichte (1771) as probably the first
use of the term "Ethnographie," which Schlözer seemed to employ
interchangeably with the term "Völkerkunde" to designate the
descriptive and historical study of peoples and nations. Vermeulen noted
Schlözer's involvement with the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences and his
residency in St. Petersburg in the 1760s, where he ed with G. F. Müller, J. E.
Fischer, and other German scholars recruited by the Russian government to
report on the peoples of the newly explored eastern territories.
There is a duality in the idea of ethnography.
On one hand, the word designates observations, ranging from isolated remarks to
extended studies of nations, tribes, or peoples, by anyone who has recorded
what he has seen or heard. On the other hand, ethnography also designated the
aspiration to collect systematically, and according to rigorous procedures,
facts about human languages, customs, arts, and achievements. Ethnography in
this sense included the culling of material from documents and interviews with
visitors returning from foreign lands and the redaction of this material into
learned treatises. The scientific ethnographer was someone who staked a fairly
large claim on erudition, breadth of learning, and capacious memory; thus
ethnography gained a certain reputation as a field for pedants.
Ethnology and ethnography developed, of course,
dialectically. As the antiquity of man became established in the mid-nineteenth
century and anthropological inquiry began to focus on evolutionary questions,
the need for better data became clear. In 1843, Prichard and two of his
colleagues drew up a schedule of questions to guide observations of native
peoples (Penniman 1935: 53). Lewis Henry Morgan began sending his first kinship
terminology questionnaires to missionaries and commercial agents in January
1859 (Trautmann 1987: 103). In 1874, the British Association for the
Advancement of Science published its first edition of Notes and queries on
anthropology, for the use of travellers and residents in uncivilized lands.
These attempts to guide inquiry sometimes had richer returns than their authors
anticipated, as recipients began to engage the larger problem of putting the
answers into local context. The outstanding example is the ethnographic of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt in
Australia, culminating in Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Fison 1880), which grew out of
the missionary Fison's original correspondence with Morgan (see Stocking 1995:
17 34). By the last decades of the nineteenth century, there were several examples
of a new kind of ethnographic book in which the hypothetical pronouncements of
armchair theorists were tested against the author's own observations. Robert
Henry Codrington's The Melanesians (1891) and Baldwin Spencer and Frank
Gillen's The native tribes of central Australia (1899) exemplify this new,
theoretically informed style of extended firsthand observation. Also during
this period, the Bureau of American Ethnology began its publication of
ethnographic monographs based on systematic field.
The underlying
contrast between the interview and ordinary (some might say naturalistic) conversation
remains at the core of scholarly on
ethnographic interviewing. Most generally, discussions of the ways ethnographic
interviewing differs from other kinds of interviewing have tended to emphasise how
ethnographic interviewing aims to be more like ordinary conversation. scholars
typically focus mainly on two key dimensions of the ethnographic interview process
that I have called embeddedness and openness.
Embeddedness:
The ethnographic interview is distinguished from
other kinds of qualitative interview in its striving for a high level of
embeddedness. The term embeddedness may be used in two senses: to describe the
degree to which the interview is taking place within the social world one is studying,
rather than in isolation from it; and to describe the degree to which the
interview is conducted from within a field of knowledge about the social,
cultural and material world of the interviewee. This embeddedness can result in
deeper understanding of the ‘other’ and produce ‘thicker’ description about
their life as they live (Geertz 1973).
Second criterion for embeddedness refers to the
degree to which the interview unfolds within the interviewee’s everyday social
milieu. The most embedded interviews in this sense take place within the context
of long-term participant observation, after researchers have made efforts to
establish a place within the nets of social relations of the people they will
be interviewing. By speaking the local language or local dialect, and by being
attentive to social norms, ideally they will have established rapport with
their interviewees, and earned their trust. This stands in contrast to
interviews that take place in isolated settings in which the interviewee knows
the interviewer only as a researcher, and not as neighbour, friend, co-er, or
perhaps, (fictive) kin. In much psychological interviewing, there is in fact an
effort to minimize the effects of the setting and to make sure the social
identity and opinions of the interviewer are obscured, so as to encourage
responses that are as little affected by external conditions as possible. In
ethnographic interviews, by contrast, interviewers deliberately seek to
approach their interviewees with an understanding of the complex social
relationships involved. Through a deep appreciation of the context of these
relationships, they expect to develop a richer and more layered understanding
of the social worlds they are studying.
Openness:
In addition
to embeddedness, the ethnographic can be
distinguished from other kinds of qualitative interview by its degree of
openness. It is informal because there are no lists of questions, the
ethnographer is not taking on the role of an interrogator, and it happens in the
course of everyday social interactions (Agar 1980: 90). In ideal typical terms,
structured interviewing, by contrast, involves asking respondents a
pre-established list of questions, sometimes using an interview schedule that
customizes the direction of the interview based on responses to previous questions.
In structured interviewing, the interviewer must be ‘directive and impersonal’,
and ideally, ‘nothing is left to chance’ (Fontana and Frey 2000: 650). Between
these two extremes are unstructured (or openended) interviewing and
semi-structured interviewing.
Ethnographic fieldwork tradition has a long
history and it is rooted from the 19th century enlightenment
philosophy. Roughly the ethnographic approaches can be divided into the
following traditions.
While anthropology was developed with
enlightenment philosophy and British territorial expansionism, it is commonly
believed that ethnographic fieldwork which tends to dominate much of the
practices of anthropology started with Malinowski. Before Malinowski, there
were surveys and before that there was anthropology from distance popularly
known as the ‘armed chair anthropology’. A recent edited volume Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork,
1870-1922 by Frederico Delgado Rosa, and Han F. Vermeulen (2022) show that
there was serious ethnographic fieldwork being carried out by scholars before
Malinowski. Women practitioners and indigenous experts have been documenting society
and culture quite like an ethnographer during the era when 19th
century evolutionism was the dominant paradigm. For example, it was Franz Boas’
prescription to adapt to ‘their’ customs in order to become a fieldworker
hinting towards immersion based work.
As Malinowski did his seminal work in Trobriand
Island and published his principal work, Argonauts
of the Western Pacific (1922), which established him as one of Europe's
most important anthropologists he successfully influenced a generation of
anthropologist with his rather unique of method of participant
observation.[i]He took posts as a lecturer and
later as chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics, attracting
large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of
British social anthropology. Over the years, he guest-lectured at several American
universities; when World War II broke out, he remained in the United States,
taking an appointment at Yale University. During this entire period of his
career he has been successful to influence social anthropologists all over the
world to embrace participant observation because, being there is seen as resulting in production of much superior information
and that has an advantage over the survey methods because there is a difference
between what people say they do and what they actually do. Even today, the
stereotypical ethnographer is seen as doing participant observation, but
researchers also perform quantitative, survey, textual, demographic, and other
types of analysis, depending on local conditions and the nature of the research
project. Until recently the optimal choice was to seek out as exotic a locale
for research as possible; choosing sites closer to home and writing library
dissertations were viewed as inferior alternatives. Researchers carrying out
traditional fieldwork are supposed to immerse themselves, taking in large
amounts of vastly different kinds of data. This range and abundance of
"raw" experience and observation helps put the more formally acquired
information, gathered through structured interviews, for instance, into
context. Supporters of traditional fieldwork also argue that a great deal of
learning about people and CULTURE needs to occur through direct experience, as
opposed to the distancing and objectivity of the scientific method. Learning
through senses other than seeing and hearingby smelling or imitating habitual body postures, for instanceshould occur (Stoller 1989). Through using
their senses anthropologists serve as data-gathering instruments and
alterations in themselves become a way of knowing; or, as Susan Harding states,
"the only certain evidence of the reality that preoccupies ethnographers,
of shared unconscious knowledge, is experiential" (1987: 180).
The tradition of fieldwork set by Malinowski
and later anthropologists continued to embrace immersion and continue to
produce an authoritative accounts on
the natives until it was late 1980s and especially before the James Clifford
and George Marcus’ Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Writing
Culture movement in the 1990s was by the “writing against culture”
movement, which expressed misgivings about a common form of anthropological thought
that imposed excessive and disadvantaging “otherness” on the cultures and
peoples studied. This movement implicitly reasserted the humanist universalism
of anthropology and pointed up how other cultures were described in terms that
distanced and dehumanized them. This was a very direct and forceful challenge
to customary descriptive and categorizing practices, and it provoked strong
debate in the discipline. Fundamentally they brought out a few uncomfortable
truths:
a)How
far an ethnographer’s account of a people is accurate, especially in an era of
post-structuralism when it is well known that writing is fashioning and when
you write you tend to objectify reality.
b)If
there is a ‘mispresentation’ of reality in ethnographic writings wheather the
finished ethnography is poetically
written to appease its readers, or political
written to appease their masters.
c)What
about the individual biases that might result in (un)intentional creation of
fiction about a group of people.
d)Where
lies the truth, is it in the diary that Malinowski wrote (A diary in the strict sense of the term) or in the ethnographic
account?
These questions opened up new possibilities for
ethnographic work and some of the new directions include:
a)Experience
near ethnography – ethnographies which are being conducted by an ethnographer
on his/her own culture
b)Self
reflexivity – when an ethnographer speaks openly about his/her own position in
the ethnography and more generally.
c)Multi-site
ethnography – when an ethnographer is no longer documenting everything under
the sun but working on a particular research question at multiple sites.
[i] Participant-Observation
is long-term, intense interaction with members of a community during which the
researcher plunges into their activities as completely as possible, for
example, by attending rituals, "hanging out," or washing clothes at
the river with other women. It is considered to be the hallmark of traditional
anthropological field research. Advantages of participant-observation are
numerous. (1) It is virtually the only way to conduct ethnographic research
with people who do not speak a written language. (2) The researcher is
"there" all the time, and consequently sees what happens when people
are preparing for events or mopping up afterwards, behaving according to the
rules or breaking them. (3) Immersion in community life results in the
fieldworker becoming less intrusive, less of a stranger, and thus in increased
trust and tolerance on the part of members of the community. (4) Being on their
turf, the researcher can more easily discern the peoples' customary, unexamined
habits and perspectives than if they were in a setting less familiar to them.
(5) Behavior is observed first hand rather than elicited from peoples' accounts
of what happened. (6) Being there and speaking the language vastly increases
the chances of comprehending the meaning of what is happening from the peoples'
point of view.
The disadvantages of participant-observation include:
(1) the investment of a huge amount of time, some of which is not spent very
efficiently. (2) People may resent what they see as snoopy, sneaky behavior by
inquisitive anthropologists. (3) Participant-observation is sometimes difficult
to explain to people (and university committees interested in informed-consent
guidelines). (4) The presence of the anthropologist, at times strongly felt,
affects the behavior being investigated. (5) It is virtually impossible to
adequately demonstrate to readers of ethnographic reports why one's
conclusions, if based on participant-observation, should be accepted beyond the
assertion that "since I was there, my perceptions are accurate." This
is why participant-observation is not, properly speaking, a methodology
(although some speak of it as such: see Spradley 1980) and why researchers
always utilize additional structured or semistructured techniques such as
censuses, genealogies, projective tests, or structured interviews with a
carefully drawn sample.
Culture and
personality is the name of a broad unrecognized movement which brings cultural
anthropology, psychology and psychiatry together from about 1928 to 1955. After
1960s the field becomes known as psychological anthropology. The primary aim is
to study human experience, facts and artifacts from a dual socio-cultural as
well as psychological point of view. Its founders are Margaret Mead, Edward
Sapir, are all students of Franz Boas.
Basic idea:
The study of
culture and personality seeks to understand the growth and development of
personal or social identity as it relates to the surrounding social environment
(Barnouw 1963). More specifically Mead argues that culture plays role in
the development of individual psychology. For Benedict emotional status are
typical of particular culture. Sapir shows that people of the same society
recognizes its culture differently. In other words, through the examination of
individual personalities, broader correlations and generalizations can be made
about the specific culture of those members. This has led to examinations
of national character, modal personality types and configurations of
personality.
Approaches:
The approaches
range from positivism to various hermeneutic humanism. The approaches can be
broadly categorized into the following:
A.Anti culture personality
position.
B.Personality is culture view or
configurationalist approach.
C.Reductionist position
D.Personality mediation view
A. Anti
culture personality position:
Despite of the psychological
inclination of major contemporary theorists such as Lasswell (1930, 1948, 1968)
the institutional social science did not accept the assumptions on which
culture and personality theoretical position is based. The influence of
Durkheim and positivistic philosophy left little space to bring subjective
perspective.
B.
Personality is Culture or Configurationalist approach (Special emphasis on Margaret Mead)
The approach of
Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and some of their co-workers is known as Configurationalist
approach or personality is culture view. They applied the relativist approach
to the study of Personality.
For them Culture and personality are
both configurations of behaviour that are manifested and carried by individuals
as characteristic of a group. These two are also psychologically interpreted in
individual behaviour or in collective products such as myth, ritual, art,
recreation, politics etc.
They argue that personality
represents an aspect of culture, in which emotional responses and cognitive
capacities of an indivifual are programmed in accordance with the overall
design or configuration of his culture, i.e., the cultural patterning of
personality (Mead 1928, 1932, 1935 Benedict 1934a, 1934b, 1938, 1939).
Margaret Mead was a
distinguished anthropologist, an intellectual and a scientist. She is the
author of numerous books on primitive societies and she also wrote about many
contemporary issues. Some of the areas in which she was prominent were
education, ecology, the women's movement, the bomb, and student uprisings.
She was a student of Ruth
Benedict. Her monograph Coming of Age in Samoa
(1949) established her as one of the leading anthropologists of the day. It was
a work done under the guidance of Franz Boas. Boas went on to point out that at
the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discuss the problems faced
by young people (particularly women) as they pass through adolescence as
"unavoidable periods of adjustment." Boas felt that a study of the
problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating.
And so, as Mead herself described the goal of her research:
"I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa:
Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence
itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence
present a different picture?" To answer this question, she conducted her
study among a small group of Samoans — a village of 600 people on the island of
Ta‘u — in which she got to know, live with, observe, and interview through an
interpreter 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20. She concluded that the
passage from childhood to adulthood — adolescence — in Samoa
was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological
distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States. As Boas and Mead
expected, this book upset many Westerners when it first appeared in 1928. Many
American readers were shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred
marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex but eventually married,
settled down, and successfully reared their own children. In 1983, five years
after Mead had died, Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman published Margaret
Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an
Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged Mead's major findings about
sexuality in Samoan society, claiming evidence that her informants had misled
her. After years of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that the truth
would probably never be known, although most published accounts of the debate
have also raised serious questions about Freeman's critique (Appell 1984, Brady
1991, Feinberg 1988, Leacock 1988).
Starting as a
configurationalist, Mead wrote about national character.Hired in World War II by the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), Mead researched the national character of England and
compared it to that found within the United States.She determined that in each society the norms
for interaction between the sexes differed, leading to many misunderstandings
between the two otherwise similar cultures.
She continued to write on
topics which focused on women's roles, childrearing, and other issues which
clarify gender roles in primitive cultures and aspects of American society.
These works include "Male and Female," "Balinese Character: A
Photo Analysis," "Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive
Peoples," "Continuities in Cultural Evolution," and "New
Life for Old." She remained an active writer all of her life and her
bibliography from 1925-1975 runs more than 100 pages.
Photography was not as
common in Mead's lifetime as it is now. However, she did a tremendous job of
integrating her photography with her writing skills. In doing this she was able
to study CULTURE at a distance. This had never been done before in this manner
and served to be an advantage during World War ll in helping to understand the
environment of Germany
and Japan.
C.
Reductionist position:
Mostly influenced by Geza Roheim
(1950), it is an approach that gave exhaustive emphasis of mind over other
factors of cultural and social behavior.
D. The
personality mediation view:
Abraham Cardiner(1939) a
psychoanalyst in collaboration with anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936, 1945),
have formulated this idea. This view splits culture in to two halves. First,
maintenance system, i.e., the determinants of personality. Second, projective
system, i.e., the outcome of personality. Therefore, personality acts as an
intervening factor.
Further reading:
Levine and
Levine (1966). Culture Behaviour and Personality.
Thomas Barfield
(1996) Dictionary of Anthropology.
Philip Bock
(1999). Rethinking Psychological Anthropology.