Psychological Anthropology — Winter 2007
(HUDV 23906, ANTH 21501, ANTH 34305, HUDV 33906)

Time: Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20 pm.
Location: Stuart 104, 5835 S. Greenwood Ave.

Office hours: Tues 3:00-4:15 & Wed 12:30-1:15, Judd 406.

This syllabus last updated 20 Feb 2007.

Reading assignments will be updated periodically.

Please note changes to requirements.

Timothy McCajor Hall, MD PhD

mccajor@ earthlink.net

The relationship between culture and psyche has long intrigued social scientists and philosophers, and many of the great debates in social theory may be seen as part of this investigation: How can culturally constituted values affect individual behavior and macroeconomics (M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)? How can social and economic arrangements drive individuals to suicide (E. Durkheim, Suicide)? How do the diffuse interactions of a monetized, industrialized society change one’s self-concept (G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money)? What are the grounds and limits of rationality (M. Merleau-Ponty, M. Foucault)? More specific to anthropology, awareness of different ways of carving up the perceived world and evaluating the resulting pieces has challenged us to find ways of understanding across cultural and subcultural groups: can we or can we not assume a basic universality of the human behavioral sciences, a “psychic unity of mankind”?

Much of American anthropology in particular, from the students of Franz Boas onwards, has been driven by these debates: how similar or different are human psyches across cultures; are there universals to human nature; how does culture exert causal force; what is culture made of and how is it reproduced; how does culture get into our heads or, conversely, how does it get out of our heads and into the world, and in what sense does it do so?

This course follows several of these themes, beginning with early (mainly American) psychological anthropologists who first made the case that human behavior can only be understood by attending to how the mind divides the world into categories and assigns them significant meanings: in other words, that one cannot study humans’ interactions with their environment without understanding that their environment is (in part) culturally constituted.

Combining these insights with psychoanalytic theories of drive and development, scholars of the Culture and Personality School then asked how cultural categories are shared and reproduced and how they acquire their emotional significance. Applied research on Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s gave way to the more theoretical Human Relations projects of the 1960s, including studies of child development, gender and familial relations, values and cross-cultural communication, and mental health.

Since the 1960s, a parallel strand has drawn on cybernetics, cognitive science, and ethnoscience to inform new approaches to understanding culture’s components in cognitive psychological terms. These new formulations address many weaknesses of the older approaches, including a more sophisticated understanding of variation within cultures, different kinds of cultural knowledge, and more realistic models of how culture can do what it does.

Several classic topics in psychological anthropology will be passed over lightly, as these are addressed in much greater depth by other courses in Human Development: psychological approaches to religion, including trance and possession; the interaction of social and cultural processes with mental health; and cross-cultural challenges to psychoanalytic theories. We will discuss aspects of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the relationship between language and cognition in passing as they bear on other issues in psychological anthropology.

While this course does not assume that students have taken HUDV 3100: Cultural Psychology, we will generally avoid overlapping readings. We will assume that participants have some previous exposure to basic concepts of anthropology and personality or social psychology. The course will not take an explicitly psychoanalytic perspective; however, students who have not read psychoanalytic theory would be advised to review the first few chapters of Erikson's Childhood and Society prior to the start of the course, as many of the Culture and Personality School authors draw on psychodynamic models.

Students with schedule conflicts for this course may be interested in Prof. Ray Fogelson's course "Ethnopsychology." I have not seen the syllabus, but there will likely be overlapping readings.

First- and second-year undergraduates: Be aware that the reading load for this course is fairly heavy. Please consider this before deciding to register.

Course Requirements:

All participants in turn are expected to take the lead in preparing and discussing assigned texts over the course of the quarter.

Preparation and participation in all class sessions will count as one third of the final grade. Approximately half of this will be based on class discussion and half on presentations of the reading assignments.

Undergraduates are required to complete two take-home examinations.

Graduate students will not be required to take the exams, but will be required to submit a 2-3 page paper proposal with a brief bibliography at the time of the midterm, and a 15-20 page paper at the conclusion of the course. Graduate students will exchange drafts of their papers during 7th week and provide feedback to their peers, due in 8th week. This paper should represent a significant, focused engagement with some aspect of psychological anthropology. Graduate students are encouraged to think of this as a preliminary (though thoughtful) draft of a paper suitable for submission to Ethos or a similar journal.

Auditors: Persons with compelling reasons to audit the course will be allowed to do so, subject to space availability and the discretion of the instructor.

It is assumed that all students know and follow the University of Chicago’s academic honesty policy. Those who are not familiar with proper citation formats should consult a recent edition of A Manual of Style by the University of Chicago Press or Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Dissertations, and Theses. Author-date citations are preferred in text: (Shweder and LeVine, 1984: 1-3). Students may use any standard social science bibliography format, so long as it is clear and consistent. Please use footnotes rather than endnotes (most journals prefer endnotes because they are easier to set in type, but footnotes are easier to read). As all assignments will be completed at home, students are expected to check thoroughly for grammatical or spelling errors.

Required Texts in the Seminary Coop bookstore:

Benedict, Ruth

1934 Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: patterns of Japanese culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

D'Andrade, Roy G.

1995 The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist

1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Shweder, Richard A., and Robert A. LeVine, eds.

1984 Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Required books will also be on reserve in the library and other required material will be on Chalk. All participants are expected to have done the required reading for each class, including the first session. Recommended items may be discussed in class, time permitting, but are not required. Other items are listed for further reading by interested students.

Week 1: Psyche in a Culturally Constituted World

Hallowell, A. Irving

1955 “The Self and Its Behavioral Environment.” In Culture and Experience. A. I. Hallowell, ed. Pp. 75 -110. New York: Schocken Books.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

1969 “The Archaic Illusion.” In The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Pp. 84-97. New York: Beacon.

Sapir, Edward

1956[1934] “The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures.” In Culture, Language, and Personality: selected essays. D.G. Mandelbaum, ed. Pp. 590-597. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

1956 “Science and Linguistics.” In Language, Thought and Reality. B. L. Whorf, ed. Pp. 207-219. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

For further reading:

Bloch, Maurice

1991 “Language, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science.” Man 26(2):183-198.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pullum, Geoffrey

1989 “Comment: The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7:275 - 281.

Sapir, Edward

1956[1927] “The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society.” In Culture, Language, and Personality: selected essays. D.G. Mandelbaum, ed. Pp. 544-559. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Stocking, George

1968 “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective.” In Race, Culture and Evolution. G. Stocking, ed. Pp. 195-233. New York: Free Press.

Week 2: Culture and Personality

Benedict, Ruth

1934 Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Chs 2-3, 6-7; skim other chapters, time permitting.

1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: patterns of Japanese culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Skim 2-3, read 5-7, 11-12.

For further reading:

Bauer, Raymond, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn

1956 How the Soviet System Works: cultural, psychological, and social themes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Doi, Takeo

1981 The Anatomy of Dependence, trans. John Bester. New York: Kodansha International Press.

Erikson, Erik

1963 Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. New York: Norton.

Inkeles, Alex; with D.J. Levinson; Helen Beier; Eugenia Hanfman; Larry Diamond.

1997 National Character: a psycho-social perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood, and Fred L. Strodtbeck

1961 Variations in Value Orientations. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

Czesław, Miłosz

1953 The Captive Mind, trans. Jan Zielonko. New York: Knopf.

Spiro, Melford E.

1987 “Culture and Human Nature.” In Culture and Human Nature: theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro. B. Kilborne and L.L. Langness, eds. Pp. 3-31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Week 3: Fashioning a Self:

Neisser, Ulric

1988 “Five kinds of self-knowledge.” Philosophical Psychology 1(1):35-59.

McAdams, Dan P.

1996 “Personality, modernity, and the storied self: a contemporary framework for studying persons.” Psychological Inquiry 7(4):295-321.

Kondo, Dorinne K

1986 “Dissolution and reconstitution of self: implications for anthropological epistemology.” Cultural Anthropology 1(1):74-88.

Spiro, Melford E.

1993 “Is the Western conception of the self ‘peculiar’ within the context of the world cultures?” Ethos 21(2):107-153.

Students who have not read Geertz (1984) should skim it before class.

For further reading:

Geertz, Clifford

1973 “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. C. Geertz, ed. Pp. 360-411. New York: Basic Books.

1984 “From the Native’s Point of View: on the nature of anthropological understanding.” In Culture theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R.A. Shweder and R. LeVine, eds. Pp. 123-136. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Holland, Dorothy

1997 “Selves as Cultured: as told by an anthropologist who lacks a soul.” In Self and Identity: fundamental issues. R. Ashmore and L. Jussim, eds. Pp. 160-190. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neisser, Ulric

1994 “Multiple systems: a new approach to cognitive theory.” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 6(3):225 - 241.

Shweder, Richard A., and Edmund J. Bourne

1984 “Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally?” In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 158-199. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Westen, Drew

1992 “The cognitive self and the psychoanalytic self: can we put our selves together?” Psychological Inquiry, 3(1) 1-13.

Week 4: Culture, Perception, and Emotion

Ekman, Paul

1999 “Basic Emotions.” In The Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. T. Dalgleish and M. Power, eds. Pp. 45-60. Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Levy, Robert I.

1984 “Emotion, Knowing, and Culture.” In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R. Shweder and R. LeVine, eds. Pp. 214-237. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lutz, Catherine

1985 “Ethnopsychology Compared to What? Explaining behavior and consciousness among the Ifaluk.” In Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. G. White and J. Kirkpatrick, eds. Pp. 35-79. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press.

For further reading:

Levy, Robert I.

1973 Tahitians: mind and experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rosaldo, Michelle Z.

1984 “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 137-157. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Schachter, Stanley, and Jerome E. Singer

1962 “Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional state.” Psychological Review 69(5): 379-99.

Wierzbicka, Anna

1999 Emotions across Languages and Cultures: diversity and universals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Week 5: Emotions and Selves: Ilongot Headhunting

Graduate Students: 2-3 page abstract/summary of your paper due at beginning of class.

Rosaldo, Michelle Z.

1980 Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chs 1-3, 5, 7.

Spiro, Melford E.

1984. “Some Reflections on Cultural Determinism and Relativism with Special Reference to Emotion and Reason.” In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 323-346. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

For further reading:

Robarchek, Clayton, and Carole Robarchek

2005 “Waorani grief and the witch-killer’s rage: worldview, emotion, and anthropological explanation.” Ethos 33(2):206-230.

Rosaldo, Renato

1984 “Grief and a head-hunter's’s rage.” In Text, Play, and Story: the construction and reconstruction of self and society. Jerome Bruner, ed. Pp: 178-195. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society.

Zajonc, Robert B.

1980 “Thinking and feeling: preferences need no inferences.” American Psychologist 35:151-175.

TAKE-HOME MIDTERM: due at beginning of class for Week 6.

Week 6: Gender, Development, and Conflict

Chodorow, Nancy J.

1989a   “Being and Doing: a cross-cultural examination of the socialization of males and females.” In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Pp. 23-44. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Mead, Margaret

1935 Sex and Temperament in three primitive societies. Pp: 245-275, 290-309. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks.

Meigs, Anna S.

1976 “Male pregnancy and the reduction of sexual opposition in a New Guinea Highlands society.” Ethnology 15(4):393-407.

Herdt, Gilbert

1982 “Nose-bleeding rites and male proximity to females.” Ethos 10(3):189-231.

For further reading:

Allison, Anne

1994 Nightwork: sexuality, pleasure, and corporate masculinity in a Tokyo hostess club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chodorow, Nancy

1989b “Family Structure and Feminine Personality.” In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Pp. 45-65. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Herdt, Gilbert

1999 “Sambia Sexual Culture.” In Sambia Sexual Culture: essays from the field. Pp: 56-88. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ortner, Sherry B.

1974 “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” In Woman, Culture and Society. M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, eds. Pp. 67-87. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Wrangham, Richard, and Dale Peterson

1996 Demonic Males: apes and the origins of human violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Week 7: Cognitive Approaches: Ethnoscience and Rationality

D'Andrade, Roy G.

1995 The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chs 1-6.

For further reading:

Atran, Scott

1998 “Folkbiology and the anthropology of science: cognitive universals and cultural particulars.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:547-609.

Graduate Students: Draft of term paper due at beginning of class for Week 8.

You will exchange papers with another graduate student and provide feedback and comments for week 9.

Week 8: Cultural Models – Who has them and how to find them

D'Andrade, Roy G.

1995 The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chs 7-8.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2002 “Russian cultural scripts: the theory of cultural scripts and its applications.” Ethos 30(4):401-432.

Holland, Dorothy

1987 “Culture sharing across gender lines: an interactionist corrective to the status-centered model.” American Behavioral Scientist 31(2):234 - 249.

For further reading:

D'Andrade, Roy

1987 “Modal responses and cultural expertise.” American Behavioral Scientist 31(2):194-202.

LeVine, Robert A.

1984 “Properties of Culture: an ethnographic view.” In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 67-87. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Quinn, Naomi, ed.

2005 Finding Culture in Talk: a collection of methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Week 9: Cultural Models – Conflicts and Internalization

Brenner, Suzanne A.

1995. “Why Women Rule the Roost: rethinking Javanese ideologies of gender and self-control.” In Bewitching Women, Pious Men: gender and body politics in Southeast Asia. A. Ong and M. G. Peletz, eds. Pp. 135-156. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

D'Andrade, Roy G.

1995 The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ch 9. Skim conclusion.

Quinn, Naomi

1996 “Culture and contradiction: the case of Americans reasoning about marriage.” Ethos 24(3)391-425.

Swartz, Marc J.

1984 “Culture as ‘tokens’ and as ‘guides’: Swahili statements, beliefs, and behavior concerning generational differences. Journal of Anthropological Research 40(1):78-89.

For further reading:

Aunger, Robert

1999 “Culture as consensus—against idealism/contra consensus.” Current Anthropology 40(Supplement): S93 - S101.

D'Andrade, Roy G.

1992 “Schemas and Motivation.” In Human Motives and Cultural Models, R. D'Andrade and C. Strauss, eds. Pp: 23-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dressler, William W. and Bindon, James

2000 “The health consequences of cultural consonance: cultural dimensions of lifestyle, social support, and arterial blood pressure in an African American community.” American Anthropologist 102(2): 244-260.

Luhrmann, Tanya M.

2000 Of Two Minds: the growing disorder in American psychiatry. New York, NY, US: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Romney, A. Kimball, Susan C. Weller, & William H. Batchelder.

1986 “Culture as consensus: a theory of culture and informant accuracy.” American Anthropologist, 88: 313-338.

Week 10: Culture in a Psychologically Constituted World

Lakoff, George

1995 “Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, or Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals in the Dusts .” Social Research, 62(2): 177-214.

Spiro, Melford E.

1987 “Social Systems, Personality, and Functional Analysis.” In Culture and Human Nature: theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro. B. Kilborne and L.L. Langness, eds. Pp. 109-144. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna

1997 Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press. Introduction (1-31), English 'friendship' (33-55).

Recommended:

D'Andrade, Roy G.

1984 “Cultural Meaning Systems.” In Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. R.A. Shweder and R. LeVine, eds. Pp. 88-119. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

1987 “A Folk Model of the Mind.” in Cultural Models in Language and Thought, D. Holland and N. Quinn, eds. Cambridge University Press, 113-147.

Hutchins, Edwin

1991 “The Social Organization of Distributed Cognition,” In Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. L. Resnick, J. Levine, and S. Teasley, eds. Pp. 283-307. Washington, DC: APA Press.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark

1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.

Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn

1997 A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chs 2-3.

TAKE-HOME FINAL (Undergraduates) and FINAL PAPER (Graduate Students):

due in my drop-box in Human Development (5730 S. Woodlawn) by noon on Monday, 12 March.

Created: 8 Jun 2006. Last updated 20 Feb 2007.

Back to my home page.