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Methods and Ethics in Culture and Personality Studies

1. Methods in Culture and Personality Studies - Standard anthropological method uses participant observation to learn about other cultures - Culture and personality studies present some special problems that require additional methods - Issues addressed often involve emotional dynamics hidden to informants themselves - Informants also surround many psychological issues with secrecy - Psychological questions take a very long time to investigate - Questions in psychological anthropology involve sensitive areas for observer as well as informants, creating strong potential for bias in observation - Techniques for direct assessment of personality supplement participant observation by examining individuals with objective instruments and extrapolating their responses to the larger culture - Projective tests like the Rorschach, and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) present individuals with a formless image and ask them to impose a form on it; the result reveals information about their cultural and psychological worlds - Photography can be used to provide randomized and systematic observations of individual behavior - Techniques for inferential assessment of personality examine cultural materials and infer conclusions about psychology - Analyses of myth may look for psychological patterns

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- Analyses of beliefs about ghosts, gods, and other supernatural beings may reveal psychological dynamics - Inferential assessment is very prone to misreading, however, so it must always be used in tandem with other methods 2. Ethical Problems of Culture and Personality Studies - Culture and personality studies often impinge on the confidentiality of informants, producing negative results - Possible solutions include the use of pseudonyms and composites; these are not perfect, however, and psychological studies often involve a troubling degree of ethical transgression

Basic Issues in Culture and Personality Studies

1. Perception - how we see the world around us - In most cultures, including ours, people tend to assume that perception is essentially the same across cultures; actually, it varies considerably - An example of this is the Mller-Lyer Illusion, which tends to be seen much more strongly in societies with carpentered environments than in those without them - A more socially relevant example is the difference in perception of emotion, such as the Danish concept of hygge, which has no equivalent in American culture 2. Motivation - what people want and need

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- As with perception, intercultural differences in motivation are much stronger than we usually think they are - The treatment of illness provides a good example of cultural constructions of basic needs. The centrality of televisions in American hospitals, for example, relates to our needs for isolation and entertainment; the presence of tables, chairs, and baby carriages in Danish hospitals indicates a different set of needs - Likewise, cultures like the Fore of New Guinea and the rural Irish of Ballybran construe sexual needs differently from Americans - such differences can produce deep cultural misunderstandings 3. Cognition - how we make sense of the world - 19th century anthropologists like Lucien Levy-Bruhl explained nonWestern customs as manifestations of a "primitive mentality" - while contemporary anthropologists reject this notion, differences in cognition between cultures remain an important anthropological question 4. Implications for cross-cultural relations - differences in perception, motivation, and cognition imply great difficulties in establishing communication and understanding between cultures

Psychoanalytic Anthropology
1. Memory and the Unconscious

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- the problem of memory - how do we manage our turbulent pasts? - the importance of forgetting - psychoanalytic approaches build on the assumptions that most of mental activity occurs in the unconscious and that this activity exercises a profound importance on our conscious lives 2. Sigmund Freud - Freud's early work in psychiatry exposed the inadequacy of the mental health treatments of the time - together with Josef Breuer, developed the "Cathartic Method" for treating hysteria; he developed this further into psychoanalysis - Freud's work always maintained that conscious, visible behavior is shaped by the unconscious, and that this process affects all aspects of mental functioning - Freud's work originated in medical treatment of hysteria; perhaps as a result, his later work focuses heavily on repression, and deals much more with dysfunction than function 3. Developmental stages - oral, anal, and genital stages - each of these stages is socially as well as biologically constructed 4. Complexes - complexes - sets of feelings and defense mechanisms that tend to occur in common - the Oedipus and Electra complexes, in which a child wishes to kill the parent of the same sex and possess the parent of the opposite sex, are central to much Freudian theory - anthropologists have debated whether such complexes are universal, or culturally specific

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- Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, argued that matrilineal societies like the Trobriand Islands would have different patterns - centrality of conflict in complexes 5. Defense Mechanisms - mechanisms for handling unmanageable emotions - repression - projection - introjection - displacement - regression - sublimation

Psychoanalytic Anthropology: Examples

1. Applying psychoanalysis to culture - the basic method of psychoanalytic anthropology is to see cultural forms as projections of inner psychological conflicts - studying these requires an initial suspension of disbelief, since even reasonable psychoanalytic analyses tend to sound silly on first hearing 2. Example 1: Totem and Taboo - In his book Totem and Taboo, Freud sought to explain the origins of these two concepts, which anthropologists at the time regarded as basic parts of early human religion

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- Freud drew an analogy between these views and neurotic compulsions and obsessions - he proposed that the beliefs had originated in a primal crime, in which a band of brothers had killed their domineering father, paving the way for totemism, taboo, and the Oedipus complex 3. Example 2: The Myth of the Earth-Diver - the myth, widespread in Native America, depicts earth brought up from the ocean floor as the material out of which the creator makes the world - Alan Dundes argues that the symbols in the myth refer to psychoanalytically relevant things like feces and birth - the myth, argues Dundes, allows men to deal with womb envy by fantasizing a male creation of the world 4. Example 3: The Cat in the Hat Comes Back - the story shows the cat transgressing rules, and then repairing the damage with the help of miniature cats - Naomi Goldenberg argues that this story represents a boy's ability to overcome Oedipal guilt by embodying adult male roles

Psychoanalytic Anthropology: Evaluation

1. Discussion of examples - Totem & Taboo

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- reprise Freud's argument

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- weaknesses of the model include its historical inaccuracy, its misunderstanding of primate evolution, its lack of a mechanism for transmission, and a series of implausible logical leaps - strengths of the model include its recognition that religion involves emotions and conflicts, not simply theology - The Myth of the Earth-Diver - reprise Dundes's argument - weaknesses of the model include its assumption that Western psychological symbolism is universal, its neglect of female influence in mythmaking, and its lack of empirical verification - strengths of the model include its useful focus on the crosscultural significance of some mythical symbols - The Cat in Hat Comes Back - reprise Goldenberg's argument - weaknesses of the model include insistence on the univocality of symbols, as well as some questionable logic - strengths of the model include its ability to account for complex symbolism and it serious attention to children's literature 2. These examples point out some more general strengths & weaknesses of psychoanalytic explanations - weaknesses - assumption of the universality of Western symbols, complexes, and emotions - much of psychoanalysis is incapable of objective verification - focus on infantile trauma to the exclusion of later emotional development

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- assumption that all culture can be understood as projection - strengths - psychoanalysis, unlike most social science, takes the irrational mind seriously, and does not try to explain it away - psychoanalysis can get at some things hidden to other methods of analysis - psychoanalysis recognizes the conflict & tension implicit in human relationships - psychoanalysis takes childhood seriously, recognizing that children are not the simple unconflicted beings we often imagine them to be

Configurational Approaches to Culture and Personality

1. Theoretical Background: 19th Century Anthropology - In the 19th century, anthropologists faced the task of making sense out of an enormous amount of information flowing into Europe about distant, "primitive" cultures - Many anthropologists turned to evolutionary models to make sense of this data, regarding cultural differences as a result of cultures being stalled at different levels of development

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- Their theory often involved a unilineal view of evolution, suggesting that there was a single track along which technology, social structure, religion, and other features of culture developed - This approach was not only ethnocentric, but tended to misunderstand both evolution and the ways that human culture changes - Franz Boas argued powerfully against such approaches, calling instead for an examination of each culture's particular historical development and culture - and approach known as historical particularism. - While its empirical rigor made Boas's approach dominant in American anthropology in the early 20th century, it tended to reduce cultures to a collection of traits, without a theoretical means of integrating these traits into a complex whole 2. Culture as Personality - A solution to this problem came from Gestalt psychology, which viewed personality as a pattern or gestalt - Ruth Benedict suggested that cultures, likewise, have overarching patterns within which their particular traits make sense 3. Configurations of culture - Benedict argued that each culture had a configuration, a set of dominant principles which ran through all aspects of culture and social structure - These principles were integrated with one another to form a complex structure 4. Configurations and personality - Since the configurations influence all of culture, they also produce predictable personality types within each culture - in Denmark, for example, the strong division between inside and outside is visible not only in culture and mythology, but also in personalities and interaction patterns - likewise, the principle of individualism applies not only to American legal and social structures, but also to self-images and emotional relationships

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Dimensions of Cultural Diversity

1. Culture and the management of complexity - Benedict's analysis of cultural diversity builds on an analogy with language - languages must reduce the thousands of possible human vocalizations to a few dozen recognized sounds - this is done in two ways: - defining some sounds as unacceptable, such as the Russian kh and y, which English does not recognize - taking other sounds which are different and grouping them together as the same sound, such as the consonant p in "pit" and "spit" - Benedict argues that cultures do much the same thing through classification -e.g., social classifications function to limit potential marriage partners to a manageable number, both in small-scale societies and on college campuses - Such classifications are arbitrary -- there are many ways of setting them up, none inherently superior to any other 2. Classification and morality - Benedict argues that morality exists in large part to confer a sense of naturalness or correctness to the fundamentally arbitrary classification schemes of different cultures - classification of violence exemplifies this; while Americans draw moral distinctions between killing a family member, a stranger, and a national

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enemy, groups like the Eskimo and the Digger Indians, according to Benedict, make no such distinctions - thus morality, like classification itself, is arbitrary and culturally determined 3. Classification and psychology - the deep influence of configurations on the culture gives them a corresponding influence on psychology; different cultures tend to produce different standard personalities

Dionysian and Apollonian Patterns

1. Two cultural patterns - Benedict describes configurations by referring to their dominant principles, the key principles which inform and dominate the entire configuration - Two such principles are the Apollonian and the Dionysian - Apollonian, like the Greek god Apollo, celebrates moderation and the fulfilling of the cyclical order of life - Dionysian, like the Greek god Dionysis, celebrates the breaking of boundaries through extreme action or experience - Apollonian and Dionysian styles can be seen in American social movements

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- one can contrast the orderly, tradition-oriented, Apollonian style of Episcopalian church services with the ecstatic, improvisational, Dionysian style of many Pentecostal groups - a similar contrast can be drawn between the celebration of individuality and creativity by the Dionysian Hippie movement and the celebration of group orientation and order by the ROTC in the 1960s - These patterns tend to conceive the individual in different ways - the Apollonian as a secure cog in a social machine, the Dionysian as a liberated but insecure free spirit - They also tend to produce different personality disorders - Apollonian patterns producing disorders of excessive constraint, like hysteria; Dionysian resulting in issues of alienation and narcissistic personality disorders - These patterns are of course ideal types; no real society is totally conformist or totally individualistic 2. Apollonian and Dionysian Principles in Native America - Of the eight culture areas in native North America, Benedict says, seven had strong Dionysian features in ritual and culture - The Pueblos, however, were predominantly Apollonian in orientation - Benedict focuses on the culture of one Pueblo group, the Zuni - A contrast of ritual activities in the Plains groups and in the Pueblo groups points out the difference

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Dobu and Kwakiutl Patterns

1. Paranoid Configuration: Dobu - Benedict describes the configuration on Dobu Island as paranoid, dominated by an ethic in which individuals constantly fear betrayal and attack from outsiders - It is important to distinguish this from mental illness; while the Dobuans behave in a way that reminds Benedict of paranoid behavior in our own society, it is entirely in keeping with the social reality of their own culture - Social life on Dobu is built around the matrilineal kin group, called the susu, which lives together in a village. Security and trust are to be found only within the susu; outsiders are assumed to be malevolent and untrustworthy - This viewpoint operates in conjunction with a limited-good approach to life, which posits a zero-sum universe in which one can only gain by taking away from another - The institution of marriage exemplifies this pattern. Begun in distrust and anger, the marriage uses an alternating residence pattern which stresses the separation and distrust between the partners' kin groups 2. Megalomaniacal Configuration: Kwakiutl - Benedict characterizes culture among the Kwakiutl as megalomaniacal, exalting the ideal of personal glorification and defeat of rivals - Leaders achieve status through competitive exchange, giving away vast amounts of wealth in ceremonial feasts called potlatches 3. Configurations and social structure - Benedict argues that social structure does not determine culture; rather, the overall configuration shapes what social structures themselves can mean and do.

Basic and Modal Personality

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1. Lintons Critiques of the Configurational Approach - Ralph Linton, who succeeded Franz Boas as chair of the anthropology department at Columbia University, saw a number of problems with Benedict's configurational approach - Problems of causality - Benedict did not identify configurations took the forms they did - Problems of method - Benedict provided little objective support for the reliability of her depictions of each configurations - Problems of applicability - not all cultures are stable or isolated enough to be described as having a single coherent configuration 2. Linton, Kardiner, and Basic Personality Structure - Together with Columbia psychologist Abraham Kardiner, Linton focused on what they called the Basic Personality Structure (BPS) of different societies - In this view, societies responded to their environments by creating certain basic, primary institutions - those concerned with, for example, subsistence, social organization, and childrearing - These institutions generate a common Basic Personality Structure in members of the society - including shared anxieties, common defense mechanisms, and characteristic neuroses - The BPS is expressed in the society's secondary institutions, sometimes called projective institutions - such phenomena as myth, religion, folklore, and theories of disease - Kardiner and Cora DuBois used this basic approach to understand personality on the island of Alor - The primary institutions of female gardening and inconsistent caregiving for small children, for example, produces a BPS in which there is a strong desire for a secure love-object, but a deep distrust and cynicism about nurturing figures; this is projected in the religion, which pictures the gods as distant, untrustworthy, and malevolent

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- The household organization and childrearing practices create strong sexual desires in children, while marriage structures repress all pre-adult sexuality; this produces a BPS characterized by frustration, strong erotic desire, and a tendency to use sex as a substitute for unavailable desires. This BPS is expressed in the culture's myth. 3. Evaluating the BPS Approach - The BPS approach does provide the causality, widespread applicability, and empirical methodology Linton found lacking in Benedict - Nonetheless, it does have weaknesses as well - There is a uniformity assumption, for example, a tendency to overlook the variation in personality within a culture - DuBois recognized this problem and suggested talking about a Modal Personality Structure rather than a BPS - Anthony Wallace used this approach in a sophisticated way in his study of personality among the Tuscarora - BPS and MPS both tend to understate the importance of myth, folklore, religion, etc.; these do not merely project ideas created by the primary institutions, but can themselves shape primary institutions

National Character Studies

1. The Concept of National Character

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- As both humor and personal experience suggest, personality tends to differ between countries and subcultures. In the middle of the century, this concept became known as the concept of national character 2. Origins of National Character Studies - National character studies grew out of an effort by anthropologists to make their discipline relevant to the World War II war effort, helping the United States to understand its enemies, its allies, and its citizens better - Doing so presented empirical problems, since fieldwork was impossible during wartime - Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and others developed techniques for evaluating other kinds of data -- immigrant and refugee testimonies, art and expressive culture, and travelers' accounts -- to build up a picture of "culture at a distance" 3. Examples of National Character Studies - Geoffrey Gorer proposed the "swaddling hypothesis" to explain the alternation in Russian psychology and politics between long periods of emotional repression and short bursts of emotion, energy, and drinking - He suggested that these patterns had their origins in the long swaddling period imposed on Russian infants - Clyde Kluckhohn and others studied changes in behavior among Japanese prisoners of war, in which soldiers who had fought courageously for Japan would turn into willing collaborators in prisoner of war camps - They attributed this to the close tie in Japan to the social group, which made a "social death" possible when one was completely cut off from ones family, friends, and culture - A number of studies looked at personality in Germany; Erich Fromm, for example, suggested that the German attraction to Hitler stemmed from an "authoritarian personality" which feared the unpredictability of democracy - A number of authors have also studied American character, including Geoffrey Gorer, David Reisman, and Francis L.K. Hsu

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Cross-Cultural Correlation Studies

1. Reasons for Cross-Cultural Correlation approach - John Whiting and others in the 1950s suggested that culture and personality studies suffered problems of objectivity and verifiability - Many of their models seemed to depend largely on the subjective evaluations of particular observers, leading to a variety of different characterizations of the same culture - Moreover, culture and personality models were impossible to prove or disprove in the way demanded of most scientific models - The ideal solution would be to use experimentation; experimenting with human culture, however, is logistically difficult, ethically objectionable, and untrue to the serendipitous nature of human experience - Whiting suggested that you could approximate the experimental method by comparing cultures cross-culturally - By looking for correlations between key variables in culture and personality theories, researchers could determine whether they were genuinely related or not 2. Cross-Cultural Correlations: Examples - The best way to get a sense of this procedure is through examples - Example: suppose you thought that Madonna concerts caused monogamy in human culture, through some contorted cultural mechanism - You could look at 100 cultures, and for each ask two questions: - have they had a Madonna concert?

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- are people there monogamous? - For each culture, this allows four possibilities Madonna yes, monog. yes Madonna no, monog. yes Madonna yes, monog. no Madonna no, monog. no

- The distribution of cultures into these four categories would give an indication of whether there was a real relationship between the variables - for example, if you were absolutely right, you might get the following distribution: 25 0 0 75

- If you were absolutely wrong, you might get a distribution like this 23 26 27 24

- Statistical methods are used to quantify these relationships - Example: Whiting and Child argued that harsh oral socialization would lead cultures to explain illnesses orally, as the result of things people had eaten - They looked at 39 societies, and asked for each whether oral anxiety from weaning was high or low, and whether oral explanations of illness were present or absent - This gave the following possibilities for each society Anxiety high, oral present Anxiety low, oral present Anxiety high, oral absent Anxiety low, oral absent

- The societies fell into these categories as follows: 17 6 3 13

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- This result is statistically very unlikely to have occurred randomly; accordingly, Whiting and Child argued that they had proven that oral explanations of illness are related to harsh oral socialization 3. Methodological considerations - Obtaining data for a large number of societies is very difficult and time consuming. The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) were developed to make this easier - A major concern in these studies involves classifying and coding data; clear and justifiable procedures must be developed for determining how each society will be characterized. - Often, this is very difficult, as societies don't fit neatly into the categories used fort the analysis - Tests for statistical significance determine how likely your results are to have come from mere random variation. The higher the level of significance, the more confident you can be that the relationship is a real one, and not simply a reflection of chance - It's important to remember that correlations only establish an association between two variables, not causality - If A always occurs with B, a may cause B; but B may also cause A, or there may be a third factor causing both - It's also important to remember that statistical methods like correlation and significance tests presuppose random samples, and the material in the HRAF is not randomly collected - Hence, the correlations found with these methods should be treated with caution

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Cross-Cultural Correlation Studies: Examples

1. Child training and the control of the supernatural - Melford Spiro and Roy D'Andradre published a study in 1958 suggesting a connection between child training and the control of the supernatural - Societies in which children are indulged, they said, would tend to produce adults who felt that the gods could be manipulated just like their parents had been, through repetitive asking - Societies which did not indulge their children, by contrast, would imagine the gods as distant and not subject to human influence - They found 11 cultures in the HRAF which had sufficient information to test this hypothesis, and found statistically significant correlations between the level of oral and anal initial satisfaction and the degree and type of benevolence expected from the gods - This, they argued, strongly supported their hypothesis 2. The Benevolence of Supernatural Beings - In 1959, William Lambert, Leigh Triandis, and Margery Wolf published another study of the relationship between child training and the supernatural - They focused on the way that supernatural beings could be imagined as benevolent or aggressive in different places - This, they speculated, might be related to the benevolence or aggressiveness of parents - They found 61 cultures in HRAF that had useful data on child training and the supernatural; for each, they looked at a variety of variables - Some were infancy variables, examining the amount of pain ad nurturance infants receive. They classified each culture on a scale of 1 to 7 for each of 9 variables: protection from environmental discomforts; absence of pain inflicted by nurturing agent; overall indulgence; diffusion of nurturance; display of affection; consistency of drive reduction;

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immediacy of drive reduction; degree of drive reduction; and constancy of presence of nurturing agent - Others were childhood variables, examining the degree of positive training (that is, rewarding good behavior) and negative training (punishing bad behavior) for 6 kinds of behavior: nurturance, responsibility, self-reliance, achievement; obedience; and independence - They also classified their gods as either mainly benevolent or mainly aggressive - To avoid observer bias, two researchers coded each society independently - Each of the infancy and childhood scores were correlated with the deity classification - Of the infancy variables, the strongest correlation was between the absence of pain and the benevolence of deities - Of the childhood variables, high positive training correlated with benevolent deities on most variables - The exceptions were self-reliance and independence; societies with aggressive deities tended to have strong positive and negative training for these traits - The authors concluded that a complex relationship does appear to exist between child training and religion

The Problem of Deviance

1. The Ordinariness of Deviance

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- While we often think of deviance as an aberration, there are several senses in which it is one of the most ordinary of social phenomena - It is universal - there are no cultures in which deviance does not occur - It is logically necessary - in any system which has norms, there must be at least the possibility of deviating from the norm - It occurs in culturally specific ways - deviant behavior within a culture tends to take forms that are characteristic of that culture 2. Defining what is deviant - Deviance is always defined in relation to a given society's expectations of normality; hence, each culture defines deviance differently - Often find deviance being of particular concern in areas where identity is poorly defined in a culture, as people with weak identities seek to highlight the boundaries of normality by focusing on deviance - In American culture, for example, teenagers' eagerness to identify and denounce trivial nonconformities of clothing and behavior reflects a general anxiety about identity - Likewise, the fear of appearing effeminate among American men may reflect the growing insecurity of masculine identity in the United States 3. Controlling deviance - Cultures must deal with deviance, either by repressing it or reclassifying it - Repression of deviance may take the form of formal sanctions, like laws, or informal sanctions, which range from mild teasing to such aggressive community sanctions as the vito of Andalusia - Classification of deviance creates special categories for deviant people, in which they do not threaten the "normal" order. Some have argued, for example, that many cultures classify people with schizophrenia as shamans 4. Origins of deviance

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- While Benedict suggests that people have inborn tendencies that lead to deviant behavior, she does not say where these come from - Some psychological research, such as Jerome Kagan's studies of shy people, suggest that tendencies toward some forms of deviance may be biologically derived

Neo-Freudian Approaches
1. A Return to Freud - Early on in the course, we discussed some of the problems with Freudian approaches to culture and personality, including its assumption of a universal mental structure and its tendency to ignore the social dimensions of culture - In the 1950s, though, some anthropologists began calling for a return to Freud, who had, for all his problems, viewed culture with a depth and complexity missing from many later theories - Neo-Freudian theorists attempt to use Freud's basic insights into the relationship between culture and personality while avoiding some of his excesses and oversimplifications 2. The Blood-Libel Legend - One way in which Neo-Freudians improve on the older version is by taking cultural specifics into account, rather than assuming a universal mental structure and universally relevant symbols

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- Alan Dundes, for example, analyzes the Blood-Libel Legend, a false story circulated since the 12th century that accuses Jews of having killed Christian children and used their blood to make Passover matzohs - Since it has been clearly established that Jews did not do this, why was the legend told? Dundes says that it must have been psychologically satisfying for those telling it - Why? Perhaps, Dundes says, because they all had one thing in common: the practice of consuming Christ's body and blood in the ritual of communion - The guilt created by this act of symbolic cannibalism was projected onto Jews through a defense mechanism called projective inversion; by punishing the Jews, Christians symbolically punished themselves and relieved their guilt - While one may disagree with Dundes's analysis, it shows an interest in the psychological effects of particular local customs and rituals, not simply universal conflicts like the Oedipus complex, that the old Freudian approach did not 3. Fairy tales - Another improvement in Neo-Freudianism is its attention to function; rather than looking at culture as simply a projection of inner states, it considers to social roles of projective institutions - Fairy tales, for example, contain extensive imagery of violence, sexuality, bizarre transformations, and infanticide - Bruno Bettelheim argues that this imagery helps children navigate the often confusing, violent, and frightening worlds in which they live - While adults may imagine childhood as sweet, innocent, and playful, children themselves often experience a great deal of terror, sexual confusion, violence, and frightening lack of control - Fairy tales give them a roadmap for overcoming such issues - In the tale of Hansel and Gretel, for example, the basic problem is one of orality - a lack of food - Attempting to solve this problem through oral regression - eating the witch's house and food - only deepens the plight

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- When the children use their intelligence and strength, however, they overcome the witch and are reunited with their father - The message of the tale, therefore, is that childhood's problems can be overcome in positive, but not in regressive, ways - Children do not, of course, understand the tale this way, but it speaks to them on an unconscious level

Personality and Social Structure

1. Importance of social structure in understanding personality - As Bock points out in his "Interlude," many theories in culture and personality suffer from the "uniformity assumption", a view of society as a single monolithic entity which can be described by a single image, such as the basic personality - This view neglects the great amount of diversity of personality present in every culture - Some authors therefore focus on how social divisions create characteristic constellations of personality types within cultures; Bock refers to these as the "social structure and personality school," since they look at the ways that the social structure divides and differentiates personality 2. Materialist approaches - Materialist approaches consider how differential access to material goods affects human life, and how this in turn shapes personality - One of the most influential materialists was Karl Marx, who argued that class and material resources deeply affect human experience

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- A key concern in any culture, for example, is control of the means of production - the resources that are necessary for the production of goods - In capitalist societies, it is private property owners who control the means of production, enabling them to determine what should be produced and how it should be produced; workers have relatively little say in such decisions - Marx argues that this division affects basic psychology, since it divorces the worker from his or her own labor, rendering the work that occupies the bulk of one's life essentially meaningless - This situation produces alienation, a sense of disconnection from one's own self and a sense of existence as meaningless - Thus, material resources and control of them shape psychological experience 3. Positionalist approaches - Positionalists look not only at material resources, but at other aspects of social position as well - How do things like gender, birth order, status, religion, and other aspects of social position affect psychological experience? - Since such positions vary among cultures, each culture will have its own set of psychological types - Some social positions occur in a number of societies, and may therefore produce predictable cross-cultural personality dynamics - George Foster, for example, has argued that peasant societies tend to have a worldview characterized by a sense of the limited good - A limited-good worldview suggests that only a set amount of desirable things exist in the world, and in order for one person to get more, another person must get less - This worldview, says Foster, is built on the relationship to land implicit in peasant agriculture 4. Social Interactionist Approaches

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- Social interactionism looks at the ways that personality is shaped by the different social experiences individuals face during everyday life - Erving Goffman suggests that people are constantly shifting their presentations of self to suit different social circumstances 5. Evaluation - Most of these approaches tend to overemphasize one aspect of social structure, to the exclusion of others - Used together, however, they can produce a much more diverse and nuanced view of personality than the uniform models popular earlier in anthropology and sociology

Behaviorist Approaches to Culture and Personality

1. Focusing on Behavior - The approaches to culture and personality discussed so far in the class have usually focused on human thought and emotions, using such techniques as crosscultural correlations and participant observation to "get inside the heads" of the people we study - Some theorists argue that this is impossible; instead, they say, we should focus on behavior, what people do - This approach, modeled on studies of other animals, is often called behaviorism

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2. One way to use behaviorism is as an empirical approach, a way of gathering data - Observing behavior is difficult, because people are behaving all the time - it is impractical to observe someone 24 hours a day, and it would create too much data to use - Instead, behaviorists use sampling, taking small amounts of behavior chosen at random in order to produce a representative picture of overall behavior - One way to do this is through spot observations, noting what individuals are doing at randomly chosen instants - Alternatively, one may use short-duration samples, observing people for short periods of time in order to see their behavior in motion - In either case, it is essential to use randomization in order to produce a representative sample of behavior - The most ambitious use of such an approach was the Six Cultures Project, led by John & Beatrice Whiting - This project studied children in six widely different cultures, using a standardized protocol - Its results suggested that there may be innate differences between boys and girls in terms of their behavior as small children; it suggested that differences between male and female rates of nurturant behavior, however, were the products of culture - While a very impressive and well-documented study, the Six Cultures Project was also a very expensive and time-consuming one, and its results were not dramatic enough to prompt many other researchers to do similar projects 3. Behaviorism can also be used as a theoretical approach - Behaviorists often place human culture in an evolutionary context, suggesting that the real effect of culture is to make people behave in ways that affect their evolutionary success or failure - Ethology looks at whole patterns of behavior in an evolutionary context

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- Ethologists might describe the singing of birds, for example, as an evolutionary strategy whereby male birds mark off and guard territory, thus allowing them to attract mates and propagate their genes in future generations - Human behavior can be examined in the same terms - It is important to note that evolutionary success is determined solely by the ability to reproduce one's genes over the long term; while assets like strength and intelligence may assist that process, they are not valuable evolutionarily in themselves - The Incredible Hulk, for example, while very big and strong, could never reproduce, and hence was an evolutionary dead end - Sociobiology argues that not only individual behaviors, but also whole cultural patterns, can be understood in evolutionary terms - Culture, according to biologists like E.O. Wilson, is a system which helps people to propagate their genes more successfully - In most cultures, for example, sexual promiscuity is relatively acceptable for men, but very unacceptable for women - This, a sociobiologist might say, stems from the fact that having multiple sexual partners does not increase the number of children a woman can have, and exposes her to risks of disease and wasted energy; a man, by contrast, can increase the number of his offspring by increasing the number of his sexual partners - Thus, culture encourages people to behave in ways that promote their genetic interests - Most cultural anthropologists see real problems with the theories used in sociobiology; at the same time, however, most acknowledge the importance of keeping an evolutionary perspective in mind when studying human behavior

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Cognitive Approaches to Culture and Personality

1. Notion of cognition - Much of our emphasis this semester has been on differences in emotional experience among cultures - Cognition, however - the making sense of information - is also an important part of the psychological world, and cognitive anthropology and cognitive sociology have studied it extensively 2. An example of such an analysis is the study of the classification of color terms by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay - All languages have only a few basic color terms; some have as few as two, others up to eleven - These vary in a distinct pattern, demonstrated by Berlin and Kay; a language with three colors will always recognize black, white, and red, for example, while one with four colors will always recognize black, white, red, and either yellow or green - This pattern of variation appears to reflect the basic visual structures by which colors are processed in the brain - The differences in the numbers of colors recognized appear to correspond to differences in the overall complexity of cultures - Thus the cognition of light is shaped by a combination of biological and cultural factors 3. Culture as a cognitive system - Claude Levi-Strauss argues that cultures can best be understood as structures, systems of classification which people use to make sense of the world

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- Culture, he says, breaks down the world into a series of binary oppositions through which we see the world around us - Myth and folklore serve in large part to dramatize some of the key binary oppositions that underlie our culture - This theoretical approach, known as structuralism, tries to understand human culture as a mechanism for turning the chaos of reality into an orderly and understandable system 4. Cognitive maps - Edward Tolman first used the notion of cognitive map to describe the image that must exist in a rat's consciousness as it navigates a maze; similarly, cognitive anthropologists have used the term to describe the blueprints for action and experience that are essential to human life - Your culture provides you with maps through which to understand what you have to do in life and how to go about doing it; when going to a job interview, for example, there are a series of things you are taught to expect to happen - Rituals often function as cognitive maps, guiding people through difficult moments of transition - A funeral, for example, guides people through the processes of grieving and expression necessary after a death - The countless different maps provided by your culture are integrated together, according to Anthony Wallace, into a master map he calls the mazeway - Rapid social change can shake the basis of this mazeway, leading to a breakdown of individual identity 5. Culture and cognitive ability - Some sociologists and cognitive psychologists have examined differences in cognitive ability between individuals and groups, arguing that cognition is a skill in which individuals differ - Differing levels of cognitive ability, they say, correspond to what is generally understood as differences in intelligence

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- While intelligence can take a number of forms, some theorists argue that there is an overall factor of general intelligence, referred to as "g", and that some groups have higher average "g" than others - Such arguments are very controversial in the social sciences. The controversy illustrates the depth of the questions raised by studies of cognitive ability

The Problem of Charisma

1. The Problem of Charisma - Seeing Triumph of the Will raises an immediate question: why are the people in the film so ecstatically attracted to Hitler? The same question arises for other charismatic leaders -- what gives them such tremendous appeal? - Charisma has been the moving force behind both many of humanity's greatest achievements and many of its greatest horrors - it clearly has the ability to move people in unusually profound ways - Most of the religious and social movements that are the bedrock of our social order today have their roots in charismatic movements; indeed, some argue that any lasting movement must have a charismatic dimension - Where this force comes from, and why it occurs when and where it does, are interesting and very important questions for social science 2. What is Charisma? - Many of us think of charisma as a characteristic of an individual, associating it with expressive ability, heightened emotional affect, and self-confidence; this is misleading, however, for charisma requires not just a leader, but also a follower

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- Charisma is actually a relationship, an intense and committed tie between a leader and a group of followers - To understand it, we must ask not only why some people are able to lead, but also why some others want to follow 3. Three Theories of Charisma - Friedrich Nietzsche saw the leader as a superman, a self-directed individual whose pursuit of his voracious desires makes him disregard normal social rules and restrictions - His followers are normal people, who do not dare to break society's laws, but who would secretly like to; they follow him to get the vicarious thrill of association with his daring and self-indulgence - Max Weber saw the leader as very similar to the shaman, a person whose authority and ideas derive from his own vision, not from the existing social order - The leader offers a possibility of escape from the increasingly oppressive rationality of modern society - Emile Durkheim saw the leader as symbol of the group, a focus for the feelings of collective identity that are most clearly visible in large rituals - Since societies can't experience large rituals on an ongoing basis, they use images of the group as a symbol of the collective consciousness - These images are often inanimate objects, but may also be a person - the leader

Theories of Charisma

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1. Charisma and the Explanation of Emotion

Lecture Outline

- While Nietzsche, Weber, and Durkheim all propose theories of charisma that explain important things, none of their theories provides a real explanation of the emotional dynamics involved - Nietzsche and Weber do not explain why the leader is so different from the followers - where does his special vision or daring come from? - Durkheim does not explain why some people rather than others become leaders, or why charismatic movements occur in some situations and not others - A full explanation of the phenomenon must involve a complex analysis of the emotional dynamics of both leaders and followers - the sort of complexity we often associate with Freud 2. Freud: Charisma as Transference - Freud saw charisma as a form of transference, a process whereby feelings for one person are transferred to a safer object, like a therapist - Freud suggested that charisma involves a transference of the feelings of love and dependency associated with the father to the leader - By submitting to and gaining the acceptance of the leader/father, the follower obtains forgiveness for his guilt over his Oedipal desires - The rage and anger associated with the father are also brought to light in this process; these are transferred to a separate party, the scapegoat - This explains, Freud says, both the sudden and often inexplicable attachment of followers to the leader, as well as the tendency for charisma to be associated with xenophobia and scapegoating 3. Charisma and Romantic Love - Lindholm sees some problems with understanding charisma as transference; it only really explains male behavior, for example, and it still doesn't explain much about the leader

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- He argues that Freud's model of romantic love actually provides a better explanation, for there are many similarities between romance and charisma - Freud sees love as a return to primary narcissism, the early stage of life when the infant believes that the entire world is an extension of himself or herself - By fusing ones identity with another in romantic love, one overcomes ones own isolation and loneliness - Charisma involves a similar dynamic, Lindholm says, a merger of identity between leader and follower 4. Synthetic theories of charisma integrate both a psychological and sociological explanation of the phenomenon - Lindholm argues that charisma is a response to identity dislocation; when people's identities become insecure or unsatisfying, they long for the kind of security and bliss experienced in the primary narcissism stage - They can achieve that through romantic love or through charisma - The leader, likewise, tends to be a person with deep problems of selfidentity, who gains an identity by the merger with his or her followers - Charisma is therefore most likely to arise in circumstances where identities are fragmented and insecure - examples include societies in crisis or transition; people in poorlydefined stages of life (college freshmen, adolescents, people in midlife crises, elderly people in some circumstances); and people in highly individualistic societies

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Charisma in Action: Adolf Hitler

1. The Question of Hitler - Adolf Hitler was unarguably one of the most evil, destructive figures in human history. He was also a democratically elected leader, who had the enthusiastic support of large segments of the German population - Why did the nation which had produced Beethoven and Goethe attach itself so fiercely to a man who, in retrospect, seems to have always been a pathologically vicious and self-aggrandizing person? - Hitler was originally Austrian, and became active in the German Workers Party (later renamed the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or Nazi Party for short) after service in World War I - He was imprisoned for his part in the Beer Hall Putsch, and emerged as the party's main spokesman after his release - With his political army, the SA, he led a violent campaign against the Communists, and gained a large number of votes in the 1932 elections - Brought on board by the Conservative government, which hoped to use and moderate him, he exploited state power to make himself dictator by 1934 - An understanding of this phenomenon, Lindholm says, requires an understanding both of why Hitler did what he did, and why so many people supported him 2. Hitler Himself - Hitler's life and personality were highly mythologized even during his lifetime, and much of his biography is very controversial among scholars - It's clear, however, that he was something of a failure prior to World War I, and that he felt alienated and disconnected from his society

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- The war gave him an intense experience of comradeship and purpose, which he loved; Germany's loss seemed inconceivable to him, and he blamed it on treachery - He loved battle, and battle was a constant theme in his political rhetoric - While it's hard to analyze his personality from our vantage point, Lindholm argues that his intense emotional attentiveness and his fluidity of affect suggest a narcissistic personality disorder - Specifically, Lindholm argues that Hitler had a borderline personality, in which the individual lacks a feeling of having a core self 3. Germany Between the Wars - The effects of the loss in World War I, the Great Depression, and civil disorder combined to severely disrupt German society in the 1930s - For ordinary Germans, identity became very insecure, as the world through which one understood oneself became senseless and unpredictable 4. Hitler and Identity in Germany - The Hitler movement provided a new identity, defining the world through identification with the fuhrer and the metaphor of battle - Hitler's persona was at the center of the Nazi movement, and he arranged both the rhetoric and the organizational structure of the state to keep himself there - Using techniques gleaned from the crowd psychologists, Hitler also carefully choreographed his rallies to produce a rush of identification and collective effervescence - The movement thus provided a solution to the alienation that Germans felt from themselves - The movement was inherently self-limiting, however, as its need for constant battle, organizational chaos, and scapegoating led both to military disasters and a horrific culture of mass murder

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Charisma in Action: Charles Manson and Jim Jones

1. Why do charismatic movements so often go bad? - Charismatic movements need not have the terrible ends of those described by Lindholm; many charismatic movements have produced important and lasting institutions - Still, traumatic ends or simple dissolution of charismatic movements are not uncommon - This may reflect the personality dynamics underscored by Lindholm's analysis - Charismatic leaders often start out with a disturbed self, a borderline personality - The experience of leadership further distorts that personality, placing it in an odd and intense social climate - Group leadership, then, is a dynamic process, and the changes in the movements may reflect at least partly the changing mental world of the leader 2. Example: Charles Manson - Manson started out as a disturbed, low-level crook, who drifted into San Francisco in the 1970s like many others

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- To his followers, he represented something dangerous, raw, and exciting, but there were many others in the city at the time with very similar backgrounds - To understand how he developed into the murderous psychopath who led the Family on its final rampage, one must understand how the social group that his followers created with him affected him - It took a person whose notions of self and boundaries were already weak, and removed the social barriers that root most of us to reality - His fantasies of leading a band, for example, were made real by the community; likewise, fantasies of sexuality, paranoia, and violence were acted out and made part of concrete reality - The Family's increasing isolation, paranoia, and descent into violence reflected the progress of Manson's own personality breakdown in the face of a seriously altered social world 3. Example: Jim Jones - Likewise, Jim Jones began rather unremarkably, as a small-time Pentecostal preacher in Indianapolis - He later moved to Oakland, where his Peoples Temple became a large and influential institution; eventually, he moved to Guyana, where his Jonestown became a paranoid dystopia that ended in a mass suicide - As with Manson, a personality in which the contours of self and identity were poorly drawn was placed in a social environment that erased the boundaries between fantasy and reality - His sexual fantasies, for example, shaped the life of the entire group; likewise, the enormous amount of money generated by the movement allowed him to live out fantasies of power and paranoia - The result was a sort of feedback between leader and group, in which Jones's disintegrating personality guided his followers into ever more paranoid and destructive behavior, which in turn altered his personality further, with catastrophic results

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Lecture Outline