Nature of human nature ch. 8
Variations in perception cross-culturally
Variations in cognition cross-culturally
Anthropological views on the Oedipal Complex
The culture and personality approach
Socialization studies
Enculturation
Acquiring a particular culture
(starts with fetus, e.g. in North America: folic acid, no alcohol & smoking)
Psychological anthropology
Relationship between the individual and the group to which s/he belongs
Perception
Biological process of apprehending environmental stimuli and the conceptual process of
interpreting those stimuli according to a set of learned expectations.
(e.g. depth, colour, distance)
Cognition
The way in which people acquire, learn, store, interpret and retrieve knowledge./
The way in which people think, feel and sense and make their lives ordered and
meaningful.
Our experience of the world (in terms of perception and cognition) is shaped by culture.
The biological acts of seeing, hearing and tasting are influenced by culture because we
perceive selectively, e.g. apple vs. quince
The key recent issue in cognition
- cultural variation
+ individual participation/consensus
Social life is
Intention + Performance
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} anthropology
Model
Action
(the impacting of meaningful, goal-oriented actions upon the world so as to maintain or
change a status quo).
Extent to which individual members of a social group partake in a social consensus
concerning the structure and content of the way they know the world.
"How natives think"?
Levy-Bruhl
"Primitive" people  pre-logical
mentality: emotional, magical, mystical connectedness, incoherent
Malinowski
All people are equally rational, recognize the same logical principles
Lévi-Strauss
"Savage thought" "a science of the concrete"
(solutions arrived at through analogy and via concrete objects - bricoleur)
Moderns intellectual models, abstract, less imaginative
(engineer)
Rationality within the conditions and confines of the belief systems (reasoning not
beyond or against the system)
e.g. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft among Azande
Underlying universal principles:
individual or person, self, the other, causality, classification, narration and time
Major differences Logic of difference is common & human
Cognitive schemata/scripts  performance/teaching  transformation
(e.g. experience, thought, knowing
adults  different children)
Culture and personality
Ruth Benedict , Margaret Mead
Goal: to demonstrate that culture is more important than biology (Boas).
Personality types
 Apollonian (middle way, cooperation, communal, avoidance of strong emotions)
 Dionysian (violent experiences, extreme)
Normality is relative to culture.
("Deviance" is defined by the society in which it occurs)
National Character Studies
Cultures as consistent psychological types
Motivation: understanding the enemy! (context Second World War)
Socialization
Margaret Mead ≠ Luther Cressman
Margaret Mead ≠ Reo Fortune
Margaret Mead ≠ Gregory Bateson
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Mary Catherine Bateson
Samoa-New Guinea
Childrearing practices and adult personality.
Transition through adolescence is culture-specific (Samoan teenager girls: no conflict,
stress, several sexual partners)
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(The culture and personality school overemphasized the degree of conformity in
cultures)