Culture and Personality
I.
Anthropology: Benedict, Mead, etc.
a. Holism and Personality
i. Boasian historical particularists lacked holistic emphasis (despite
rhetoric), seeing culture as chance association of disparate features
ii. C and P school borrows from Gestalt psychology the notion of
personality as an interrelated psychological pattern rather than a
collection of separate elements
b. Key problem: how humans acquired culture and culture’s relationship to
individual personality
i. Relationship between culture and human nature (Mead)
ii. Relationship between culture and individual personality (Benedict)
iii. Relationship between culture and a society’s typical personality
type (Kardiner, Du Bois)
c. Criticisms: Benedict and Mead assume culture as a given, and that it
determines personality, but don’t specify process; where does culture
originate?
d. Benedict (1887-1948)
i. Key Themes:
1. No higher or lower cultures, just different lifestyles
2. Normal and abnormal culturally determined
3. Each culture has a unique “cultural configuration” that
determines fundamental personality characteristics
4. These characteristics are molded through enculturation
5. likes to push borders by stressing shocking elements of
other cultures and showing them as “normal” (sex, drugs,
etc.)
ii. Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest
1. Cultures “choose” different cultural types that differ
markedly
a. “For the typical choices of the Apollonian have
been creative in the formation of this culture, they
have excluded what was displeasing, revamped
what they took, and brought into being endless
demonstrations of the Apollonian delight in
formality, in the intricacies and elaborations of
organization.”
b. “God gave to every people… a cup of clay, and
from this cup they drank their life… They all
dipped in the water but their cups were different.”
2. Neitzsche sees two basic ways at arriving at “values of
existence”
a. Dionysian: through “the annihilation of the ordinary
bounds and limits of existence” through escape
from sensory boundaries into transcendent
experience; the frenzied illuminations of excess
b. Apollonian: maintaining control over disruptive
psychological states
3. Pueblo Indians as Apollonian
a. Religion of fertility without orgy
b. Dance without ecstacy
c. No destruction of property at death
d. No excessive use of intoxicants (liquor or drugs)
e. Stripped sex of mystic danger
f. No disruptive role for individual in social order – no
impromptu individual acts in tight-knit religious
program
g. Apollonian recasting of Dionysian techniques
i. Drugs given Apollonian makeover
ii. Vision complex: Same formal elements but
stripped of “will to achieve ecstacy,” but just
as omens of luck
iii. Fasting not to dredge up experience but to
experience ceremonial cleanness
iv. Dance used merely to reassert normal roles
v. Filth-eating; done, but dreaded
vi. Clowning; not as comic relief from sacred
ceremony, accentuating the tension; but pure
buffoonery or social satire
h. No disruptive, individualist shamans; just priests
who become members by heredity, payment, and
memorization
i. No understanding of suicide
4. Other Indians as Dionysian
a. Key role of ecstatic experience in religion
i. Drugs
ii. Fasting
iii. Torture
iv. dance
e. Mead (1901-1978)
i. Background:
1. Married three times, with long affair with Benedict
2. Freudian influence – how child-rearing techniques effect
personality development
3. Culture as primary factor determining masculine and
feminine characteristics and behavior
ii. Introduction to Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(1935)
1. Culture as collective choice; group agency
a. “man has taken a few hints and woven them into the
beautiful imaginative social fabrics that we call
civilizations.”
b. “Each people makes this fabric differently, selects
some clues and ignores others, emphasizes a
different sector of the whole arc of human
potentialities.”
c. Culture then more and more firmly embodies these
choices in structure, political and religious systems,
art and literature, and socialization of new
generations to more and more fit dominant trends
d. Cultures differ in which parts of nature, or
personality traits, to seize on (i.e. shaman as sacred;
same personality we might imprison)
2. Attacks essentialist position on sex and gender; arguing that
cultures relate sex and temperament in wholly different
ways
a. Both male and female roles culturally constructed
b. Vs. simple reversion of dominant paradigm in
fantasies of matriarchy of cold, strong, dominant
women and naturally weak and submissive men
c. Some societies see differences in dress or
occupation, while others see innate temperaments
d. Constructions of roles may cause hardships for
individuals who don’t fit in (this struggle to achieve
masculine role causes some to drop out and become
berdaches, for example)
e. Arapesh (only men paint in color) and
Mundugumor (fishing an essentially feminine task)
give men and women different religious and
economic roles, but not different temperaments
3. Problem with methodology: quick, easy judgements of
whole cultures based on limited fieldwork
a. “the gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh”
b. “the fierce cannibalistic Mundugumor”
c. “the graceful head-hunters of Tchambuli”
4. “others” used to make surprising critique of home society
by invoking cultural relativism
a. “In this matter, primitive people seem to be, on the
surface, more sophisticated than we are.”
f. Kardiner and Du Bois
i. K: “basic personality structure” as collection of fundamental
personality traits shared by normal members of a society
ii. Formed by “primary institutions” (child-rearing practices of
weaning, toilet training, disciplining early in childhood)
iii. Personality then influences culture through creation of “secondary
institutions” (religion, etc.) created to satisfy the needs of the
personality through projection
iv. Fails to account for differences in personality
II.
v. Du Bois: Accounts for diversity through notion of “modal
personality”
g. National Character Studies
i. Research methods: interviews with immigrants, literature and film
analysis, government records
ii. Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) relates toilet
training practices to alleged Japanese preoccupation with
obedience and order
iii. Gorer and Rickman’s The People of Great Russia (1949) connects
swaddling to supposed manic-depressive Russian national
character
iv. Most of these were simply inaccurate
v. Continue on outside anthropology as guides for businesspeople
Sociology: David Reisman (1909- )
a. Question: What Type of person is being formed in emerging consumer
capitalist economies of developed nations?
b. Three periods of history; each with prevailing character type
i. Tradition-oriented
1. high birth and death rates
2. agrarian economies
3. cohesive communities with shared values
4. slow social change
5. personality guided by strong collective mores and folkways
of the community
ii. Inner-directed
1. emerging industrial capitalism
2. population growth
3. emphasis on increasing production
4. personality guided by internalized norms and values
learned from parents
5. “intensity” or “driveness” to character; individualistic
(moralistic or greedy) man who adheres to values even
when separated from community and family
6. archetype: “self-made man” of 19th century capitalism
7. associated with white protestant small town America and
small business owners (like Weber’s Protestant Ethic);
“old” middle class (banker, tradesman, small entrepreneur,
engineer)
iii. Other-directed
1. advanced capitalist societies that emphasize service and
consumption over industrial production (especially
American middle class in suburbs and cities)
2. stable populations from changing womens’ roles and
effective birth-control
3. personality guided by peers and media, without
internalized values and goals but internalized mechanisms
that allow them to sense and adapt to changing
expectations of others
4. “new” middle class (bureaucrat, salaried business, etc.)
iv. Formed in Peer Group
1. Other-directed begins with “permissive” child care
2. peer-group most important; parents make him guilty not
about violating inner standards but failure to be popular or
manage relations with other children
3. guidance from peers (real or in media); only constant is
“the process of striving itself and the process of paying
close attention to the signals from others”
4. nothing special about family; constantly absorbing strange
new phenomena—gives ability to form rapid and
superficial intimacy and response to everyone; a cultural
montone results in anxiety
5. vs. Tradition-directed (feeling impact of culture as a unit);
sanction is shame
6. vs. Inner-directed with “psychic gyroscope” set by parents,
other similar authorities; feels guilt
v. Parents vs. Peer Group
1. adult authorities move from authority to peer-group
facilitator; from morality to morale (“stage managers for
the meetings of three- and four- year olds”)
2. almost automatic adjustment to subtlest insignia of status
3. conformity: attempt to cut down people who stand out—
vanity a sin (or is it accentuated in current phase?)
4. constant ranking on continua of taste; hidden by “confusing
notion that the function of the group is to have fun, to play;
the deadly seriousness of the business, which might justify
the child in making an issue of it, is therefore hidden”
5. training in taste (useful within age and class peer group)
replaces etiquette (handling relations with people with
whom one does not seek intimacy, i.e. across class lines,
individuals as representatives of carefully graded social
roles)
6. taste requires more learning due to increase in qualitative
differences among products with vague differences (unlike
sharp differences in etiquette)
7. energy channeled into consumption (vs. “inner-directed”
production); from “stable and individualistic pursuits” to
“fluctuating tastes” from peer-group which trains out
individuality
8. seen in play; today’s play is about consumption (many
more toys… developing reasons to consume more)
9. gender: more burden on girls, seen as leaders in
consumption; and children train parents in consumption
vi. Conflict in peer group
1. group member consumes itself; “people and friendships are
viewed as the greatest of all consumeables” (Foley,
Eckert); this process has middle-class as leading edge (only
mention of class)
2. ideological shift from individualistic competition to
submission to group
vii. Sex as Consumption
1. seen as necessary evidence of aliveness in group; without
internal gyroscope, there is no defense against envy
2. women are no longer “objects for the acquisitive consumer
but peer-groupers themselves”—women not social inferiors
for interest in sex—yet still an arena of mystery
viii. Archetype: The “Inside Dopester”
1. Politics becoming spectator sport instead of arena for
pursuing morality or self-interest; cynical dopester
compelled to be “in the know”
2. “The inside-dopester is competent in the way that the
school system and the mass media of communication have
taught him to be competent. Ideology demands that, living
in a politically saturated milieu, he knows the political
score as he must know the score in other fields of
entertainment, such as sports.”
3. Politics “experienced through a screen of words by which
the events are habitually atomized and personalized—or
pseudo-personalized”