This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing practices. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and communicative practice.

After over three decades of continual publication in multiple editions, the Third Edition of Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, now with coauthor Stephen Leavitt, describes the latest interests, concepts, and approaches in the field with the inclusion of four new chapters and updates to earlier topics. The premise of the previous editions remains: that all anthropology is psychological and that the interplay between anthropological methods and the psychological theories existing in different times is dialectical. Psychological anthropologists have grappled with changing trends in both disciplines, including psychoanalytic, holistic, cognitive, interpretive, and developmental approaches. It is important to appreciate these currents of thought to understand the state of the field today. This text is thus a guide to that history along with a critique that may lead to a new synthesis. It is an ideal choice for courses in psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, and the history of anthropology.

Psychological Anthropology: A Reader in Self in Culture presents a selection of readings from recent and classical literature with a rich diversity of insights into the individual and society. Presents the latest psychological research from a variety of global cultures Sheds new light on historical continuities in psychological anthropology Explores the cultural relativity of emotional experience and moral concepts among diverse peoples, the Freudian influence and recent psychoanalytic trends in anthropology Addresses childhood and the acquisition of culture, an ethnographic focus on the self as portrayed in ritual and healing, and how psychological anthropology illuminates social change

This edited volume provides a long-overdue synthesis of the current directions in culture theory and represents some of the very best in ongoing research. Here, culture theory is rendered as a jigsaw puzzle: the book identifies where current research fits together, the as yet missing pieces, and the straight edges that frame the bigger picture. These framing ideas are two: Roy D’Andrade’s concept of lifeworlds—adapted from phenomenology yet groundbreaking in its own right—and new thinking about internalization, a concept much used in anthropology but routinely left unpacked. At its heart, this book is an incisive, insightful collection of contributions which will surely guide and support those who seek to further the study of culture.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to psychological anthropology, covering both the early history and contemporary state of the field. Eller discusses the major themes, theories, figures and publications, and provides a detailed survey of the essential and enduring relationship between anthropology and psychology. The volume charts the development, celebrates the accomplishments, critiques the inadequacies, and considers the future of a field that has made great contributions to the overall discipline of anthropology. The chapters feature rich ethnographic examples and boxes for more in-depth discussion as well as summaries and questions to support teaching and learning. This is essential reading for all students new to the study of psychological anthropology.

First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open—even eager—to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present. Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation.