This volume identifies an emerging synthesis in psychological anthropology and presents the new research agenda taking shape as the discipline moves beyond the postmodernist critique. United by a desire to better understand the relationship of individual experience to culture, the individual authors use a range of contemporary approaches in the field, including person-centered ethnography, activity theory, attachment and object relations theory, and cultural schema theory. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the importance of basing comparative studies on categories derived from...

John Whiting is a leading figure in psychological anthropology and a pioneer in the development of systematic cross-cultural research. His work is interdisciplinary, drawing mainly on the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and learning and behavior theory. This book includes some of his most influential articles on culture and human development, and a comprehensive autobiographical essay. Roy D'Andrade's introduction assesses the unique contributions of Whiting and locates his work within the contemporary currents of psychological anthropology.

This is a study of how self-transformation may occur through the practice of reframing one's personal experience in terms of a canonical language: that is, a system of symbols that purports to explain something about human beings and the universe they live in. The Christian conversion narrative is used as the primary example here, but the approach used in this book also illuminates other practices such as psychotherapy in which people deal with emotional conflict through language.

Latah, the Malayan hyperstartle pattern, has fascinated Western observers since the late nineteenth century and is widely regarded as a "culture-bound syndrome." Robert Winzeler critically reviews the literature on the subject, and presents new ethnographic information based on his own fieldwork in Malaya and Borneo. He considers the biological and psychological hypotheses that have been proposed to account for latah, and explains the ways in which local people understand it. Arguing that latah has specific social functions, he concludes that it is not appropriate to regard it as an "illness"...

This is the only volume available to bring together a wide selection of primary sources from the theatrical history of the Middle Ages. The focus is on Western Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Renaissance forms in Italy. Coverage includes the survival of Classical tradition and development of the liturgical drama, the growth of popular religious drama in the vernacular, and the pastimes and customs of the people. Each of the major medieval regions is featured and documents are presented in modern English translation.

A full understanding of human action requires an understanding of what motivates people to do what they do. For too many years studies of motivation have drawn from different theoretical paradigms. Typically, human motivation has been modeled on animal behavior, while culture has been described as pure knowledge or symbol. The result has been insufficient appreciation of the role of culture in human motivation and a truncated view of culture as disembodied knowledge. The anthropologists in this volume have attempted a different approach, seeking to integrate knowledge, desire, and action into...

A generation of feminist research has explored the extent to which the roles--and expectations--of women and men vary across cultures. In this volume, leading anthropologists reflect on the evidence and theories, broadening the conventional field of comparison to include female/male relationships among nonhuman primates and introducing fresh case studies that range from lemurs to hominids, from Japanese peasants to male strippers in Florida, from skeletal remains of a Korean queen to mother/child conversations in Samoa. They document the rich and often surprising diversity in sex and gender...

The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are prominent figures in psychological anthropology, and they write about recent developments in this field. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, the early practitioners in the forties and fifties concentrated on studying cross-cultural variation in child rearing practices. While tensions between individual experience and collective meanings are still central to psychological anthropology, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approaches, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, and ethnopsychology have been introduced....

Nancy Rosenberger's book challenges previous simplistic comparisons between Western individualism and non-Western collectivism: the idea, as exemplified by the Japanese, of the self as interactive with society. Through their observations of Japanese life, the authors explain how the Japanese define themselves and communicate with those around them. They discuss what Westerners view as oppositions within the Japanese community and demonstrate how the Japanese reconcile one with the other. The Japanese emerge as complex and multi-faceted, vulnerable to outside influences, but strong enough to...

Latah, the Malayan hyperstartle pattern, has fascinated Western observers since the late nineteenth century and is widely regarded as a "culture-bound syndrome." Robert Winzeler critically reviews the literature on the subject, and presents new ethnographic information based on his own fieldwork in Malaya and Borneo. He considers the biological and psychological hypotheses that have been proposed to account for latah, and explains the ways in which local people understand it. Arguing that latah has specific social functions, he concludes that it is not appropriate to regard it as an "illness"...