John Ingham reviews recent developments in pyschological anthropology and argues for an eclectic approach that finds room for psychoanalytic, dialogical, and social perspectives on personality and culture. The argument is developed with special reference to human nature, child development, personality, and mental disorder, and it draws on studies set in many different cultures. He also shows the relevance of some recent work in psychoanalysis and child development to current concerns in anthropology with agency and rhetoric.

"Culture" and "meaning" are central to anthropology, but anthropologists do not agree on what they are. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn propose a new theory of cultural meaning, one that gives priority to the way people's experiences are internalized. Drawing on "connectionist" or "neural network" models as well as other psychological theories, they argue that cultural meanings are not fixed or limited to static groups, but neither are they constantly revised or contested. Their approach is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage and ideas of success in the United...

Are emotions given by biology or are they learned? Are they the same everywhere, or culturally variable? Research on the emotions tends to be polarized between neo-Darwinian and culturalist perspectives. In this volume, biological and cultural anthropologists attempt to transcend the traditional oppositions, proposing various strategies for integrating biological and cultural approaches to the study of emotion. Discussing a variety of fascinating ethnographic examples, topics range from the effects of music to the relationships between emotion and respiration. The editor's introduction...

Collective violence changes the perpetrators, victims, and societies in which it occurs. It targets the body, the psyche, and the socio-cultural order. How do people come to terms with these tragic events? This groundbreaking collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world, profits from an interdisciplinary dialogue. Providing provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, it also proposes new ways of understanding the terrible things that people are capable of doing...

"Culture" and "meaning" are central to anthropology, but anthropologists do not agree on what they are. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn propose a new theory of cultural meaning, one that gives priority to the way people's experiences are internalized. Drawing on "connectionist" or "neural network" models as well as other psychological theories, they argue that cultural meanings are not fixed or limited to static groups, but neither are they constantly revised or contested. Their approach is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage and ideas of success in the United...

The book describes methods for working with elements, subgroups, and quotient groups of a finitely presented group. The author emphasizes the connection with fundamental algorithms from theoretical computer science, particularly the theory of automata and formal languages, from computational number theory, and from computational commutative algebra. The LLL lattice reduction algorithm and various algorithms for Hermite and Smith normal forms are used to study the Abelian quotients of a finitely presented group. The work of Baumslag, Cannonito, and Miller on computing non-Abelian polycyclic...

Are emotions given by biology or are they learned? Are they the same everywhere, or culturally variable? Research on the emotions tends to be polarized between neo-Darwinian and culturalist perspectives. In this volume, biological and cultural anthropologists attempt to transcend the traditional oppositions, proposing various strategies for integrating biological and cultural approaches to the study of emotion. Discussing a variety of fascinating ethnographic examples, topics range from the effects of music to the relationships between emotion and respiration. The editor's introduction...

This edited volume deals with an important but neglected topic--the ways in which power is experienced by individuals, as agents as well as objects of the exercise of power. Each contributor presents a series of case studies drawn from a variety of cultural contexts. These include a chapter on the treatment of patients in American nursing homes, the plight of immigrant Turkish women in the Netherlands, and one contribution that relates theories about the capacity to commit genocidal violence to "everyday forms of violence."

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...

In this important theoretical treatist, the authors push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process.