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.

The papers in this volume, a multidisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, explore the ways in which cultural knowledge is organized and used in everyday language and understanding. Employing a variety of methods, which rely heavily on linguistic data, the authors offer analyses of domains of knowledge ranging across the physical, social, and psychological worlds, and reveal the importance of tacit, presupposed knowledge in the conduct of everyday life. The authors argue that cultural knowledge is organized in 'cultural models' - storylike chains of...

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...

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.

"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...

This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them...