Chapter 8 Flashcards
Describe the Life History Method
a life history is the overall picture of the informant’s or interviewee’s life. The purpose of the interview is to be able to describe what it is like to be this particular person, that is, the one being interviewed.
Describe “personality writ large”
Each culture chooses from the “great arc of human potentialities” only a few characteristics become the leading personality traits of the members of that culture.
Describe Cultural Configuration
Derived from the notion of Gestalt psychology. Ruth Benedict believed the behaviors that are selected are those conforming to the cultures configuration, which is the overall psychological orientation. Cultural configurations are patterns of behavior, movement and thinking, when analyzing different cultures.
Describe Gestalt
Suggested that people learn in response to underlying patterns called forth by a specific event rather than by a direct stimulus response.
Describe character studies
refers to a set of anthropological studies conducted during and directly after World War II that arose from (and ultimately ended) the culture and personality school within psychological anthropology.
Who is Paul Radin
(1883-1959) attempted to show how individuals can be both the product of their culture as well as a factor influencing its development. He did this not by writing ethnographies but biographies of selected members.
Who is Ruth Benedict
(1887-1948) one of Boas’ students who attempted to discover how culture shapes the personality of the individual. One of the first ever women to hold a university teaching position.
Who is Margaret Mead
another one of Boas’ students who attempted to discover how culture shapes the personality of the individual.
Who is Abram Kardiner
(1955-present) A psychoanalysts and anthropologist working from the 1930’-1950’s Kardiner’s work was an important advance over the earlier culture and personality work of Mead and Benedict. This was because he offered explicit hypotheses relating child-rearing practices to cultural personality. In other words, it attempted to explain the origins of personality differences with a testable hypothesis, something that eluded the earlier culture and personality formulations of Mead and Benedict.
Who is Sigmund Freud
Freud coined the term Oedipal complex: the universal but usually repressed desire of males to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. Also identified psychological processes such as repression, projection, and transference. He wrote the book Totem and Taboo to address the Oedipal complex and religion.
FROM SLIDES
-Social science had missed a critical component of human nature –the workings of the subconscious
What is the critique of Benedicts Patterns of Culture categories
According to Mead, much of the criticism directed towards Patterns of Culture was based on the critics failure to grasp the fact that Benedict was not dealing with typologies in the sense that cultures can be seen as elaborating psychological or biological givens.
Margaret Mead’s sex/love life was complicated. Does this personal history dimish her work on sex and gender?
A lot of her work was biased and on some occasion’s primarily focused on what she wanted to find to support her notion regarding sex and gender.
Why was Abram Kardiner’s work an improvement on Benedict’s and Mead’s? Describe his model and speak to its strengths.
-He began with the assumption of a “basic personality structure” that is that most members of a given culture would exhibit a similar personality typical of that society (Similar to what Mead and Benedict stated). He then divided institutional aspects of culture into two categories. The primary institutions were those responsible for forming the basic personality structure. These practices were most concerned with disciplining, gratifying, and inhibiting infants and young children. Secondary institutions were those that satisfy the needs and tension created by the primary or fixed ones. Secondary institutions reflect features of personality development, or are necessary to manage the tensions that arise in our personalities.
Culture and personality school – What was the reason this arm of anthropology developed?
The publication of Alfred Kroeber’s textbook, Anthropology, marked a turning point in American anthropology. After three decades of amassing material, Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most obvious in the ‘Culture and Personality’ studies carried out by younger Boasians such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these authors sought to understand the way that individual personalities were shaped by the wider cultural and social forces in which they grew up.
What does Freud’s model of id-ego-superego contribute to the discipline of anthropology?
The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited (i.e. biological) components of personality present at birth, including the sex (life) instinct – Eros (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct - Thanatos.
The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responded directly and immediately to the instincts.
-According to Freud’s model of the psyche, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.
