History of the study of Culture and Psychology

Plato (427-347 B.C.) - Theory of forms (essences):
Universal patterns of thought and personal characteristics.
Based upon mathematics and music (Pythogoras).

Protagoras: Democratic Relativism
"Man is the measure of all things;
of those that they are they are;
and of those that they are not they are not."

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): New Science: observation

-Efficient Causes understood through observing
conjunctions and disjunctions

John Locke (1632-1704) Empiricism,
tabula rasa, simple and complex ideas

• Scienza -> verum "universal a priori truths" as in mathematics
• Coscienza -> certum "external knowledge", acquaintance with fact
• Storia ideale eterna -> forms "eternal truths" (Plato)
• Per Causus -> creations "intentional 'inner' knowledge"

 Predecessor of Völkerpsychologie - Hermeneutics of life history. Many perspectives and interpretations of life through language, art, myth, ...

~
Modern thought & the division of the natural & Human worlds

 Auguste Comte (1798-1857): "Father of positivism"

• Only Positive Science is meaningful as it uses
  inductive knowledge based on the
  verification of observations in experimentation
  & comparison of objective facts
• Progressive knowledge for social betterment
  in abandoning established order or tradition.
• Science as a religion seeks ultimate causes to
  establish natural Laws for the prediction
  and control of the natural world.

1. Ontological (Assumptions about reality):
Consciousness: "vitality and freedom of self reflection"
"self-consciousness and the world [are]
connected with each other in one [dialectical] system"

Self is embedded in cultural history, identity is conditioned by its milieu

2. Methodological (Methods of knowing):
Knowledge is "always already" grounded, or
situated within a (historical) context

Hermeneutical Circle: Meaning-there is
no understanding without pre-understanding
Understanding (verstehen) arrives through expression (artistry)

First to articulate distinction between worldviews
Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften
Natural Science and Human Science

~
Modern Psychology: Lab Science or Historical Studies?

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) Credited with the founding of psychology

Psychology is both Experimental (individual)
and Völkerpsychologie (collective)

An example of the debate: the Sapir -Whorf Hypothesis

• E.g. time - Hopi vs. European. Hopi language
  has no words that refer to time (implicitly or explicitly,
  rather of the manifest and non-manifest.
• -The Inuit conceptions of snow?  is this evidence
• -The (African) Bantu languages no words for geometric forms
• -Words for colour: black red green blue brown

Arising from Psychological Anthropology 

Many common ancestors with cross-cultural psychology

Degerando (1772-1842) - While on Baudin's expedition to Australia (1800-1804) wrote:

Considerations sur les diverse methods a suivre dans l'observation des peuples sauvages

-Positivist science of mankind:
using observation to confirm beliefs.

-Interested in the fundamental Laws of psychological development across peoples

-Studied "Savage's sensations (perception), association of ideas,
foresight, reflection (cognitive processes and language), pinions and
judgment (belief systems, morals and conventions), attention and
reflective needs (emotion and motivation), imbecility (psychopathy),
and the moral education of children (developmental niche)."

-Refuted hypothesis of physical strength being  inverse to degree of civilization

-Proposed methods for each of these areas of study 
and that facts are understood only in a system of other facts.

-Know the 'natural connections' or 'order' of them.

-Cautioned against racism and ethnocentrism

Francis Galton (1822-1911) Heredity of psychological characteristics (Intelligence) & Correlation

-Classification of people according to their abilities and rated "races"

-Studied visualising faculty (space perception) of "Bushmen of South Africa", and "Eskimos" who were well skilled at mapping vast tracts of land in their minds

Edward Burnet Tylor (1832-1917) Father of Anthropology

"Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action" (1871/1958)

Tylor (1889) proposed a quantitative approach to the study of
institutions by looking at their common features. Societies
could be compared and clustered to show development.

-Looking at the adhesions (correlations) one can
find the universal causes of psychology.

-Institutions, like the family, are universal, though
our mental capacities develop in response to the
situations in which our culture has been maintained.

James Frazer (1854-1941) The Golden Bough

-A classical scholar who read Tylor's Primitive Culture
and turned to anthropology

-Wrote about the psychological function underlying
magic and religion, presenting a huge collection of folklore,
customs and rites with literary drama, excitement!

-Inspired Freud to write Totem and Taboo (1919),
having drawn heavily from Frazer's book, showing the
common psychic lives of "savages and neurotics".

Universal Oedipus complex that was due to the 'primal horde'
being dominated by a tyrannical 'father' who kept his 'sons'
from contact with all women.

Inspired the "Personality and Culture" stream of
Boasians (Margaret Mead & Ruth Benedict)

William Halse Rivers (1864-1922) British father of Psychological Anthropology

-Studied medicine and was inspired by
Ewald Herring's work on vision.

1898 took part in Cambridge Anthropological Expedition
to Torres Straits (New Guinea).

-Recruited students William McDougall and C.S. Myers

-Studied sensory functioning in "primitives" to test Spencer's
theory that they spend most of their mental energy on perceptual
abilities, not thinking and "higher" abilities (refuted)

-Tests: visual illusions, hearing, smell, taste, cutaneous &
muscular sense and reaction-times

-Refuted theory of superior sensory acuity
(visual, auditory, tactile (2-point threshold))

-They communicated in "pidgin English",
received tobacco or sweets for participation

-Studied colour preference through (unobtrusive method)
of observing clothes worn.

-Encouraged his student Fredric Bartlett to maintain strong
experimental methods

Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

-Research in Adaman Islands and followed River's
orientation of psychology

-Later came to be a follower of Durkheim,
emphasizing the social over individual

-The structure of society and the social system
are most important to study

Malinowski (1884-1942)

-Studied under Wundt at Leipzig influenced
by his folk-psychology

-Developed a "functional" approach that described
cultures as integrated wholes, recognizing the relative
weight of constituent parts in social change

-Ended up in Trobriand Islands during WWI
and tested Freud's theory of Oedipal complex
in a matrilinear 'avuncular' society.

Mother's brother, not father is main authority figure,
and contact with sister not mother is 'prohibited'.
Observing that they had different dreams of homicide
and incest, he refuted Freud's claim of universal Oedipal
Complex, revealing his own view of cultural determinism.

Frans Boas (1858-1942) Founder of American Psychological Anthropology

-Expedition to Baffin Island -geography
and psychology (cognitive maps)

-Extensive writings on the "Kwakutl" (of north Vancouver Island and surround)

-Diffusionist (like Rivers), directly influenced by Bastian
and Tylor as well as Galton's work on the psychological variation
(contradiction?)

-Compromise between these two views
(psychic unity and diversity) comes from influence of Wundt

-Studied the historical roots and environmental factors
influence on art and mythology, along with the relationship
between language and thought

-Played down (but did not deny) racial differences
- however, held culture took over (Boas. 1911).

-Influenced students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict

Contemporary Theory and Methods in Psychological Anthropology

Berry at al. (1992): Also called ethnoscience the study
of cognitive (thinking) abilities across cultures is
referred to as cognitive anthropology. Historically
language has been studied heavily.

 Field Studies & Key Informants

Spindler et al. (1978): The Making of psychological anthropology
involves the "weaving" together of many different strands,
including culture and personality, cognitive psychology,
psychoanalysis, behaviourism, ethnoscience, biology,
and symbolic anthropology.

-Following Rivers and Tylor, Seligman and others continued
to "psychologise" anthropology, especially in America.

-Questioning the boundaries, there was an "identity crisis" in the field.

-Sapir, Boas, Benedict and Margaret Mead led
the challenge against reification, instead made
use of narratives-accounting (describing)
setting and important contextual situating.

-Splitting of anthropology had already
occurred with behavioural and cultural.