A Companionto PsychologicalAnthropologyModernity and PsychoculturalChange

Edited by Conerly Casey andRobert B. Edgerton

A Companionto PsychologicalAnthropology

Blackwell Companions to AnthropologyThe Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offer a series of comprehensive synthesesof the traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry forthe field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthro-pology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends inthe field as a whole.

1 A Companion to Linguistic Anthropologyedited by Alessandro Duranti

2 A Companion to the Anthropology of Politicsedited by David Nugent and Joan Vincent

3 A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indiansedited by Thomas Biolsi

4 A Companion to Psychological Anthropologyedited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton

5 A Companion to the Anthropology of Japanedited by Jennifer Robertson

ForthcomingA Companion to Latin American Anthropologyedited by Deborah Poole

A Companionto PsychologicalAnthropologyModernity and PsychoculturalChange

Edited by Conerly Casey andRobert B. Edgerton

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A companion to psychological anthropology: modernity and psychocultural change / edited byConerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton.

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Contents

Synopsis of Contents x

Notes on Contributors xvii

Acknowledgments xxv

Introduction 1

Part I Sensing, Feeling, and Knowing 15

1 Time and Consciousness 17Kevin Birth

2 An Anthropology of Emotion 30Charles Lindholm

3 “Effort After Meaning” in Everyday Life 48Linda C. Garro

4 Culture and Learning 72Patricia M. Greenfield

5 Dreaming in a Global World 90Douglas Hollan

6 Memory and Modernity 103Jennifer Cole

Part II Language and Communication 121

7 Narrative Transformations 123James M. Wilce, Jr.

8 Practical Logic and Autism 140Elinor Ochs and Olga Solomon

9 Disability: Global Languages and Local Lives 168Susan Reynolds Whyte

Part III Ambivalence, Alienation, and Belonging 18310 Identity 185

Daniel T. Linger

11 Self and Other in an “Amodern” World 201A. David Napier

12 Immigrant Identities and Emotion 225Katherine Pratt Ewing

13 Emotive Institutions 241Geoffrey M. White

14 Urban Fear of Crime and Violence in Gated Communities 255Setha M. Low

15 Race: Local Biology and Culture in Mind 274Atwood D. Gaines

16 Unbound Subjectivities and New Biomedical Technologies 298Margaret Lock

17 Globalization, Childhood, and Psychological Anthropology 315Thomas S. Weisner and Edward D. Lowe

18 Drugs and Modernization 337Michael Winkelman and Keith Bletzer

19 Ritual Practice and Its Discontents 358Don Seeman

20 Spirit Possession 374Erika Bourguignon

21 Witchcraft and Sorcery 389René Devisch

Part IV Aggression, Dominance, and Violence 41722 Genocide and Modernity 419

Alexander Laban Hinton

23 Corporate Violence 436Howard F. Stein

24 Political Violence 453Christopher J. Colvin

viii CONTENTS

25 The Politics of Remorse 469Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Afterword 495Catherine Lutz

Index 499

CONTENTS ix

Synopsis ofContents

Part I Sensing, Feeling, and Knowing

1 Time and ConsciousnessKevin Birth

This chapter explores the cultural ideas of time and the experience of time in thecontext of globalization. Time is a cultural creation, but one that encompassesembodied experiences of circadian cycles as well as learned and shared ideas aboutpower and social relationships. In addition, concepts of time are cognitive tools fororienting and coordinating people and relationships. Since concepts of time link adiversity of physical and social experiences, cultures do not manifest single conceptsof time, but instead cultural ideas of time are directly related to power, coopera-tion, and conflict. One source of conflict explored in this chapter is the time-spacecompression associated with globalization. Not only does this create conflicts andcontradictions between local and global relationships, but it also creates embodied,culturally elaborated tensions between biological rhythms and the global social rela-tionships that modern technology makes possible.

2 An Anthropology of EmotionCharles Lindholm

This chapter outlines the historical background and theoretical premises of the studyof emotion in the social sciences. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that univer-sal motivating emotions exist, although these are largely shaped by the constraintsof culture, history, and structure. Repression of fundamental emotions leads to theirexpression in disguised forms. Future studies of emotion ought to be comparative,and focus on the manner in which destructive collective emotions can be curbed ordisplaced.

3 “Effort After Meaning” in Everyday LifeLinda C. Garro

A process oriented perspective of cognition need not limit the cultural contributionto content, or the process merely to biochemical cognitive processes. Rather, it canhighlight cultural–historical and social processes as well as the range of artifacts andculturally available resources for “effort after meaning” while advancing an under-standing of variation and change in cultural settings. The constructive and situatednature of knowing is explored through the distributed nature of cognition, trans-formative learning processes, schemas, and narrative as a mode of thinking.

4 Culture and LearningPatricia M. Greenfield

Over the last forty years, concepts of culture and learning have moved from strictand separate operational definitions to integrations of these concepts as they areused within the fields of psychological anthropology and developmental psychology.Culture and learning have become cultural learning, and cultural learning is fastbecoming part and parcel of developmental psychology. At the same time, the domainof culture and learning is no longer contextualized in separate and timeless cultures;the perspective is now historical, evolutionary, and global.

5 Dreaming in a Global WorldDouglas Hollan

In this chapter it is argued that the study of dreams is one of the ways we canexamine the degree to which “global” processes, however defined, gain cognitive,emotional, and motivational saliency for a person. Because dreams exist at theinterface of self and social experience, they can illuminate how and in what waysaspects of self, desire, and fantasy become intertwined with the experience of body,world, and people. They can give us a sense of how the self projects itself into theworld, but also a sense of how “the world,” no matter how large or small, affects thedevelopment and organization of self.

6 Memory and ModernityJennifer Cole

This chapter reviews the relationship of memory to modernity, arguing that theexperience of modernity has both increased scholarly and popular interest in memoryand shaped the study of memory in problematic ways by separating the analysis ofindividual memory from that of social memory. Arguing for the importance of view-ing memory as a key site at which to examine the complex interplay of individualand social experience, the chapter reviews social psychological and anthropologicalapproaches to memory and constructs a history of different regimes of memoryin the West. It then proposes an alternative genealogy from which to recuperatea view of memory that takes account of the dual social and individual nature ofmemory, tracing out the relevance of the work of Halbwachs, Bartlett, Vygotsky,and Voloshinov to such an approach. The final section of the chapter explores some

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS xi

concrete instantiations of the proposed approach through a review of specific workon discourse and ritual as they relate to memory.

Part II Language and Communication

7 Narrative TransformationsJames M. Wilce, Jr.

Narrative is changing globally. Stories, genres, and languages themselves shift.The relevance of such change to psychological anthropology may be clearest vis-à-visemotional genres like lament, but new communicative forms are shaping sharedsubjectivities – widely shared identities. These shifts putatively reflect a grand narrative,the meta-story we call modernity. A limited version of this claim is embraced, basedon evidence that newer forms of narrative participation can fit the so-called age ofthe spectacle.

8 Practical Logic and AutismElinor Ochs and Olga Solomon

This chapter examines the practice-based paradigms of Bourdieu and Garfinkel,specifically the relation between structure and agency, through the prism of autism.It is argued that practical logic is not a homogeneous domain of competence, asit presents degrees of complexity when applied to the flow of local and extendedactions and expressed/implicated propositions. The practical proclivities of childrenwith autism illuminate the primacy of structure over improvisation.

9 Disability: Global Languages and Local LivesSusan Reynolds Whyte

This chapter proposes a pragmatic approach to the study of global discourses ondisability. Like many languages of misfortune, these languages offer hope, but do soin contexts where opportunity is socially patterned. Analyzing disability discoursessuggests that problems are defined in terms of the solutions being offered. Analyzingthe pragmatics of empirical situations shows that discourses of disability are unevenlyrelevant to people in different positions. We cannot assume that discourse shapessubjectivity in any simple or regular way. Instead, we must examine how it is usedand what social implications it has in practice.

Part III Alienation, Ambivalence, and Belonging

10 IdentityDaniel T. Linger

Contemporary studies of identity focus on emergent gender, ethnic, and transnationalidentities, simultaneously engaging sharp debates within anthropology over the natureand locus of meaning. This chapter explores controversies over the instability andproliferation of identities, arguing that significant future work requires continuedelaboration of a model of the person. Such a model is a theoretical precondition ofall approaches to meaning, all attempts to link public and private domains, and thusall accounts of identity.

xii SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS

11 Self and Other in an “Amodern” WorldA. David Napier

This chapter reviews the major assumptions about culture and identity that have shapedthe fields of social and psychological anthropology. Beginning with philosophicalquestions about ideological commensurability and incommensurability – that is, aredifferent embodied practices exclusive? – the chapter goes on to examine the degreeto which contemporary anthropologists may have silenced this discussion, not onlyby failing to admit to the potential importance of learning about new domains ofexperience, but also by denying that one can have any knowledge outside of theself. Consequently, the chapter sets out to demonstrate how postmodern views ofthe discipline are actually dependent on traditional ideas about personal develop-ment and transformation – how, in Latour’s sense, We Have Never Been Modern.Here, the author maintains that the conservative views that characterize postmodernanthropology can only be transcended by acknowledging, in ways stated by those“others” we study, that creativity is dependent upon the risk of encountering thatwhich is different enough to appear at first unknowable.

12 Immigrant Identities and EmotionKatherine Pratt Ewing

The inbetweenness of those who migrate is not easily captured in the models thatdominate the anthropology of emotions. This chapter examines situations in whichthis inbetweenness is foregrounded: the medical clinic, where many migrants seek helpin managing the stresses of migration; the emotional structurings of the memory ofhome; and the relationships between first and second generations, in which emotionalstructures and identities are transmitted across a gulf of cultural difference.

13 Emotive InstitutionsGeoffrey M. White

This chapter explores the social and cultural character of emotion, outlining a modelfor comparative ethnographic research on the meaning and force of emotions in every-day life. After briefly reviewing differences between psychological and anthropologicalapproaches to the social dimensions of emotion, the chapter introduces the idea of“emotive institution” as a means of focusing attention on the role of cultural models,social context, and social relational factors in producing emotional experience.

14 Urban FearSetha M. Low

This chapter uncovers some of the underlying motivations of moving into a residentialgated community by exploring how the discourse of fear of violence and crime andthe search for a secure community legitimates and rationalizes class-based exclusionstrategies and residential segregation embodied in the walls, gates, guards, and sur-veillance technology of these built environments. The chapter expresses the concernthat these physical changes in suburban design and planning will become normativeand ultimately encode fear in a relatively open, suburban landscape. Secondarily,

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS xiii

it attempts to untangle the relationship of emotion and environment, through theexamination of this built form.

15 Race: Local Biology and Culture in MindAtwood D. Gaines

This chapter considers concepts of “race” from several perspectives: psychologicaland medical anthropology, cultural history, psychoanalysis, and the Cultural Studiesof Science. From these perspectives, it views “race” as cultural and psychologicalconstructs, as professional medical and scientific constructs, and in the contexts of“racial” justifications and psychological defenses. The chapter focuses on medicaland scientific discursive formations of “race” in the United States, since social racialcategories are transmuted into a “Local Biology” that is exported in part or in wholeto other countries. While for some time researchers have demonstrated the lack ofempirical bases for any conception of “race,” it remains a (clearly declining) para-mount cognitive, cultural, medical, and scientific reality.

16 Unbound Subjectivities and New Biomedical TechnologiesMargaret Lock

This chapter argues the concept of subjectivity has a genealogy best contemplatedthrough the practices, technologies, and discourses that change through time andspace. Using three illustrative case studies – organ transplantation, the recognitionof brain dead bodies as corpse-like and no longer alive, and the production andglobalization of the technology of immortalized cell lines – it is argued that not onlysubjectivity, but also the bounded material body, has a history. Both subjectivity andmaterial embodiment are radically challenged by new biomedical technologies inwhich the body is fragmented and commodified, resulting in an exchange of cells,tissues, and organs among people and places.

17 Globalization, Childhood, and Psychological AnthropologyThomas S. Weisner and Edward D. Lowe

The psychological anthropology of childhood and adolescence accounts for themarvelous variety of childhoods found around the world, and how children andadolescents acquire, transform, share, integrate, and transmit cultural knowledge.Psychological anthropologists focus on topics in human development impacted byglobal processes: identity, self, trust and attachment, cognition and memory, parenting,childhood stages, health, social behavior, personality, and character. The opportuni-ties are stunning for new research and applied knowledge about children engagingglobal processes.

18 Drugs and ModernizationMichael Winkelman and Keith Bletzer

Attitudes toward substance use in the United States and Europe have shifted fromprehistory through postmodernity. Premodern use of natural substances was sanctionedfor cultural practices that sought improved integration of the individual withinsociety. European colonization altered the religiosity of early substance use by com-

xiv SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS

mercializing it and eventually taking legal control of it, restricting and prohibitingthe popular use of some substances. The modernization of substances has led to anemphasis on individual pursuit rather than communal well-being.

19 Ritual Practice and Its DiscontentsDon Seeman

This chapter maps three broad approaches to the study of ritual practice. Psy-chological approaches pioneered by the students of Freud and cultural approachespioneered by the students of Boas have competed with and contributed to oneanother in the foundation of their respective disciplines. However, neither has yetsucceeded in escaping the charge of reductionism first sounded by Edward Sapir.This chapter argues for a rethinking of ritual practice along poetic and phenomeno-logical lines that responds to this early critique.

20 Spirit PossessionErika Bourguignon

Spirit possession beliefs are ancient, very widespread, and dynamic. Rapid changesin numerous aspects of existence in the context of globalization have affected themost intimate aspect of people’s lives virtually everywhere. Frequent among theeffects of change are alterations in people’s relations to spirits and ancestors, as wellas in their own sense of identity. Ritualized possession trance states project humanconcerns to a cosmic plane and may assist in restructuring relationships within acommunity.

21 Witchcraft and SorceryRené Devisch

Seeking some endogenous understanding of lethal bewitchment, primarily amongblood relatives in Bantu African contexts, this chapter is concerned with the captivat-ing intercorporeal and intersubjective transactional dynamics mobilized between avictim and the suspected aggressor’s congenital capacity for fatal attack. It focuseson the prereflective consciousness (at play in the skin, the “flesh,” the senses, the belly),as a magma of “forces” of abjection, transgression, and annihilation gradually con-sumes it. Without a bewitched, there is no witch. A fatal bewitchment only comesabout at the level of the affects of some weakened individuals who, while imaginingan evildoer regarding their weakening or ill-fate, turn themselves into victims orcounter-attack.

Part IV Aggression, Dominance, and Violence

22 Genocide and ModernityAlexander Laban Hinton

This chapter maintains that, as opposed to being an “aberration” or a “regression”to a state of “barbarism,” genocide is powerfully influenced by modernity. Reflectingon the work of Zygmunt Bauman, the chapter argues psychological anthropologyprovides an important and distinct vantage on the interconnection between genocide

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS xv

and modernity, illustrating how modern genocides, while unfolding within particularcultural contexts, involve issues of identity, motivation, upheaval and revitalization,meaninglessness, existential dread, and manufacturing difference.

23 Corporate ViolenceHoward F. Stein

Taking a psychoanalytic approach to understanding culture, this chapter exploresAmerican corporate violence that takes the forms of downsizing, reductions in force,restructuring, reengineering, outsourcing, deskilling, and other euphemized formsof “managed social change.” Language is shown to be a key to disguising humandisposability in the idiom of rational economic necessity. Much national attentionhas been given in recent years to physical forms of “violence in the workplace.” Thischapter explores ongoing symbolic violence that is no less brutal.

24 Political ViolenceChristopher J. Colvin

This chapter’s examination of political violence begins by looking at post-conflicttraumatic storytelling in South Africa. It is particularly focused on the globalizationof psychological discourses of trauma and argues the narrative and emotional laborsdemanded of victims (and perpetrators) by these discourses are both intensely per-sonal and political acts. The chapter suggests that increasingly global languages oftrauma make it more difficult to understand the many internal and external causesand effects of political violence.

25 The Politics of RemorseNancy Scheper-Hughes

This chapter treats the politically and morally ambiguous task of recording the experi-ence of violence and truth-telling from the point of view of a small cross-sectionof white South Africans. Their narratives of suffering, remorse, and reconciliationreflect the experiences of ordinary people existentially “thrown” into a political dramain which they participate as active collaborators, passive beneficiaries, or revolutionary“race traitors” vis-à-vis the apartheid state. Today, they are trying to make sense oftheir country’s violent history and of their role in that history, to undo past wrongs,and to mend spoiled identities, so as to resume interrupted lives.

xvi SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS

Notes onContributors

Kevin Birth is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at QueensCollege, City University of New York. He is the author of Any Time is TrinidadTime: Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness (1999) as well as articles onTrinidadian music, kinship, and ethnicity.

Keith Bletzer completed formal training in medical anthropology and public health.His substantive interests include critical medical anthropology, social epidemiologyof risk behavior (substance use, HIV/AIDS, violence), and the long-term ethno-graphy of agricultural laborers. He has worked both within and outside academia,and conducted fieldwork inside and outside the United States. His writing rangesfrom publications on indigenous ethno-medicine and manifestation of folk illness,to HIV risk reduction and substance use among trans-national migrants, to socialadversity among commercial sex workers and violence against women. He was arecent recipient of a National Research Service Award through the Department ofAnthropology at Arizona State University, where he received training in advancedethnographic methods.

Erika Bourguignon is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology atOhio State University. Her major interests are in psychological anthropology andthe anthropology of women. Among her publications are Religion, Altered Statesof Consciousness, and Social Change (1973), Possession (1976, 1991), PsychologicalAnthropology (1979), A World of Women (1980) and (edited with Barbara Rigney)Exile: A Memoir of 1939 by Bronka Schneider (1998).

Conerly Casey is Assistant Professor in the anthropology and psychology programsat the American University of Kuwait. Based on research with Muslim Hausa youthsin northern Nigeria, she has published several articles and book chapters about thepolitics of identity and citizenship, media and mediated emotion, and violence,including “Suffering and the Identification of Enemies in Northern Nigeria” (PoLAR

1998); “‘Marginal Muslims’: Politics and the Perceptual Bounds of Islamic Authenti-city in Northern Nigeria” (Africa Today 2007); and “Mediated Hostility: Media,‘Affective Citizenships’ and Genocide in Northern Nigeria” in Genocide, Truth andRepresentation: Anthropological Approaches (2007), co-edited by Alexander LabanHinton and Kevin O’Neill.

Jennifer Cole is a cultural anthropologist and member of the Committee on HumanDevelopment at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on the socialand cultural construction of memory, including a book entitled Forget Colonialism?Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (2001). She is currently writing abook about youth, families, and the intimate bodily and moral politics of globalizationin urban Madagascar.

Christopher J. Colvin has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the Univer-sity of Virginia. His doctoral research examined the politics of traumatic storytellingwith a Cape Town support group for victims of apartheid-era political violence.After his Ph.D., he developed this work further as a postdoctoral fellow at ColumbiaUniversity’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society. Since returning to SouthAfrica, he has lectured in anthropology and public health at the Universities of CapeTown, Stellenbosch, and the Western Cape. He also consults in the areas ofHIV/AIDS, community-based care, and health systems development. His newresearch project focuses on two HIV/AIDS support groups in Cape Town, one ofwhich focuses exclusively on men taking ARVs. He has published numerous bookchapters and journal articles on trauma, violence, and memory.

René Devisch is Professor of Anthropology at the Catholic University of Louvainin Leuven, Belgium. A past coordinator there of the Africa Research Centre, and amember of the Belgian Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, and the Belgian Schoolof Psychoanalysis, he has published a number of books, including Weaving the Threadsof Life: The Khita Gynecological Healing Cult Among the Yaka (1993) and The Lawof the Life-Givers: The Domestication of Desire (1999). His major topics of interestconcern the relations between culture, cosmology, bodily and psychic symbolism,and symptom formation, and the management of misfortune and healing in BantuAfrican cults and Christian healing churches.

Robert B. Edgerton is a University Scholar and Professor of Anthropology at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles. A past president of the Society for Psycho-logical Anthropology, he has published a number of books in the field, includingThe Individual in Cultural Adaptation (1971), Alone Together (1979), Rules, Excep-tions and Social Order (1985), Sick Societies (1992), and Warrior Women (2000).

Katherine Pratt Ewing is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Religionat Duke University. Her publications include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psycho-analysis and Islam (1997) and numerous articles based on research in Pakistan, inTurkey, and among Muslim migrants in Europe, including “The Illusion of Whole-ness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency” (Ethos 1990), “LegislatingReligious Freedom: Muslim Challenges to the Relationship between ‘Church’ and

xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

‘State’ in Germany and France” (Daedalus 2000), and “Between Turkey and Germany:Living Islam in the Diaspora” (South Atlantic Quarterly 2003).

Atwood D. Gaines is Professor of Anthropology, Bioethics, Psychiatry, and Nursingin the College of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Medicine and Nursing ofCase Western Reserve University. A medical/psychiatric anthropologist with publichealth training, he has published a number of articles on ethnopsychiatry, theory inmedical anthropology, ethnicity, aging, and the cultural studies of science. He hasco-edited several volumes, with Robert Hahn, on Physicians of Western Medicine(1982, 1985) and edited Ethnopsychiatry (1992). He is currently finishing books onidentity in Alsace, the cultural studies of science, and theory in medical anthropology.

Linda C. Garro is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Univer-sity of California, Los Angeles. Recipient of the Stirling Award for Contributionsto Psychological Anthropology in 1999, she is co-author, with James C. Young, ofMedical Choice in a Mexican Village (1994) and co-editor, with Cheryl Mattingly,of Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (2000).

Patricia M. Greenfield is Professor of Psychology at the University of California,Los Angeles and founding Director of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research/UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. She has authored or co-authoreda number of books, including Studies in Cognitive Growth (1966, with Bruner, Oliver,et al.), The Structure of Communication in Early Language Development (1976, withJ. H. Smith), Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games and Computers(1984), and Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas(forthcoming).

Alexander Laban Hinton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers Univer-sity. He has published Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide(2005) and three edited volumes: Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions (1999),Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (2002), and Annihilating Difference: TheAnthropology of Genocide (2002).

Douglas Hollan is Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Luckman DistinguishedTeacher at the University of California, Los Angeles and an instructor at the SouthernCalifornia Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the co-author of Contentment and Suffering:Culture and Experience in Toraja (1994) and The Thread of Life: Toraja Reflectionson the Life Cycle (1996). Much of his published work examines the interface of cul-tural and psychological processes.

Charles Lindholm is University Professor of Anthropology at Boston University.His most recent books are The Islamic Middle East: Tradition and Change (2002),Culture and Identity: The History, Theory and Practice of Psychological Anthropology(2001), and (co-authored with John. A. Hall) Is America Breaking Apart? (1999).His book Charisma is available on-line at www.bu.edu/uni/faculty/publications/.He is presently working on a book on authenticity and modernity.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Daniel T. Linger is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,Santa Cruz. He has done ethnographic research in Brazil and Japan. His publishedworks include Dangerous Encounters: Meanings of Violence in a Brazilian City (1992),No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan (2001), and Anthropology Througha Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory (2005).

Margaret Lock is Marjorie Bronfman Professor in Social Studies in Medicine affiliatedwith the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of Anthro-pology at McGill University. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, receiveda Canada Council Izaak Killam Fellowship, was awarded the Prix Du Québec,domaine Sciences Humaines in 1997, and in 2002 the Canada Council for the ArtsMolson Prize. Her monographs include Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Meno-pause in Japan and North America (1993) and Twice Dead: Organ Transplants andthe Reinvention of Death (2002), both of which received prizes. She has edited orco-edited nine other books, including New Horizons in Medical Anthropology (2002),and written over 150 scholarly articles.

Setha M. Low is Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthropology andDirector of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center of the CityUniversity of New York. She is the author and/or editor of numerous articles andbooks, including Theorizing the City (1999), On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Spaceand Culture (2000), The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (2003,with D. Lawrence), and Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happinessin Fortress America (2003). Her most recent research with the Public Space ResearchGroup is a post 9/11 ethnography of Battery Park City, New York. Currently, sheis finishing a book on how to maintain cultural diversity in large urban parks andhistoric sites (Common Ground: The Cultural Life of Parks, forthcoming) as a fellowin residence at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Edward D. Lowe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Soka University ofAmerica. His publications include “A Widow, a Child, and Two Lineages: ExploringKinship and Attachment in Chuuk” (2002) and “Identity, Activity, and the Well-Being of Adolescents and Youths: Lessons from Young People in a MicronesianSociety” (forthcoming).

Catherine Lutz is Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. She is the authorof Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (2001). She hasalso co-authored Reading National Geographic with Jane Collins (1993), co-editedLanguage and the Politics of Emotion with Lila Abu-Lughod (1990), and writtenUnnatural Emotions (1988). She has conducted studies on militarization and ondomestic violence for activist organizations, including Micronesia as Strategic Colonyfor Cultural Survival and Making Soldiers in the Public Schools: An Analysis of theArmy JROTC Curriculum (with Lesley Bartlett) for the American Friends ServiceCommittee.

A. David Napier is Senior Lecturer in medical anthropology at University CollegeLondon. He is the author of three books on the cultural construction of the self:

xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Masks, Transformation and Paradox (1986), Foreign Bodies (1992), and The Ageof Immunology (2003). He has conducted fieldwork in Indonesia and India, and hasspent several years working with the homeless and with primary care doctors in ruralsettings. He is the founder and current Executive Director of Students of HumanEcology, a non-profit organization that sponsors mentor–apprentice learning oppor-tunities in the areas of medicine, the environment, and culture.

Elinor Ochs is Professor of Anthropology and Applied Linguistics, and Mac ArthurFellow (1998) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include Cul-ture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socializationin a Samoan Village (1988), Developmental Pragmatics (1979, co-edited withB. B. Shieffelin), Language Socialization across Cultures (1986), Interaction andGrammar (1996, co-edited with E. Schegloff and S. A. Thompson), and withL. Capps: Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia (1995) and LivingNarrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (2001).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley. She has conducted field research on madness among bachelorfarmers in rural Ireland; AIDS and human rights in Cuba; death squads and streetkids; mother love and child death in the shantytowns of Brazil; popular justice inSouth African squatter camps; and invisible genocides among street kids in Braziland native Californians. A so-called militant anthropologist, she focuses in her writ-ings on suffering, violence, and death as they are experienced on the margins of thethird world. She is completing a book based on a ten-year, multi-sited study of theglobal traffic in “fresh” organs procured from desperate kidney sellers for affluenttransplant tourists, an uncivil practice she views as a form of sacrificial violence.

Don Seeman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and the Institutefor Jewish Studies at Emory University. A former NIMH post-doctoral fellow inclinically relevant medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School, his recent researchfocuses on social suffering in ethnographic contexts and on ritual as a mediator ofsocial experience, as well as religion and public health. “Otherwise than Meaning:On the Generosity of Ritual” (Social Analysis 2004) and “Violence, Ethics andDivine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought” (JAAR 2005) appeared recently. Hisethnography Tainted Hearts: On Moral Experience, Religious Transformation andthe Politics of Exclusion in Contemporary Israel is forthcoming.

Olga Solomon is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles. She brings together her graduate training inapplied linguistics and clinical psychology to examine discourse competence ofchildren with autistic spectrum disorder to participate in everyday narrative activitywith family members. She is a guest co-editor with Elinor Ochs of a special issue,Discourse and Autism, of the journal Discourse Studies (forthcoming). She is currentlythe director of the UCLA Ethnography of Autism Project on the everyday lives ofhigh functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders.

Howard F. Stein, a psychoanalytic anthropologist, is a Professor in the Departmentof Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi

Center. A past president of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology, he isthe author of 22 books, including Listening Deeply (1994), Euphemism, Spin, andthe Crisis in Organizational Life (1998), Nothing Personal, Just Business: A GuidedJourney into Organizational Darkness (2001), and Beneath the Crust of Culture:Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Cultural Unconscious in American Life (2003).

Thomas S. Weisner is Professor of Anthropology, Departments of Psychiatry (NPISemel Institute, Center for Culture and Health) and Anthropology at the Universityof California, Los Angeles. His research and teaching interests are culture and humandevelopment; medical, psychological and cultural studies of families and children atrisk; mixed methods; and evidence-informed policy. His publications include HigherGround: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (2007), co-authoredwith Greg Duncan and Aletha Huston; Making it Work: Low-Wage Employment,Family Life and Child Development (2006), co-edited with Hiro Yoshikawa andEdward Lowe; Discovering Successful Pathways in Children’s Development: New Methodsin the Study of Childhood and Family Life (2005); and African Families and theCrisis of Social Change (1997), co-edited with Candice Bradley and Phil Kilbride.He is currently President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Geoffrey White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii andAdjunct Senior Fellow at the East-West Center. His publications include PerilousMemories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (2001, co-editor), New Directions in PsychologicalAnthropology (1992, co-editor), Identity Through History: Living Stories in aSolomon Islands Society (1991), and Person, Self and Experience: Exploring PacificEthnopsychologies (1985, co-editor). He served as president of the Society for Psycho-logical Anthropology 2001–2003.

Susan Reynolds Whyte, a Professor at the Institute of Anthropology, Universityof Copenhagen, has done research in the areas of misfortune, health, disability,medicines, and international development. She has co-edited two books, The SocialContext of Medicines in Developing Countries (1988) and Disability and Culture(1995), written a monograph, Questioning Misfortune (1997), and co-authored SocialLives of Medicines (2003).

Jim Wilce is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University and has alsoserved as Visiting Lecturer at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.He is the author of Eloquence in Trouble: Poetics and Politics of Complaint in RuralBangladesh (1998) and Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity and the ExaggeratedDeath of Lament (Blackwell, in press). He is the editor of the book series, BlackwellStudies in Discourse and Culture, and of the book, Social and Cultural Lives ofImmune Systems (2003). Wilce has published articles related to language and emo-tion in Current Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Comparative Studiesin Society and History, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and Ethos, and is writing anew book on the subject.

Michael Winkelman is Director of the Ethnographic Field School and Head ofthe Sociocultural Subdiscipline, Department of Anthropology at Arizona State

xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

University. He is the author of several books, including Shamans, Priests and Witches(1992), Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing (2000), andEthnic Relations in the US (1998). He has recently examined the role of shamanismas part of an evolved human psychology in “Shamanic universals and evolutionarypsychology” (Journal of Ritual Studies 2002) and the applications of shamanismto contemporary health problems, particularly addiction, in “Alternative and tradi-tional medicine approaches for substance abuse programs: A shamanic perspective”(International Journal of Drug Policy, 2001) and “Complementary therapy foraddiction: ‘Drumming out drugs’” (American Journal of Public Health 2003). Hiswebsite is at www.public.asu.edu/~atmxw.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

Acknowledgments

We offer our heartfelt thanks to all of the volume’s contributors, many of whomhave provided valuable advice and suggestions along the way, and to our anony-mous reviewers. The volume would not have been conceived or produced withoutJane Huber’s editorial guidance, laced with her unwavering perseverance, diplo-macy, and charm. For the loving indulgence of our families and friends, Conerlythanks Carole and Michael Landon, Andrew Wilson, Margaret Ostermann, LeliaCasey, and Carolina Izquierdo. Bob thanks his wife Karen Ito. We both thankKristen Hatch for her editorial assistance in pulling the manuscript together.

INTRODUCTION 1

Introduction

Within the past two decades, planetary computerization, burgeoning media industries,and other global processes have significantly altered the ways in which individualsexperience local and global, interdependent, cultural communities. Individuals, andthe emerging or dissolving communities to which they belong, enter dialogical, oftenparadoxical relations. While scholars from many fields question these life changes, thisanthology demonstrates the vitality and relevance of psychocultural approaches thatemerge through the sub-field of psychological anthropology. Psychological anthro-pology, or the study of individuals and their sociocultural communities, helps usto understand what Jackson (1998: 21) refers to as “the many refractions of the coreexperience that we are at one and the same time part of a singular, particular, andfinite world and caught up in a wider world whose horizons are effectively infinite.”While critiques of ethnocentrism have brought attention to the politics of identity andequality, as well as to the mutual recognitions and attunements that are necessaryfor coexistence, the relationship and balance of the particular and the universal, theindividual and the global, as examined through various life processes, vary dramatic-ally among individuals and across communities. Psychological anthropologists bringunique approaches to these dynamic relations. Ethnopsychological research, in-depthcase studies, studies of transference and counter-transference, person-centered ethno-graphies, and ethnographies of communication, enable psychological anthropologiststo draw out the experiential lives of subjects and informants who shape, and are shapedby, their communities.

Psychological anthropology, which marked the birth of American anthropology,has been credited with early attention to racism and ethnocentrism, while simul-taneously discredited for developing cultural and national stereotypes. Part of ourrevisionist approach to the historical, theoretical genealogy of psychological anthropo-logy is to chart the ambivalence with which scholars have viewed the linking of people’s“psychologies” with their sociocultural communities. This ambivalence emerged outof critiques of imperialism, colonialism, Social Darwinism, capitalism, and develop-ment industries, all of which have supported the production of “psychologically

2 INTRODUCTION

underdeveloped” cultural communities as objects for modern intervention. Not sur-prisingly, ambivalence about the relationship between the particular and the univer-sal has been poignant during major world crises and events – World War II and itsaftermath, during the 1960s and 1970s decolonizations, civil rights’ and women’smovements, and in the 1990s with increased attention to the inequities of globalcultural economies. During these periods of rapid social change, rich concepts of the“individual,” the “self,” an “authoring self,” a “person,” and “intersubjective selves”– self-formations that are embedded in social realms of meaning and significance– have been attached to thin or poorly understood notions of power, agency, andchanging sociocultural communities.

Critiques of psychocultural studies tend to oscillate between those of totalizationand Euro-American centrism, to those of extreme dialogism, where heteroglossiaand polynarrative supposedly make it difficult to hear or to interpret the experiencesof individuals. Within this range of critique, scholars have widely accepted socialspeech and visible bodily practice as ways to understand others, while intrapsychicprocesses such as Freud’s unconscious motivations or Bakhtin’s (1981) “inner speech,”speech directed toward oneself, have been considered impossible to study acrosscultures, or racialized and “othered” in such a way as to be unthinkable, evenunknowable.

In his 1935 preface to Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, Franz Boas wrote:“It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life ofthe southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companionsof her childhood. Thus she has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanorby which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating inhis true inner life” (Hurston 1935: xiii). A conscious champion of cultural differenceand anti-racism, Boas, like many other psychological anthropologists, nonethelesslived within racist, segregated academic and political, cultural communities.

It was not until the late 1950s and 1960s that scholars in psychological anthropo-logy and psychology began to address the connections between racism, ethnocentrism,and psychology, and the sociohistorical ruptures that make listening to the “innerlives” of others so profoundly difficult. However, listening has never been enough.As many scholars show, intersubjectivity is not simply the dialectic of conceptualintentions, but it is lived through our bodies and our five senses (Fanon 1963,1967; Jackson 1998; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Stoller 1995). It is marked by consciousperspectives, intentions, and attunements, and by those less conscious, unconscious,or habitual (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994; Obeyesekere 1981); it is neither well-integrated neurophysiologically nor consonant, so that persons may perceive andrelate the same occurrence, yet experience and remember it differently. We also witnesshuman consciousness shift among diverse senses of self, from ontologically secureand whole, to selves that are “epidermalized,” anxious, fragmented, or engulfed (Casey1997; Fanon 1963, 1967; Laing 1969), to those that integrate many different selves(Ewing 1990; Holland et al. 1998). We now recognize as many selves as peoplewho recognize us and who engage us in their thoughts, words, or actions (Goffman1959; Jackson 1998). We note the temporal and spatial dimensions of self and otherrecognitions, sometimes drawing ourselves into synchronicity with global culturalcommunities or sharply diverging in our perceptions, cognition, or memory. Whilemany theorists describe intersubjectivity and dialogism as mere styles of representation,