Culture and the Individual Early Anthropological Work

Culture and the Individual

• Early Anthropological Work

Racism and Stereotypes

• There were two general approaches to understanding diversity prior to the turn of the twentieth century:

• 1. Individual characteristics are a result of innate traits that are inherited from ancestors; similarities between individuals within a society are due to common ancestry = Racism

• 2. Individuals in a society are alike because they grow up under the same cultural situations, and can be described accurately using broad stereotypes = National character stereotypes.

Eg. Emanuel Kant & Stereotypes

• According to Kant (1789), Germans are:

• Homeloving

• Solid

• Intelligent but lacking brilliance

• Industrious

• Cleanly

• Capable

• Lacking in wit

• Lacking in taste

• Overmethodical

• Pedantic

• Orderly

• Docile under government

Early Work

• Sigmund Freud

• Bronislaw Malinowski

• Margaret Mead

• Edward Sapir

• The New Freudians (Erikson, Gorer, Roheim)

• Abram Kardiner

• Cora DuBois

• Ruth Benedict

Freud: The Oedipal Complex

• Boys are sexually attracted to their mothers.

• Boys resent and are jealous of their father’s sexual access to their mothers.

• Boys also love their fathers and need their fathers love, creating a love/hate relationship.

• Boys dream about conflict with their fathers, including murdering their fathers to gain sexual access to their mothers.

• Normal, healthy development demands that boys resolve their jealousy and aggressive feelings toward their fathers, and give up sexual fantasies about their mothers.

Malinowski’s Challenge

• Who: Bronislaw Malinowski

• Where: The Trobriand Islands

• What: A natural experiment

• Concepts:

• Patrilineality vs Matrilineality

• Fathers vs Maternal Uncles

• Sexuality vs Authority

• Evidence vs Interpretation

The Trobriand Islands

What Is a Standard Kinship Diagram?

• A standard kinship diagram has two of each type of relative EGO can have, one that is male and one that is female. As a result, standard kinship diagram does not have the complexity of most real family diagrams. A standard kinship diagram is shown below. Notice that EGO’s parents each have two siblings, one sister and one brother. Likewise each of these has two children, one male and one female.

What is a Patrilineage?

• The diagram below show all relatives in EGO’s patrilineage in blue. Notice that if a person is in EGO’s patrilineage, all siblings of that person are also in EGO’s patrilineage. EGO’s mother is not part of his patrilineage, nor are any of her family members. His mother is part of another patrilineage that includes 3, 10, 12, 13, 23 and 24.

Patrilineal Inheritance of Property

• The diagram below shows how property is typically inherited in a patrilineal system. The blue lines show how inheritance moves from one male individual in a generation to male individuals in succeeding generations.

What is a Matrilineage?

• The diagram below show all relatives in EGO’s matrilineage in pink. Notice that if a person is in EGO’s matrilineage, all siblings of that person are also in EGO’s patrilineage. EGO’s father is not part of his matrilineage, nor are any of his family members. His father is part of another matrilineage that includes 2, 6, 7, 9, 15 and 16.

Matrilineal Inheritance of Property

• The diagram below shows how property is typically inherited in a matrilineal system. Notice that females are the links that connect men who will inherit. The pink lines show how inheritance moves from one male individual in a generation to male individuals in succeeding generations. Women do not typically manage property, even in a matrilineal system.

Mother’s Brother in Matrilineages

• In matrilineal societies, EGO’s mother’s brother is a very important relative, because he is the one who controls the property that EGO will inherit. EGO is the mother’s brother of his sister’s son(s).

• EGO will therefore manage his matrilineage’s property for his sister’s sons to inherit. EGO’s own children will not inherit from him. They will inherit from their mother’s (EGO’s future wife’s) brother(s).

Malinowski’s Findings

• From Sex and Repression in Savage Society

• 1. Trobrianders are well-adjusted and lacking in obvious “perversions and neuroses.”

• Boys reported no sexual dreams about mothers.

• Boys reported some sexual dreams about sisters.

• There are no Oedipal legends in Trobriand folklore.

• Brother-sister incest is a recurring theme in Trobriand folklore.

• There is no reported mother-son incest.

• Some brother-sister cases of incest are reported.

• Boys reported no negative feelings toward fathers or dreams about conflict with fathers; they reported warm, loving relationships.

• Boys reported hostility and hostile dreams involving their maternal uncles.

Malinowski’s Conclusions

• This society shows no evidence that would support the presence of the Oedipal Complex.

• The absence of evidence for the Oedipal Complex in Trobriand society means that it cannot be a universal part of human male development.

The Freudian Response

• The Trobriand maternal uncle and sister symbolized the father and the mother respectively.

• Anthropologists lacked the psychoanalytic skill to identify the Oedipal Complex.

• Denial in anthropologists caused them to suppress recognition of the Oedipal Complex.

Margaret Mead

• The Nature of Adolescence in Samoa

• Gender Differences in New Guinea

• Child Development in Bali

• Childhood Cognition in New Guinea

The South Pacific

Mead and Samoan Adolescence

• American adolescence is a turbulent and difficult time characterized by rebellion and experimentation with sex.

• Samoan adolescence is not a time of rebellion and young people do not find the transition to adulthood difficult. Sexuality is not treated as a taboo subject in Samoa and is not a source of rebellion.

Mead: Gender Differences in New Guinea

• Three different cultural groups in the Sepik region of New Guinea:

• Arapesh Society– both men and women were gentle, responsive and cooperative.

• Tchambuli Society– men were gentle and dependent while women were dominant and impersonal.

• Mundugumor Society– both men and women were aggressive, violent and power seeking.

• Western ideas about gender traits were contradicted by all three societies, and therefore cannot be universal.

Indonesia

Mead: Childhood in Bali

• Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson using field notes, still photos and the first use of film and participant drawings to record culture.

• Documented teaching and learning, and child care such as bathing practices that they believed shaped personality.

Mead: Childhood Cognition

• Animism = the belief that objects, plants and animals have spirits and can take purposeful action through this spirit. All things have a supernatural/magical component.

• In Western culture, children think animistically while adults do not.

• In Pere Village on Manus in New Guinea adult belief systems were very animistic.

• Mead hypothesized that children should also think animistically as Western children do.

• 35,000 children’s drawings were collected.

• Children depicted realistic things in their drawings, not supernatural things and their animistic thinking increased as they grew older.

• This was the reverse of what happened in Western society, and therefore animistic thinking in children was shown NOT to be a universal trait.

Edward Sapir

• Early proponent of studying the relationship between culture and personality through “psycholinguistics”.

• Hosted the first academic seminars on culture and personality at Yale University in 1930.

• Believed that language was an influential shaper of personality as grammatical structures and vocabulary shape thought.

The Neo Freudians

• Erik Erikson studied the impact of child-rearing on adult personality in the Sioux.

• Cradleboarding caused great frustration that resulted in suppressed rage that translated into adult cruelty, aggression, and ritualized self torture for warriors.

• Geoffrey Gorrer studied swaddling of Russian peasant children resulting in generalized rage combined with guilt for feelings against parents that resulted in alcoholism and religiosity.

The Neo Freudians

• Geza Roheim used the Oedipal Complex to explain agricultural practices.

• - Trobriand boys jammed phallic shaped yams into the earth in their frustration over oedipal issues, and when yams grew, the society began to plant food crops.

• - Clearing forest for gardens with axes was a metaphor for father castration.

• - Egyptian ploughs “penetrated” the earth, and the ox that was used to pull it was a castrated animal.

Abram Kardiner

• A Neo Freudian who dropped the Oedipal focus.

• Inferred from cultural information that there was a “basic personality structure” for every culture” based on:

• 1. Primary Institutions = shape basic personality structures (child rearing institutions that discipline, inhibit, gratify children)

• 2. Secondary Institutions = result from basic personality structures (religion, taboosystems, rituals, folktales) and satisfy needs & tensions created in the individual by primary institutions and shape primary institutions.

Abram Kardiner

Cora DuBois

• Fieldwork on Alor Island in Indonesia

• Derived the concept of “modal personality” from test data (most common personality traits).

• Data was biographies, dreams, children’s drawings and projective tests.

• Blind analysis of projectives by two individuals.

• Personality characteristics: suspicious, sneaky, insecure, apathetic.

• Babies abandoned in the village each day while the mother goes to work in the fields, fed only while the women were in village.

Ruth Benedict

• Patterns of Culture (Southwestern Zuni, Northwest Coast Kwakiutl, Melanesian Dobu) Configurations of personality traits

• The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Japanese) National Character