11 Culture and Personality studies: Spiro, Mary Doughlas, A. Kleinman, A.F.C. Wallace

Dharna Sahay

Contents

Introduction

1. Mary Douglas

2.  Arthur Kleinman

3. Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace

4.  Melford Spiro

Learning Outcomes

• To develop an understanding about the concept of culture and personality
• To gain knowledge about the beliefs and views of the schools of thought associated with the topic
• To know about the contributions made by different scholars
• To know about the theories and concepts propounded by the scholars related to the topic

Introduction

From the basic personality structure approach to the new culture and personality studies, all played important role in anthropology. These studies showed the new themes for developing the culture and personality in terms of psychology, religion, social and economic backgrounds. Basic personality structure approach developed by the Kardiner and Ralph Linton offered a new approach to look at members or individual members within a society and compares in order to achieve a basic personality for each culture, whereas configurational approach by Edward Sapir and Benedict developed the early school for the basic personality and culture. This approach also displayed personalities and patterns within a culture would be linked by symbolism and interpretation. Then cultural determinism also emphasizes on knowledge, belief, norms and customs which shape human thoughts and behaviour. Besides this ethnography also plays major role to study empirical data on a culture and society. Also Gestalt theory gives an idea to studied the whole unit rather than in parts. In the developing notion of culture and personality, Cora-du-bois explained the model personality approach to utilize in society and culture. She defines personality that is statistically the most certain in a society. She also modified her idea which has based on assumption of “psychic unity of mankind”. Lastly National character studies began after the World War II. Ruth Benedict and Margaret mead attempted the new concept of different peoples. Both the anthropologists were best in explaining the patterns of culture and personality. But most national characters studies have been heavily criticized as being unanthropological for being too general and having no ethnographic field work incorporated in it. Culture and personality studies have greatly explained in the early part of the century. This module basically deals with new culture and personality studies by Mary Douglas, Arthur Kleinman, Anthony F.C. Wallace, Melford Spiro. These anthropologists highlighted the culture and personality by adding psychology as new theme in it. Mary Douglas talks of enculturation which compels new generation to reproduce to established lifestyle. She also highlighted the group and grid views to deal with cultural bias. Arthur Kleinman addressed significant attention to the interaction of culture and mental illness. Wallace makes out of certain ethno historical data pertaining to work America Indian acculturation will probably count in future anthropology. He also talks about the revitalization process phases of revitalization movement. Melford Spiro emphasizes on the theoretical importance of unconscious desires and beliefs in the study of stability and change in social and cultural systems, particularly in respect to the family, political and religion. Though these studies, a new emphasizes on the individual emerged and one of the links between anthropology and psychology was made. From the culture and personality, psychological anthropology developed in small but still prevail or active in today’s world. After this four anthropologist contribution are given in detail.

1.   Mary Douglas (1921-2007)

Mary Douglas was a British anthropologist, she was follower of Emile Durkheim and proponent of structuralist analysis with a strong interest in comparative analysis of religion. According to her culture theory, culture is based on the uniquely human experiences encode such classification symbolically and teach such abstractions with others.

According to Douglas, variation in social participation can be adequately accounted for by the dynamics
between group and grip (two dimensions).

All these are world views but the risk of perception is about the nature or attitudes about nature. All the people views are different about the nature or how to handle the nature.

To sum up cultural theory, central part of the cultural theory draws focus away from risk and safety, towards
social institutions. According to Thompson et.al people feel need to justify their own way of life. Wildavsky and
Dake (1990) sum up the cultural theory that individual are active organizers of their own perception, who choose what to fear and how much to fear it. According to Dake (1991), three different ways of life can predict the broad pattern risk of perception but fatalism is not reported to have been tested empirically in these studies.

2. Arthur kleinman

A number of prominent psychological anthropologist have addressed significant attention to the interaction of culture and mental illness. A.kleinman is a prominent American psychiatrist and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb professor of medical anthropology and cross cultural psychiatry at Harvard University in USA. He is well
known for this work on mental illness in Chinese culture. He worked on depression, somatization, epilepsy,
schizophrenia, and suicide and other forms of violence. He worked on ‘cross cultural psychiatry’ in 1977 and
published his seminal article on ‘new cross cultural psychiatry’. According to him, culture and personality had
emerged in North America anthropology in the 1930’s and continued into the 1960’s.

Advanced model (1977) of somatization as culturally shaped illness behaviour could account for some of the
distinctive patterns of depressive experience in china. He was also interested in psychopathology or
interpersonal dynamics and more concentrated with developing in a rich sense of the socio-political context and moral predicament of patients and suffers.

In the cultural and personality school of psychological anthropology that influenced the ‘old cross cultural
psychiatry’, the assumption was that were strong parallels between social structures, ways of life and individual
style of thinking and feeling. According to Kupler (1999), culture is not only a matter of individual knowledge,
beliefs and attitudes but involves larger configuration of rules, regulations and practices.

In the cultural and personality school of psychological anthropology that influenced the ‘old cross cultural psychiatry’, the assumption was that were strong parallels between social structures, ways of life and individual style of thinking and feeling. According to Kupler (1999), culture is not only a matter of individual knowledge, beliefs and attitudes but involves larger configuration of rules, regulations and practices.

In the cultural and personality school of psychological anthropology that influenced the ‘old cross cultural

psychiatry’, the assumption was that were strong parallels between social structures, ways of life and individual
style of thinking and feeling. According to Kupler (1999), culture is not only a matter of individual knowledge,
beliefs and attitudes but involves larger configuration of rules, regulations and practices.

Now the ‘new cultural psychiatry’ leads to change in people and their perspectives. Mix of traditions contributes to the distinctiveness among the local world. Global forces have processes and give rise to new mobile social world.

• Changes in political, economic and social world.
• Migration also changed the culture into mix culture.
• Psychiatry itself is an agent of globalization.

According to Kleinman psychiatry called a serious engagement that must be renewed in each generation. Culture psychiatry illustrates the interdisciplinary approach and advances in cognitive science and discursive psychology offers ways to approach psychopathology as shaped by discourse and emergent from interpersonal interaction with family and community. Globalization demands new ways of thinking about culture in terms of hybridisation, turbulence and virtual exchange.

Importance of new cross cultural psychiatry:

It can help to explore rapid changing environment through its forces on the lived experience of individual in moments of crisis and healing or of adaptation and resilience in the face of persisting adversity.

3. Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace (AFC Wallace)

Anthony Wallace is a Canadian-American Anthropologist who specializes in Native American culture especially the Iroquois. He born in Toronto, Ontario in 1923, the son of the historian Paul Wallace and did both undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. Wallace was one of the most influential American anthropologist of the modern era. Besides the culture and personality, he discussed mental maps that join personalities with cultures. He also highlighted on culture, conduct everyday life, illness issue, and cultural stress. His theories, concept and fieldwork continue to challenge scholars across disciplines, including anthropologists, sociologists, historians and theologians.

Major works:

-1952, the modal personality structure of the Tuscarora Indians as revealed by the Rorschach test

-1961, culture and personality

-1966, religion: an anthropological view.

Anthony Wallace (1952) work with the Tuscarora demonstrates how the Rorschach test and appropriate statistical procedures allow a strictly model personality type to be conducted. The term ‘model personality’ used before Wallace but there was substantial difference between usages. Wallace sampled deliberately and his work deals with true model types. If culture and personality have usually been with true model type according to him, if culture and personality have usually been delineating ideal type, their does not follow that certain criticism of national-characteristics studies must be reconsidered? In 1955-1956, he makes out of certain ethno historical data pertaining to North America Indian acculturation will probably count in future anthropology. He introduced the “concept of revitalization” to designate the psychological process that operate in process that operate in persons during certain kinds if nativist movements and these movements can be interpreted in psychological terms quite meaningfully.

Theory of revitalization describes procession phases of revitalization movement. Revitalization movements like reform movement, cargo cults, messianic movement, social movement, revolution, etc.

Process of revitalization includes:

1. A steady state

2. A period of individual stress

3. A period of cultural distortion

4. A period of revitalization 

Within revitalization six major tasks occurs:

1. ‘maze way’ reformation

2. Communication to others

3. Organization of followers

4. Adaptation of contention and conflict

5. Cultural transformation

6. Routinization of the new culture systems

When these tasks occur, revitalization creates a new steady state. Revitalization seeks to receive traditional culture, they import a foreign cultural system.

Strength and limitation of revitalization by Wallace:

Strength- It provides the model though which change can be perceived from the animistic to the Christian, as well as Christian to any other.

Limitations-

1. No-conception about the active god working in us to defeat the powers of Satan that radiate out of animistic systems.

2.  Wallace conceives of all religious system as neutral. This is rejected by the critiques.

3.  Wallace model talks of cultural process but not about fundamental changes occurs within the cultures.

Over the years people look for vary out, for some way to restore a move satisfactory culture. Some people “succeed” in effecting rather norms base, personal “solutions” for their stress through such behaviour alcoholism or neurosis. War and changes in political leadership are also tried and new economic doctrines are advanced but generally without much success. At one point a prophetic leader appears. He announces the solutions that came to him, perhaps from a divine source. At this point, assuming the leader is indeed heeded, revitalization sets in as order is restored in the community world of meaning. Prophet shows an intense concern for cultural reforms. Wallace looks at prophet personality re synthesize. When the prophet’s stress reaches a critical point the “physiochemical motives for resynthesis are automatically established”. Wallace’s work is notable for the courageous way in which he attempts for to fuse social and physiological level of analysis. He opens himself to the change of being reductionist that is of explaining phenomenon on one level by phenomena belonging to another system of events. Many people’s critism carries little weight, provide that the explanation which offered really explains what is being studied. Wallace used ethno historical data in pursuing personality studies.

4. Melford Spiro (1920 – 2014)

Spiro was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology. His critiques of the pillars of contemporary anthropological theory include the wholesale cultural determinism, radical cultural relativism, and virtually limitless cultural diversity. His emphasis on the theoretical importance of unconscious desires and beliefs in the study of stability and change in social and cultural systems, particularly in respect to the family, politics, and religion explicated in numerous theoretical publications They are empirically exemplified in monographs based on his fieldwork in Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia, an Israeli kibbutz, and a village in Burma (now Myanmar). He was a significant figure in a series of debates over cultural relativism and postmodern theory among American cultural anthropologists in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which he consistently argued for the importance of the comparative method and the appreciation of universal cultural and psychological processes. Melford Spiro’s work has attracted the attention of a wide audience. His approach to the subject is stimulated by Melford E. Spiro’s view on human nature and the relationship between religion and personality, which seems to offers an excellent framework for the development of a holistic, evolutionary, and pan human understanding of ritual trance. On ‘systems of meaning’, came to dominate anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s and ‘culture and personality’ gave way to the larger and more inclusive project of psychological anthropology. In 1951 Melford Spiro had argued that the person is not merely conditioned by culture, rather culture is incorporated into the individual via the psychodynamic processes of identification and internalization. When we talk of contemporary theorists to discuss culture and personality, they are likely to attempt to integrate ideas such as Spiro’s with a model of cognitive functioning, for example that offered by schema theory (see Andrade 1990).One of the reason for his influence is suggested by his statement that “my intellectual interests has always been more philosophical than scientific and for the anthropology has been the handmaiden of philosophy, a tool for the empirical investigation of some central issues concerning the “nature of man”. Spiro always address fundamental questions and never shines away from taking controversial positions. Perhaps the most important issues he has dealt with the nature/nurture. For most of its history, American anthropology has taken an extreme environmental or cultural determinist positions, emphasizing a great degree of human plasticity, a broad range of cultural diversity, and uniqueness of every society. While the mainstream of cultural anthropology was moving toward an increasing relatives and idiographic approach with a “new ethnography it focused on the “nature’s viewpoint” and humanistic “interpretation of culture”.

Spiro was moving in the opposite direction, toward a more nomothetic and scientific approach. In the Burmese supernaturalism (1978), he characterized the “emic” approach as “intellectual trivial” and outlined an “unabashedly etic” approach in which “a narrow range of common psychological needs” (human nature) is satisfied by a “wide range of diverse forms”. Spiro has borrowed several terms from other disciplines to conceptualize those relationship between human nature and cultural variations. Cultural determinism led to an increasingly central bias in anthropology, which is apparent in the recent schools of structuralism, symbolic anthropology, and ethno science, but Spiro’s psychology is much boarder and encompasses “needs, values, and executive-response processes, he has always emphasized panhuman needs and drives such a sex and dependency, which often conflict with societal values and must be repressed and canalized into institutionalized roles and setting such as shamanism and ritual. Spiro’s career began at the height in popularity of culture and personality studies and psychoanalytic theory, and he steadfastly followed them even after they had come under

serious attack and had been abandoned by many colleagues. Spiro’s approach to study of religion is largely psychological, and one of his interests has been the relationship between the conscious and public knowledge of religion tradition and the private and unconscious aspects of individual faith. Spiro believes that religion not only explain but attempts to reduce or overcome suffering. He makes a distinction between religion-in-belief and religion-individual are sometimes spontaneously “taken away by the spirit”, but the normal routs is to follow some prescribed rituals for “getting in the spirit”.

Taxonomy of ways of getting in the spirit

References:

• McGee, J.R. & Warms, R.L. (2008), Anthropological theory: An introductory history. New York. McGraw Hill.
• Barnard, A., & Spencer, J. (2002). Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology. London. England: Rout ledge.
• Hsu, Francis L.K. 1961. Psychological anthropology: approaches to culture & personality.