Psychological anthropology: what it is and what this discipline studies

Broadly speaking, anthropology is the science that studies the human being within a community. It arose at the end of the 19th century and, as with most disciplines that cover a very wide area, wide range of knowledge, it soon split into various branches that sought to perfect the object of its study.

Today we are going to talk about psychological anthropology, the most recent branch of anthropological studies.

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What is psychological anthropology?

Psychological anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies the relationship between human psychology and individual behavior within sociocultural structures.

Its main objective is to discover common behaviors in all human beings, beyond the cultural realities that surround them. To do this, psychological anthropology combines elements of anthropology itself with elements from psychology studies, such as psychoanalysis.

It is necessary to establish what are the main differences between anthropology and psychology. Broadly speaking, we can say that, while the first one is dedicated to the

study of the human being as an element inserted in a community, psychology usually focuses on the study of the human being as an individual.

However, at the beginning of the 20th century, some anthropologists realized the possibilities offered by combination of anthropological studies with the novel theories of psychoanalysis, developed by a certain Sigmund Freud. Let's see it next.

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The origin of psychological anthropology: criticism of Sigmund Freud

In 1913 he appears totem and taboo, one of the first works of Sigmund Freud, whose shocking subtitle Some Concordances in the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics he revolutionized the panorama of anthropology, by including psychoanalysis in the study of cultures. The central idea of ​​this essay (now largely superseded) is that one could apply a kind of analogy between the development of primitive communities and the psychic development of the individual.

The main thesis of the work revolves around the emergence of the totem and the taboo, whose origin places Freud in the tyranny of an "alpha male" whom the rest of the men in the community would hate and, finally, they would kill him, with the feeling of guilt that the act would entail after.

Such a theory was highly revolutionary for the time (we are talking about 1913), and it did not take long for them to appear. criticism of Freudian postulates. In these critiques we must situate the origin of psychological anthropology.

For example, Franz Boas (1858-1942), a noted American anthropologist of German-Jewish origin, was extraordinarily critical of Freudian psychoanalysis, despite the fact that he himself became interested in psychology. No less critical was Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) who, in his work The sexual life of the savages of northwestern Melanesia (1929), he criticized the universality of the Oedipus complex, which Freud had so much claimed.

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Through data extracted from field studies, Malinowski demonstrated that this complex, according to which the child desires the "death" of the father in order to gain access to the mother, did not occur in all cultures. The basis of this British anthropologist's criticism is that the Oedipus complex, as Freud put it, needed a patrilineal monogamous family structure to develop, something that, obviously, does not occur in all cultures of the world. world.

In any case, it cannot be concluded that Malinowski, as well as other anthropologists who were critical of psychoanalysis, were completely against its use in the field anthropological; rather what they wanted is that the social and cultural realities of the different human communities be taken into account. They were clear that psychoanalysis could be very useful for anthropology; Freud's mistake had been, mainly, to start from a strictly and essentially European vision and extend it to the rest of the world.

In short, we can conclude that, despite the fact that there were already certain pre-Freudian currents that claimed the union between psychology and anthropology, it was not until the appearance and diffusion of Freud's ideas that this trend became general, precisely through criticism of his work.

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Universal principles… do they exist?

We have already commented at the beginning that one of the objectives of psychological anthropology is to discover common behaviors in human beings, whatever the culture in which they are immersed. Throughout the 20th century, many anthropologists investigated and conducted numerous field studies to unravel whether, indeed, certain common behaviors could be extracted that were the product of the human psyche rather than the culture in which the individual.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978), in his studio Coming of age in Samoa, tried to clarify if the famous adolescent rebellion was common in all cultures or if, on the contrary, it was a particularly Western phenomenon. The result was surprising: Samoan adolescents did not experience this period in such a traumatic way, among other things, because from an early age they were openly talked about death or sex. Apparently, this more "natural" relationship with the world prevented inhibitions and doubts from building up in the child, or at least not forming them in the same amount as a Western adolescent. Mead's study, which wondered about the universality of adolescence, is a very clear example of where psychological anthropology intends to go.

In general, the first psychological anthropologists agreed with the Freudian proposals that held that the foundations of mental development occur in childhood. To this they added the capital importance that culture has in the whole process. Thus, throughout the 20th century, studies were carried out that thoroughly analyzed all the stages of this human period (the breastfeeding, weaning, sibling rivalry...) and, above all, how they developed in the various manifestations cultural.

Anthropology and psychology finally shake hands

The apparent rivalry between anthropology and psychology and the disagreements that had led to the first decades of the 20th century had a "happy ending" in 1937, when, at Columbia University (USA), they began to to impart interdisciplinary seminars that tried to unite both sciences for an effective collaboration. Abraham Kardiner (1891-1981), who combined notions of psychiatry and anthropology to his credit, played a major role in this meeting.

Kardiner had personally met Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the 1920s, so his contact with psychoanalysis had been intense. He was keenly interested in how the human personality was constructed and, above all, in how culture and personality were related. Aware of the need to unite both disciplines, in 1937 he created the aforementioned seminar, with the aim of reaching conclusions jointly. Some anthropologists who worked together with Kardiner were Ruth Bunzel (1898-1990), who carried out, among others, a comparative study of alcoholism in Guatemala and Mexico, Cora du Bois (1903-1991) and Ralph Linton (1893-1953).

What is essential in the work of Abraham Kardiner is that he applies the technique of psychoanalysis to the results obtained through anthropological fieldwork. Kardiner distinguished between "primary institutions" from "secondary" ones; the former would be, for example, subsistence techniques and family organization, while the latter would be made up of elements such as religion or art. Both one and the other would profoundly influence the child and mark the development of his personality, and the changes exerted in the primary institutions would mean a change in the secondary ones.

The new era of psychological anthropology

In the 1950s something was changing. The methodology used by the followers of Abraham Kardiner was subjected to a series of criticisms, and authors such as John Whiting and Irvin Child expanded on Kardiner's theory of institutions.

In this period the idea that culture “manufactures” homogeneous personalities is discussed; For example, according to the anthropologist Anthony Wallace (1923-2015), the cultural system only organizes the different personalities that make it up. Thus, the men and women who make up a cultural reality would not have to share ideas, beliefs and emotional structures, and the only thing that is shared, then, is what he calls the "contract institutional".

Currently, and despite being the most recent branch of anthropology, psychological anthropology is on the rise and offers great possibilities for study. Today's anthropologists are far from thinking that the cultural phenomenon can be separated from individual aspects such as human psyche, and this, which at the time may have seemed complex, obscure and even contradictory, is now a fascinating future full of odds.