Psychological anthropology; approaches to culture and personality

UNIVERSITY
OF FLORIDA
LIBRARIES

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2010 with funding from

Lyrasis IVIembers and Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/psychologicalantOOhsuf

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Approaches to Ctdhi-re and Personality

THE DORSEY SERIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY
AND SOCIOLOGY

EDITORS

PETER H. ROSSI WILLIAM FOOTE WHYTE

U/ih'ersify of Chicago Cornell University

Argyris Understanding Organizational Behavior

Adams & Preiss (eds.) Human Organization Research (Pub-
lished for the Society for Apphed Anthropology)

Hsu (ed.) Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture
and Personality

Psychological Anthropology

Approaches to Culture and Personality

Edited by FRANCIS L. K. HSU

Chairman, Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University

THE DORSET PRESS, INC.

Homewood, Illinois • 1961

© 1961 BY THE DORSEY PRESS, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS BOOK OR ANY PART THEREOF MAY NOT
BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER

First Printing, July, 196 1

Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 61-15062

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

The purpose of this volume is twofold. On the one hand, it is an
assessment of the up-to-date gains in the field of culture-and-
personality. Each of the contributors tries to achieve comprehen-
siveness within the scope of his particular assignment. Insofar as
possible each brings together materials from diverse sources, from
obscure journals to their own yet unpublished field notes. On the
other hand, each of them also attempts to indicate some of the most
important problems yet to be tackled. All the contributors outline
some of these problems, the hypotheses and methods most relevant
to their investigation, and possible solution.

The American tradition in textbooks is that they contain mate-
rials from the beaten paths and are exercises in facts and principles
generally endorsed by most or all scholars. Such a tradition fails to
introduce the student to the vitality of an expanding and exciting
discipline. This book is a textbook, but tliere will be many contro-
versial spots in it. The reader will find no complete agreement
among the contributors, nor between the contributors and the
editor. This is a text in which differences in facts, theories, and
points of view are not only pointed out, but also explored at some
length, leading, in some instances, even to almost diametrically
contrasting conclusions between the authors.

Another reason for our approach to this text is that, since the
subdiscipline of culture-and-personality is only about twenty-five
years old, we are severely limited by the availability of well-
established facts and principles. If we only aim at the beaten paths,
then we would have either to confine ourselves to the obvious or
have little to say. Culture-and-personality has simply not had the
accumulation of scholarly heritage enjoyed by older subdisciplines
of the science of man such as archaeology or linguistics.

These two reasons are interrelated. The paucity in culture-and-
personality of beaten paths points to the need for growth. And
growth is impossible without strong efforts to explore new and un-
sure grounds. In an interdisciplinary subject such as ours, explora-
tion of new and unsure grounds will by definition be a major part
of its endeavour for years to come.

Throughout this enterprise I am fortunate in having a group of

vi FOREWORD

colleagues as collaborators who have spared no pains in giving me
their generous support and gracious cooperation. In particular I
would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Thomas Gladwin,
Anthony F. C. Wallace, and Donald T. Campbell, who are also
contributors to this book, and to Paul J. Bohannan. But my grati-
tude to all contributors to this volume is very considerable. Their
intellectual distinction as scholars is a matter of public knowledge
in the professions and needs no advertising from me. But I, for my
part, am compelled to express my gratitude to all thirteen con-
tributors to this volume for their forbearance in the face of my
many requests, demands, and even, at times, impudence. As a per-
son born and brought to adolescence in traditional China, I know
I am open to the suspicion (on the part of those who have read
Chapter 14) that, still prompted by my early culture pattern of
mutual dependence, I protest gratitude merely as a matter of good
form. In the present instance, however, my contributors completely
and truly deserve my gratitude. As a result of laboring as Editor of
this volume I have the great satisfaction not only of seeing our joint
efforts come to fruition, but also of receiving invaluable intellectual
benefits.

I wish also to express my indebtedness to Mrs. Elizabeth E. Reed,
Mrs. Sharon Horine, and Mr. Robert Hunt, who have most ably
assisted me in the final preparation of the manuscript for publica-
tion.

F. L. K. H.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Psychological Anthropology in the Behavioral Sciences,

Francis L. K. Hsu i

PART I. AREA

Editor's Introduction 17

2. Japan, Edward Norbeck and George De Vos 19

3. Africa, Robert A. LeVine 48

4. North America, John J. Hou'igmann 93

5. Oceania, Thomas Gladwin 135

6. National Character and Modern Political Systems, Alex
Inkeles 172

7. Am.erican Core Value and National Character, Francis

L. K. Hsu 209

PART II. METHODS AND TECHNIQUES

Editor's Introduction 231

8. Cross-Cultural Use of Projective Techniques, Berf Kap-
lan 235

9. Mental Illness, Biology, and Culture, Anthony F. C. Wal-
lace 255

I o. Anthropological Studies of Dreams, Roy G. D'Andrade . 296

1 1 . The Mutual Methodological Relevance of Anthropology

and Psychology, Donald T. Campbell 333

PART III. SOCIALIZATION, CULTURE, AND FEEDBACK

Editor's Introduction 353

12. Socialization Process and Personality, John W. M. Whit-
ing 355

13. Culture and Socialization, David F. Aberle 381

vii

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

14. Kinship and Ways of Life: An Exploration, Francis L. K.

Hsu 400

PART IV. ASSESSMENT

Editor's Introduction 457

15. An Overview and a Suggested Reorientation, Mel ford E.
Spiro 459

APPENDIX

A Selected Bibliography Bearing on the Mutual Relationship

between Anthropology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis 493

Photographs following 498

INDEXES

Author Index . 501

Subject Index 509

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

David Aberle, Professor of Anthropology and Chairman of the
Department, Brandeis University

Roy D'Andrade, Instructor of Anthropology, School of Educa-
tion, Harvard University

Donald T. Campbell, Professor of Psychology, Northwestern
University

George DeVos, Associate Professor, School of Social Welfare,
Associate Research Psychologist, Institute for Human Develop-
ment, and Research Associate, Center for Japanese Studies, Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley.

Thomas Gladwin, Social Science Consultant, National Institute
of Mental Health

John J. HonigmAnn, Professor of Anthropology, University of
North Carolina

Francis L. K. Hsu, Professor of Anthropology and Chairman of
the Department, Northwestern University

Alex Inkeles, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Bert Kaplan, Professor of Psychology, University of Kansas

Robert A. LeVine, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Com-
mittee on Human Development, University of Chicago

Edward Norbeck, Professor of Anthropology and Chairman of
the Department, WiUiam Marsh Rice University

Melford Spiro, Professor of Anthropology, University of Wash-
ington

Anthony Wallace, Professor of Anthropology and Chairman of
the Department, University of Pennsylvania

John W. M. Whiting, Professor of Anthropology, School of
Education, Harvard University

chapter i

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

FRANCIS L. K. HSU

Nortknvestern University

At the beginning of our joint efforts the contributors to this vol-
ume were of the opinion that attempts at dehneating boundaries for
culture-and-personahty would do more harm than good. Too often
precise boundaries have been used as excuse for lack of data,
methods, and results. What we need in culture-and-personality is
not orthodoxy but more specific research and discussion. Some opin-
ions were milder than others but the direction of our comments was
similar. One commented in the following vein:

I feel that any area of study which is still as formative as ours can readily deal
itself out of important areas of inquiry by a premature setting of limits. Anthro-
pology itself supplies a classic example. The respective areas of study of archaeol-
ogy, physical anthropology, and ethnology were so neatly defined and separated
that it took years of effort and the pressure of great intellectual need to recon-
stitute the connective tissue which had been unthinkingly destroyed by the classi-
ficatory surgery once fashionable. We are not an exclusive society which needs
entrance requirements for members.

Others expressed themselves as follows:

My advice is not to worry about these demarcation problems but to go where
our interests and talents lead us. Anthropology has always been distinguished
by amoeba-like extensions into any discipline where its problems or interests have
pushed it.

The virtues of anarchy and chaos are many — the pains of efforts to achieve unity
are usually without compensatory gain.

Finally, I do not think we should repeat the errors of many in the standard aca-
demic disciplines by taking the boundaries of our field too seriously. A recent
article begins with a comment that is relevant here: "It is perhaps a reflection of
the intellectual insecurity of social scientists that they spend an inordinate amount
of time and energy defining the boundaries of their respective fields as if these
were holy lands which had to be defended against expansive, barbaric, and heathen
invaders."

2 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

I received more reactions on this subject than I have reproduced
here. They do not all state the point as strongly but there is none
which upholds the opposite view. In the circumstances it is natural
that our ideas as to what should be the proper concern of culture-
and-personality vary a good deal. As I scan our correspondence and
the sometimes copious notes of our various meetings, I find the
following general trends of thought:

1. A work of culture-and-personality is one by an anthropologist who has a
good knowledge of psychological concepts or by the member of another discipline
who has a good knowledge of anthropological concepts.

2. Any work that deals with the individual as the locus of culture.

3. Any work that gives serious recognition to culture as an independent or a
dependent variable associated with personality.

4. Any work by an anthropologist which uses psychological concepts or tech-
niques or by a scholar in a psychological discipline which provides directly perti-
nent data in forms which are usable by anthropologists.

5. The field of culture-and-personality is equivalent to the cross-cultural study
of personality and sociocultural systems and includes such problems as (a) the
relation of social structure and values to modal patterns of child rearing, (b) the
relation of modal patterns of child rearing to modal personality structure as ex-
pressed in behavior, (c) the relation of modal personality structure to the role sys-
tem and projective aspects of culture, and (d) the relation of all of the foregoing
variables to deviant behavior patterns which vary from one group to another. The
theories used and hypotheses tested can come from any of the behavioral sciences,
but the characteristic mark of culture-and-personality research is the emphasis on
natural group differences as the subject matter. Studies of individual differences
are not, therefore, works of culture and personality. Nor are studies of the experi-
mentally produced group differences of many social psychologists. Studies of many
role personalities within a particular society are on the borderline, but group dif-
ferences within a society are, in my opinion, squarely within the culture and
personality field. Thus, Marvin Opler's studies of types of schizophrenia in two
American ethnic groups are culture and personality work.

6. The conception of personality-culture as emergent from intereaction is fruit-
ful. To this it should be added that students of culture-and-personality are con-
cerned with behavior always with reference to its antecedents and cannot be
satisfied simply to describe its characteristics — as social psychologists are wont
to do.

The possible differences between culture-and-personality and so-
cial psychology will be touched upon later. Our own lack of agree-
ment is probably reflective of the perennial seesaw discussion among
many anthropologists on the same question. At one end is Kroeber's
concept of the Superorganic, and the perhaps more extreme posi-
tion of Leslie A. White in his CuUurology, which comes close to as-
serting that the march of history is independent of the birth of

IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 3

particular personalities and that cultures transcend the minds and
bodies of the individuals living in them (Kroeber 1948:253-255
and White 1949) . This view has been criticized on the ground that
culture cannot exist without the individual, since "to objectify a
phenomenon that can have no manifestation except in human
thought and action is to argue a separate existence for something
that actually exists only in the mind of the student" (Herskovits
1948 : 25) . At the other end are students who note individual differ-
ences and cultural variation in each society. Herskovits shows how
the same song, "John Crow," prevalent in the northwestern part
of Jamaica, is rendered into many different versions by many dif-
ferent singers (Herskovits 1948:565-569). John Gillin demon-
strates the intrasocietal differences among many nonliterate socie-
ties (Gillin 1939:681-702). Bert Kaplan has revealed similar
differences in four American Indian cultures (Kaplan 1954) . Hart
perhaps pushed the importance of individual personality differences
to a greater extent than most others (Hart 1954) .

Needless to say, Kroeber was not unaware of the fact that cul-
tures have to be expressed through individuals, for in his major text-
book he did devote a whole chapter to "Cultural Psychology"
(1948:572—621) . On the other hand, it is equally obvious that no
science of man is possible if we merely concentrate on individual
differences. Perhaps it is to satisfy both extremes that Kluckhohn
and Mowrer found it desirable to introduce an extensive analysis of
all the components of personality, from the biological, the physical-
environmental, the social, and the cultural, on the one hand, and the
universal, the communal, the role, and the idiosyncratic on the
other (Kluckhohn and Mowrer 1944:4) .

In the 1948 edition of their anthology entitled Personality in Na-
ture, Society and Culture, Kluckhohn and Murray reformulated
the four determinants which were then designated as constitutional,
group membership, role, and situational. The two editors con-
cluded in the second edition of this book that "the differences
observed in the personalities of human beings are due to varia-
tions in their biological equipment and in the total environment
to which they must adjust, while the similarities are ascribable to
biological-environmental regularities" (Kluckhohn and Murray
1953:65).

In a later publication Kluckhohn leaned more strongly toward
the cultural factor in human behavior, but modestly guarded him-
self as follows:

4 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

In all these, and other, secondary categories the basic determinants are con-
founded— as the statisticians would say or, in other words, behavioral scientists
must deal with a complex field structure. There is, at best, a vague recognition
that all are involved, but, in practice, scientists from different disciplines and with
different temperamental biases tend to operate as if motivation were, after all,
simply biological or situational or cultural. We lack the techniques, quantitative
or otherwise, for dealing with systems of organized complexity. And so, for the
time being at least, we must do the best we can with crude, first approximations.
Each of us must continue to insist that the particular variable he is most interested
in be taken fully into account. If there is a reasonable of "give" on every side, if
each specialist fully accepts the fact that his discipline can explain not everything
but something, the results are not too bad. One may compare a game in which
the high card or combination is crucial. Other cards in the hand have a value but
a secondary importance for that deal. Some hands are dealt by science where the
winning combination is certainly held by biology, others where psychology, so-
ciology, geography, or anthropology can do the calling. So I shall here unashamedly
concentrate upon the hands where, it seems to me, anthropology can bet high
upon the significance of cultural factors for understanding and explanation.
(Kluckhohn 1954:3—4)

The Core of Culture-ond-Personality

Though as a group we eschew boundaries, I think it is quite ap-
propriate for the editor at least to offer some thoughts on the cen-
tral concerns of culture-and-personality. In this venture I do not
expect to settle anything. In such a fuzzy jirea no clarification is
likely to meet with universal acceptance. What I shall try to do is
not more than to offer some material to feed further discussion.

It is probably as trite to observe that all human behavior is medi-
ated through the minds of individual human beings as it is to observe
that all human individuals live in social groups each governed by a
specific pattern of culture. All human behavior, except random
movements and reflexes, is, therefore, at once psychological and so-
cial in nature. However, the same psychosocial data may be ap-
proached from different angles. The angle of approach would seem
to be the primary difference between cultural anthropology and
social anthropology, and between them and culture and personality.

Social anthropology began in Britain. The British view is that
social anthropology is synonymous with anthropology and sociology
combined. That is to say it deals with all aspects of human behavior
from kinship and political organizations to economies and religions.
The American definition is that social anthropology is confined to
the study of social or political organizations. Therefore, some
American students are surprised that E. E. Evans-Pritchard, a well-

IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 5

known social anthropologist, should have "left" his field to write a
book on Naer B^eligion (1954). There are perhaps two ways of
seeing the real difference between them. First, the British social
anthropologists really have distinguished themselves in the inten-
sity of their field work and of analysis of the data, a trend first begun
with Rivers and Williams in the Torres Straits and later Malinowski
in the Trobriands. Thus, Evans-Pritchard carried out his field work
in the late twenties and spent the next thirty years publishing pri-
marily on the two societies he studied. This is more or less true of
other well-known British social anthropologists such as M. Fortes,
R. Firth, and Max Gluckman, though most of them have studied
more than one people. This contrasts with the less intensive pattern
of field work among American anthropologists, characterized by
shorter periods of sojourn, lack of emphasis on thorough familiarity
with the native language, and even among many students of the
Historical School, a relatively greater emphasis on problem orienta-
tion.

The other way is to see cultural anthropology as largely dealing
with human behavior in terms of products (culture traits, rituals,
dances, techniques, and so forth) while social anthropology, in
terms of relationships (such as kinship, inheritance, law, and gov-
ernment). According to this view cultural anthropology studies
the end results — cultures, including their diffusion from area to
area and their development from epoch to epoch; and social anthro-
pology studies the interpersonal mechanisms through which human
beings learn, manipulate, and produce cultures.

Neither of these distinctions is complete in itself. The British and
American patterns of field work reflect no real difference in scope,
only, with many obvious exceptions and to a certain extent, in
thoroughness and depth. They are, in fact, complementary ap-
proaches to the same objective. The British way often leads the
field worker into a displaced ethnocentrism in which Bongo ethno-
centrism takes the place of English ethnocentrism. The American
way sometimes leaves the field worker with many factual details
but with possibly less sensitivity to the feelings and the views of the
peoples he has studied. The product versus relationship distinction
is equally without finality. For as the student intensifies his re-
searches, his concern for the mechanisms will inevitably lead him
to the end results and vice versa. Many anthropologists will prob-
ably deny the existence of either of these distinctions.

It is in this context that we must view culture-and-personality.

6 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Culture-and-personality deals with human behavior primarily in
terms of the ideas which form the basis of the interrelationship be-
tween the individual and his society. On the one hand, it deals with
ideas shared by a considerable portion of any society: the "shame"
or "guilt" feelings among the Japanese, the belief in immanent jus-
tice among some children of Ghana, the anxiety about food in ex-
cess of the actual danger of going hungry among some Oceanic
peoples, and even the world view of the Chinese; how these and
other ideas held by the individuals are rooted in the diverse patterns
of culture in which they grow up. On the other hand, culture-and-
personality deals with characteristics of societies: reactions to con-
quest and disaster, internal or external impetuses to change, mili-
tarism and pacificism, democratic or authoritarian character; it
deals with how these and other characteristics consistently associ-
ated with some societies may be related to such things as the aspira-
tions, fears, and values held by a majority of the individuals in these
societies.

With these thoughts on the central concerns of culture-and-per-
sonality, I would like to propose a new title for our subdiscipline:
psychological anthropology.

For over twenty years culture-and-personality has retained its
cumbersome title. I think the time has probably come for us to give
it a less cumbersome and more logical title. The concept of person-
ality, which anthropologists have borrowed from psychologists,
leads to some difficulties. For example, some anthropologists,
though resorting to psychological explanations at many crucial
points of their arguments, tend to regard the personality concept
either as indistinguishable from culture or as much deeper than
what the anthropologist can usually deal with. In his book The
Foundations of Social Anthropology Nadel expresses the following
thoughts:

We may take it for granted that there is some connection between the make-up
of a culture and the particular personality (or personalities) of its human carriers.
Yet in taking this connection to be a simple and obvious one, so simple and obvious
that one can be inferred from the other, v/e run the risk of arguing in a circle and
of using the word "personahty" in an ambiguous sense. For by "personality" we
can mean two things. We can mean, first, the sum-total of the overt modes of
behaviour of an individual, in which we discern some integration and consistence,
and which we thus understand to be facets or "traits" of that total, patterned
entity. Or secondly, we can mean some basic mental make-up underlying the pat-
tern of overt behaviour and accounting for it in the sense of a "hidden machine"
or a causally effective set of factors. (Nadel 1951:405)

IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 7

Nadel then refers to a distinction made by the psychologist, R. B.
Cattell, between "surface traits" "which give us 'clusters' of in-
trinsically related characteristics of behavior observable in every-
day Hfe," and "source traits" or "factors," "which are extricated
by analysis and have a causal significance, being possible explana-
tions of how the actually existing cluster forms may have origi-
nated" (Cattell 1946:4). Nadel's reasoning goes as follows: If the
anthropologist operates with the personality concept and wishes to
ascertain the mental make-up of a group possessing a certain cul-
ture, he should resort only to tests and other techniques developed
by psychology. If he wishes to "define the cultural patterns in terms
of 'basic' psychological agencies," he "must examine them where
they are ultimately rooted — in the individual" (Nadel 195 1 1407) .
But if the anthropologist approaches the personality merely from
cultural observation, by means of direct inference, he can only
reach the "surface traits." Even though he may infer the desires,
motivations, and so forth, prompting the overt behavior he "pene-
trates, as it were, only a short distance beneath the surface;" for
the desires and so forth are "simply implicit in the cultural mode of
behavior," or "are merely its sustaining energies, and have no causal
and explanatory significance" (Nadel 1951:405). Nadel con-
cludes:

As long as we are inferring personality types from cultural observation we can-
not legitimately claim any explanatory value for the personality concept; if we
did, we should be committing the cardinal sin in science, namely, of pronouncing
upon invariant relations between facts which are not "demonstrably separate."
(Nadel 1951:407)

I think Nadel is wrong here. Psychological constructs, by virtue
of the fact that they have to be inferred from linguistic data or
other indirect evidences supplied by the actors, are certainly
"demonstrably separate" from behavior which can be directly ob-
served. Furthermore, gravitation is inferred from falling apples,
rises and falls of tides, and movements of the moon, earth, and other
heavenly bodies. Gravitation can never be seen anywhere except in
terms of what it does, through the behavior of the objects which it
controls or influences. Similarly physical hunger can only be in-
ferred by stomach contractions, nausea (if the hunger is severe
enough) , or malnutrition of the body (as a result of prolonged
hunger) . No one can see hunger except through these and other
concrete expressions of it. I have yet to hear from a scientist who
denies the usefulness of the concept of gravitation or hunger, and

8 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

who insists that correlating certain movements of the heavenly
bodies with gravitation, or correlating certain physiological phe-
nomena with hunger, is equivalent to commiting "the cardinal sin
in science, namely, of pronouncing upon invariant relations be-
tween facts which are not demonstrably separate." As our knowl-
edge progresses, we may conclude that the concept of gravitation
or hunger is no longer adequate to account for certain phenomena,
but we cannot deny that during a certain period of our scientific
development these concepts have played crucial and organizing
roles.

However, Nadel's arguments do point up one important matter,
namely the personality which psychological anthropologists deal
with is not the same as that of the individual psychologists. At
least conceptually, the latter deal with the unique personality of
the individual, but the former deal only with those character-
istics of the individual's mind which are shared as part of a wider
fabric of human minds. In Chapter 8 Kaplan discusses various at-
tempts to conceptualize and understand the differences between
the two kinds of reality, for example, by introducing the term "so-
cially required" personality patterns as distinguished from the "ac-
tual modal" personality patterns. Yet the term "personality"
possesses connotations that often lead the student to regard it as
a complete entity in itself. Instead of seeing personality as a life-
long process of interaction between the individual and his society
and culture, he thinks of it as being some sort of reified end-
product (of very early experiences according to orthodox Freu-
dians, of somewhat later sociocultural forces according to many
Neo-Freudians and social scientists), which is ready to act in this
or that direction regardless of the sociocultural fields in which it
has to operate continuously. It is true that the scholars have never
quite said so in exact words. It is also true that "field theory" of
Kurt Lewin or others has many advocates. But given the social
scientist's individualist culture heritage of hero and martyr wor-
ship, and a Judaeo-Christian theological background of absolute
conversion and final salvation, the one-sided finished-product view
of personality would seem too "natural." Such a view must be re-
sisted and the beginning of such a step is to eliminate the word per-
sonality from the title of our subdiscipline.

Some anthropologists may object to the new title of psychologi-
cal anthropology on several grounds, though I see no insurmount-
able obstacles against it. One argument is that it may lead to pro-

IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 9

liferation of subdisciplines. But giving the subdiscipline a more
logical name should not cause any more proliferation than culture-
and-personahty has done. In the second place, division of any large
single discipline into subdisciplines is inevitable as our knowledge
in that area grows. Seventy-five years or so ago it was as sufficient
simply to be an anthropologist as it was to be a sinologist. But soon
anthropology was divided into cultural anthropology, physical
anthropology, and so forth, and we no longer find the term sinolo-
gist except in some ultraconservative academic pockets. The same
phenomenon has occurred in biology, physics, chemistry, and even
such subdisciplines as linguistics and geometry. The only caution
that we must exercise in branching out is that we must make sure
that the advances of knowledge are ahead of the subdivision and
not vice versa.

Another argument against the new title is that it will turn out
to be neither psychology nor anthropology, that it is a no man's
land. This is not a fruitful argument. We have textbooks on physio-
logical psychology, biochemistry, astrophysics, and psychosomatic
medicine. There is not the slightest indication that the separate dis-
ciplines which have been so allied with each other have suffered in-
tellectually. On the contrary psychosomatic medicine has enriched
both psychology and medicine; and, without biochemistry, biology
and chemistry would both have been poorer. The psychological
anthropologist should certainly make use of the results not only in
psychology but also in psychoanalysis, sociology, and even experi-
mental psychology and philosophy wherever these are relevant and
applicable. This is the way all sciences grow, like so many amoebae
which extend a pseudopodium here and another there, retracting
them here and there while their nuclei remain more or less constant.

Psychological Anthropology and Related Disciplines

To clarify our thoughts further, it may be advantageous to ex-
amine the relationship between psychological anthropology and a
few other disciplines. In the short history of psychological anthro-
pology as a subdiscipline the clinical sciences have figured largely.
In fact the indebtedness of psychological anthropology to psychia-
try and psychoanalysis is immeasurable. Anyone who knows any-
thing about psychological anthropology can easily call to mind the
significant roles of such clinicians as Abram Kardiner, Erik Erick-
son, Alexander Leighton, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Geza
Roheim and associates, and of course the master himself, Sigmund

10 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Freud. These students have, either singly or in collaboration with
anthropologists, helped to make psychological anthropology grow
immensely in stature, concepts, and volume of research.

However, psychological anthropology is not a clinical science
and, while it has benefited from the clinical sciences, it has its own
ways. In objectives, psychological anthropology is concerned with
large numbers of individuals who are normal and functioning
members of their societies. In methods of approach psychological
anthropology follows the usually accepted scientific procedure of
hypothesis formation, testing of hypothesis, cross-cultural valida-
tion of the result, and further refinement of the hypothesis. In this
it must first be emphasized that psychological anthropology is not
simply the psychology of the individual, and it must shun psycho-
analysis of whole cultures in the manner that Freud arrived at his
conclusion on the origin of totem and taboo (Freud 1919) .

What psychological anthropology deals with are (a) the con-
scious or unconscious ideas shared by a majority of individuals in
a given society as individuals (which can be subsumed under such
terms as basic personality or modal personality (Linton 1945 : 1 30) ,
both statistical or nearly statistical concepts) and (b) the con-
scious or unconscious ideas governing the action of many indi-
viduals in a given society as a group (sometimes described as group
psychology, mob psychology, or collective conscience) . Both of
these are different from the unique psychology of the individual.
It is not maintained that the ideas underlying the life pattern of a
group and those of the actions of an individual are two distinct
entities. In fact they form a continuum. There is much evidence
to indicate that many individuals evaluate national or international
affairs in terms of their own personal likes and dislikes, anxieties, or
aspirations. But before the psychological anthropologist can con-
clude that one is rooted in the other, he must make sure that he
is not arguing merely from analogy, that he has made sure he is not
confusing broad trends of cultural development, which may be
psychologically propelled, with specific institutional details, which
are usually historically determined.

The damage to psychological anthropology by the failure to dif-
ferentiate the normal from the abnormal is great. Admittedly the
demarcation line between the normal and the abnormal is not clear.
Nevertheless, even after allowing cultural differences, there is still
undeniable evidence for certain core differences between them
(Hsu 1952:238-248). The extension of the abnormal psychology

77V THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 11

of the individual into the normal pattern of the group was, I think,
responsible for Freud's lopsided emphasis on the death instinct, and
its continued lopsided emphasis by modern Freudians of many hues.
That all human beings die is as indisputable as the fact that all
human beings live. The extent to which some human beings ap-
parently seek self-destruction in wars, suicides, alcoholism, and
psychotic behavior, and the possible psychological mechanisms un-
derlying such patterns of action have been brilliantly outlined by
Jules Masserman (1955: 647-649 ) .

However, while the evidence in support of the universality of the
life instinct among humans and animals is overwhelming, the evi-
dence in support of the death "instinct" comes chiefly from the
relatively abnormal. This is why the self-destructive tendencies
are not common among the majority of any society. Furthermore,
the incidence of suicide and homicide no less than delinquency and
adventure vary from culture to culture. Clearly another type of
explanation than a universal postulate of death instinct is indicated.
It will probably be well for psychological anthropologists to be on
guard against generalizing from the psychology of a minority of
the relatively abnormal to that of a majority of the relatively nor-
mal when they make use of the psychiatrically derived resources,
insights, and data.

Among all the behavioral sciences, psychological anthropology
and social psychology have the future potentiality of developing
the closest and most mutually enriching relationship with each
other. Both disciplines deal with society and both deal with psychol-
ogy, but they have been separated from each other so far in sig-
nificant ways. We have seen that two of the points made in the
preliminary discussions among the contributors to this volume
were: (a) that the characteristic mark of culture-and-personality
research is the emphasis on natural group differences along ethnic or
societal lines, and so forth, as the subject matter, whereas social
psychology often deals with experimentally produced group dif-
ferences; and (b) that culture-and-personality scholars are con-
cerned with behavior always with reference to its antecedents, while
social psychologists are satisfied simply to describe its characteris-
tics. I do not think the second distinction to be valid, for many
studies in social psychology are attempts to discover the antecedents
of behavior; and I think the first distinction is only partially valid,
since psychological characteristics due to role, sex, and occupational
affiliations are also problems of psychological anthropology.

12 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

What have so far differentiated psychological anthropologists
from the social psychologists are found in three areas. First, psycho-
logical anthropology is cross-cultural in approach from its incep-
tion while social psychology has traditionally drawn its data from
Western societies. Second, social psychology is quantitative and
even, to a certain extent, experimental in orientation, while psycho-
logical anthropology has paid little attention to research designs
and only lately awakened to the need for rigor in the matter of
hypothesis formation and of verification.

In both of these connections the distance between the two dis-
ciplines is narrowing, and rightly so. Social psychologists have be-
come increasingly more interested in cross-cultural validity of their
generalizations. This anthropological contribution to psychology is
well recognized by Campbell, a social psychologist, in Chapter 1 1
of this volume. A comparison of the earlier and later editions of
many texts on social psychology shows far greater use of cross-cul-
tural data in the later than in the earlier works, though some such
as Klineberg (1940 and 1954) have always led among the pioneers
in interdisciplinary thinking and research, while others such as
Bogardus (1950) are less inclined in that direction. In fact, it is a
rare textbook on social psychology today which does not contain at
least references to Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer,
Clyde Kluckhohn, Ralph Linton, M. J. Herskovits, John Whiting,
or some other anthropologists. Psychological anthropologists, on
their part, have become increasingly more sensitive to the impor-
tance of sophistication in research designs and quantification. The
chapters by Wallace, Whiting, Aberle, Spiro, and D'Andrade in this
volume and the works of Hallowell, Kluckhohn, Gillin, and others
are, in different ways, objective evidence in this new direction. The
psychological anthropologist may not agree with (or may not be
able to do much about it at the moment even if he does agree with)
some of the methodological points raised by Campbell in Chapter
1 1 , but there is no doubt about the importance of such thinking
to psychological anthropology. Psychological anthropology has
already derived no small part of its methodological inspiration from
social psychology and, as time goes on, its indebtedness to social
psychology is likely to be even greater than its previous indebted-
ness to the clinical disciplines.

The third area in which psychological anthropology differs from
social psychology thus far is that it deals not only with the effect of
society and culture on personality (a basic concern of social psy-

IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 13

chology) but also with the role of personality characteristics in the
development, formation, and change of culture and society. Chap-
ters 7, 8, 12, 13, and 14 of the present volume touch upon this in
different ways. Finally, in Chapter 15 the reader will find a hy-
pothesis to investigate the mechanism underlying the mutual in-
fluences between the individual society and culture. For a sound
theory which aims at explaining the relationship between man and
culture must not only account for the origin of psychological char-
acteristics as they are molded by the patterns of child rearing, social
institutions, and ideologies but must also account for the origin, de-
velopment, and change in these child-rearing practices, institutions,
and ideologies. It is a well-known fact that societies and cultures do
change, often slowly but sometimes drastically. Since human be-
ings are not so many helpless creatures simply being pushed by ex-
ternal forces such as geographical calamities, foreign conquests,
fate, gods, or the unaccountable vicissitudes of some superorganic,
we must at least find part of the explanations for cultural and so-
cial changes in the interaction between the human minds and the
societies and cultures in which they operate.

At the beginning of this attempt at clarifying our thoughts on
psychological anthropology, I noted the difficulties besetting such a
venture. What I hoped to do was not to close the discussion but to
keep it going. Furthermore, just as a mere matter of emphasis or
point of view separates cultural anthropology from social anthro-
pology, so psychological anthropology is similarly differentiated
from its related disciplines. For example, a cultural anthropologist
will ultimately come to analyze the ideas behind the diffusion of cer-
tain cultural traits and complexes; a social anthropologist will ulti-
mately look at the material wealth involved in the different forms of
social organization, exactly as the psychological anthropologist will
ultimately relate the conscious or unconscious ideas to both par-
ticular cultural end results and particular human relationships. It
is probably desirable, however, for the student from one viewpoint
to hold on to his particular viewpoint as he probes deeper and deeper
into his data, or else he may be hopelessly enmeshed in them without
guideposts to go forward or backward. The significance of such a
viewpoint to the field worker is comparable to that of the "ego"
to the maker of a kinship chart. As the maker of a kinship chart
cannot change the "ego" in it without getting lost, the field worker

14 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

who shifts from one viewpoint to another, or has no viewpoint at
all, is hkely to bring back Httle that is of coherent significance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOGARDUS, E. E.

1950 Fundamentals of social psychology. New York, Appleton-Century-
Crofts.

Cattell, R. B.

1946 Description and measurement of personality. Yonkers, N.Y., World
Book Co.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.

1954 Nuer religion. London, Oxford University Press.

Freud, Sigmund

19 19 Totem and taboo. London (reprinted in The Basic Writings of Sigmund
Freud, 1938, The Modern Library, New York, Random House) .

GiLLiN, John

1939 Personality in preliterate societies. American Sociological Review 4:681-
702.

Hart, C. W. M.

1954 The sons of Turimpi. American Anthropologist 54, 2, Part I, 242—261.

Herskovits, M. J.

1948 Man and his works. New York, Alfred Knopf.

Hsu, F. L. K.

1952 Anthropology or psychiatry: A definition of objectives and their im-
plications. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8:227-250.

Kaplan, Bert

1954 A study of Rorschach responses in four cultures. Papers of Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 42,
No. 2.
Klineberg, Otto

1954 Social psychology. New York, Henry Holt (ist ed., 1940).

Kluckhohn, Clyde and O. H. Mowrer

1944 Culture and personality: A conceptual scheme. American Anthropol-
ogist 46:4.
Kluckhohn, Clyde, Henry A. Murray, and David Schneider

1953 Personahty in nature, society, and culture. 2d ed.. New York, Alfred
Knopf.

Kluckhohn, Clyde

1954 Culture and behavior. In handbook of social psychology, Gardner
Lindzey (ed.), Cambridge, Mass., Addison-Wesley Press.

Kroeber, a. L.

1948 Anthropology. New York, Harcourt Brace & Co.

IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 15

Linton, R.

1945 Cultural background of personality. New York, D. Appleton Cen-
tury Co.

Masserman, Jules

1955 Dynamic psychiatry. Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders Co,
Nadel, S. F.

195 1 Foundations of social anthropology, Glencoe, 111., Free Press.
White, Leslie A,

1949 The science of culture. New York, Farrar, Strauss & Co.

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

AREA

The treatment of the subject of psychological anthropology by
area presents some difficulties. Culture and personality differences
between tribal groups and national groups within these large areas
are sometimes so great that the contributors will either have to gen-
eralize on a relatively superficial level or else have to confine them-
selves to a few selected studies which already possess intensity and
depth.

There is no adequate answer to these difficulties. In a work of this
scope it is simply not possible to gain the intensity and depth attain-
able in a field report on a single tribe or community. A general
picture of the psychology of a region like North America or even
Japan is bound to contain fewer details than a monograph on the
culture and personality of Polish peasants inhabiting a village in
Ruthenia. The contributors themselves are keenly aware of the dan-
ger of overgeneralization, or generalization based on scanty data.
LeVine has indicated, with reference to Africa, some of the clearest
instances of fallacies resulting from such procedures; Honigmann
has assembled a fine array of studies among the North American In-
dians in which more refined designs and techniques have yielded
composite psychological characteristics of peoples each scattered
over a large area that bear out the purely qualitative and inferential
pictures arrived at years earlier. There are many social and cultural
mechanisms which, on closer inspection, make for psychological
standardization of large communities. Communal, tribal, or na-
tional myths are some of these. Communication and diffusion proc-
esses are others.

However, even in this section of the book, our interest is only
partially areal. The areal arrangement is convenient in providing
the reader with a panorama of the most significant works of psycho-
logical anthropology in the area of his curiosity. But a problem
orientation is present in this section of the book, as in the subsequent
sections. Norbeck and DeVos discuss personality factors affecting
differential Japanese acculturation on different continents. LeVine
summarizes problems of infant experiences and the family environ-

17

18 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ment; psychocultural interpretation of ritual, witchcraft, and
dreams; and the problem of differential incidence and types of men-
tal illness. Honigmann treats the problems of values and of model
personality. Gladwin analyses the contributions of Mead and co-
workers and their use of a broadly framed learning theory, and of
the Kardiner-Linton group and their use of a revised Freudian
psychology. In these and other materials the problem-minded reader
will find much that is informative and stimulating.

The last two chapters analyze the composite psychological char-
acteristics of some large, modern, and complex societies, relating the
individual aspirations to the over-all thought and action patterns
of each group. On the one hand, they indicate fresh approaches
to the question of generalization on huge societies. Too often na-
tional character studies have been attacked on a priori grounds, that
it is "impossible" to gauge the psychological characteristics under-
lying complex civilizations, with hundreds of millions of individuals
living in them. But the basic problem is surely one of level of gen-
eralization. If we look for individual differences, there is no shortage
of data which compel us to observe that no two individuals are
identical. But if we raise our sights to a different level, we shall at
once see that millions of human beings interact with each other,
voluntarily or involuntarily, in any large society on any one day,
often sight unseen, apparently without any. significant difficulties.
This relatively smooth interaction among strangers in any large,
modern society is a remarkable reality, which will be impossible
without some high degree of uniformity, not merely in externally
visible laws, customs, procedures, and usages but also in externally
invisible ideas, emotions, expectations, and faiths. Yet these two
analyses arrive at very different conclusions. Is this due to the differ-
ences in point of view of the two authors? Is this due to differences
in the kinds of fact upon which the two authors based their gen-
eralizations? Are the two papers products of different levels of
abstraction? Or are they evidence that we must employ more pre-
cise methods?

Chapter 2

JAPAN

EDWARD NORBECK,

William Marsh Rice University, and

GEORGE DE VOS,

University of California

The objectives of this chapter are to review research in the field of
Japanese culture and personality, and to appraise it from the stand-
point of the contribution it has made to theory and the promise of
future contribution that it holds.

Anthropological interest in Japan and the Japanese is old, but
until World War II it was left principally to native Japanese
scholars, whose publications rarely reached the Western world. For
decades before the war, Western writers had made many impres-
sionistic observations on the character of the Japanese, but writings
on this subject by scholars trained in psychology, sociology, and
anthropology are principally postwar. Entry of the United States
into the war served in several ways to direct the attention of Amer-
ican social scientists to Japanese culture, and it is during the w;ar
years that research on Japan using modern techniques of person-
ality-and culture-began, principally under the sponsorship of the
United States government. The first published studies are papers
byLaBarre (i945),Gorer (1942, 1943), and others which attempt
to describe the Japanese personality and relate it to cultural insti-
tutions of child training. As is well known, Ruth Benedict's The
ChrysanthemUfn and the Sword also sprang from research con-
ducted during the war under governmental subsidy.

Since the end of the war, the number of American social scien-
tists engaged in research on Japan has grown, and scholarly writings
on Japanese culture have increased greatly. We no longer regard
Embree's Suye Miira as modal for Japanese communities. As a re-
sult of sociological and ethnological research, we have become aware
of many regional distinctions in Japanese culture and differences

19

20 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

along lines of occupation and social class. We have also become in-
creasingly aware that Japanese culture is in a state of rapid transi-
tion so that observations made at one point in time are often quickly
outdated.

Research on Japan concerned with the relationship between per-
sonality and culture began with American scholars. Since the end
of World War II, Japanese scholars have also engaged in research in
this field on their own culture, and interest in the subject among
native scholars is growing. Publication of a Japanese journal con-
cerned with studies using projective techniques (Japanese Journal
of Projective Techniques) began in 1954. A society composed of
approximately 30 psychologists and anthropologists called Nihon
Bunka to Nihonjin no Shinrigakuteki Kenkyii no Kai (Society for
the Psychological Study of Japanese Culture and the Japanese Peo-
ple) was formed in 1958. During the past decade many relevant
publications in the Japanese language have appeared, and several
research projects concerned with Japanese personality and culture
are now being conducted by Japanese social scientists. The com-
bined research of native and foreign scholars makes a surprisingly
large total, and Japan is probably unique in the field of culture-
and-personality in being the focus of fairly extensive study by both
natives and foreigners.

We shall review both Western and Japanese research that has
been completed and discuss projects now under way. As a mat-
ter of convenience we shall classify these studies under five major
headings that are not mutually exclusive:

1. Broad Approaches to Understanding National Character

2. Content Analyses of Forms of Expressive Behavior

3. Studies Using Projective Techniques

4. Studies of Early Socialization Patterns

5. Studies of the Japanese Overseas

Judgment as to the kind of research and the specific studies to in-
clude has, of course, been in part arbitrary. We have not limited
ourselves to research conducted by anthropologists, but have in-
cluded publications in social, clinical, and child psychology, in
psychiatry, and in other fields when these studies have dealt with
questions of the relationship between culture and personality. No
attempt will be made to review all publications relevant to Japanese
culture and personality. Many publications, especially in the fields
of psychology and psychiatry, have been omitted or mentioned
only in passing because they make no attempt to relate traits of

JAPAN 21

personality to cultural determinants. For lack of space, a very large
group of studies of Japanese culture prepared by ethnologists, so-
ciologists, historians, economists, and political scientists, both Japa-
nese and Western, are not discussed. Omission is made with full
awareness that these publications are relevant to an understanding
of Japanese culture and personality, as they provide vital informa-
tion on such matters as differences in culture by region and class
and trends of cultural change.

Studies of National Character

Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is probably
the only major Western publication on Japan that consensus would
place under the heading of studies of national character. The impact
of this work upon both the scholarly world and the general public
of Japan was surprisingly great. Translated into Japanese, it was
widely read and served as a strong stimulus to Japanese scholarly in-
terest in personahty and culture. An indication of the importance
of Benedict's work is afforded by the fact that it served as the topic
for a series of seminars, well publicized in scholarly circles, in which
prominent Japanese scholars participated. A summary of the Japa-
nese critique of Benedict's methodology and conclusions has been
given us by John Bennett and Michio Nagai (1953) , and we shall
mention here only the chief criticism that her study presents a static
picture of ideal upper class patterns of a time gone by, and ignores
distinctions by social class and changes through time. Jean Stoetzel's
postwar study. Without the Chrysanthem^um and the Stvord, points
up change and indicates that much of what Benedict describes does
not apply to the modern youth of Japan. Benedict's work not only
stimulated interest in Japanese character but also led to field re-
search by Japanese scholars, notably T. Kawashima (1951), on
modes and differences in conceptions of the values in interpersonal
relations {chit, on, girt) with which her study had dealt. This re-
search summarizes interviews with country people showing that
these cultural ideals are less strongly held by them, especially by
young people, than Benedict reports.

Benedict's attempt to delineate Japanese character stands out also
from the standpoint of methodology. As one of the pioneer studies
of "culture at a distance," it points out the potentialities of this ap-
proach. As a result of subsequent field research in Japan and the
critique of the study by Japanese scholars, we are given a better idea
of its limitations.

22 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Since the publication of The Chrysanthemtim and the Sword, the
most extensive research aimed at understanding Japanese national
character has been the interdisciplinary studies conducted from
1953 to 1955 by the Human Relations Research Group, headed by
Tsuneo Muramatsu, Professor of Psychiatry at Nagoya National
University. Included in the group were Japanese scholars from vari-
ous disciplines and one American, George De Vos. The principal
objective of this project was to determine both modes and regional
differences in cultural values as these are related to types of per-
sonality. With the efforts of as many as 30 researchers, samples were
taken of attitudes and customs of urban and rural populations of
central and southwestern Japan. Data were also gathered on social
and economic backgrounds, and a number of families selected as
modal were subjected to intensive interviews. Principal test instru-
ments used were the F Scale, derived from American studies of the
authoritarian personality; two opinion scales devised to test atti-
tudes toward familial relations and "liberal-traditional" attitudes
toward Japanese values; the Rorschach test; the Thematic Apper-
ception Test modified for Japanese culture; a problem situation
test; figure drawings; a "child-parent problem" test, and question-
naires on customs of child training. Photographs were also taken
to illustrate mother-child relations during the first few years of life.

Samples totaling 250 individuals were obtained from three rural
settlements, a mountain community depending for subsistence on
farming and forestry, a fishing community, and a lowland rice-
farming community, which represent the spectrum of the con-
ventional scholarly Japanese classification of types of rural
communities.

A sample of over 2,000 individuals was obtained in the cities of
Nagoya and Okayama, although not all persons of this group were
subjected to the entire battery of tests. Data gathered under this
research project are still in the process of analysis and interpretation.
Although no generalizations concerning modal traits of the Japa-
nese personality have as yet emerged, a series of publications pre-
senting interpretations of smaller scope have appeared or are now
in press. ^ Results of these studies will be discussed in this paper.

A second major research project aimed at determining regional
variations in traits of personality and the cultural factors which
have brought them into existence is now in progress under the di-
rection of Seiichi Izumi of Tokyo University. This project is also

^ These include articles by Marui, Murakami, De Vos, and Wagatsuma, cited in bibliography.

JAPAN 23

interdisciplinary. It makes extensive use of projective tests and in-
cludes among its objectives an assessment of national character. Re-
search is centered upon northeastern Japan and other areas which
have not previously been subjected to intensive investigation using
the techniques of culture-and-personality.

A number of studies by Japanese scholars, some of which are dis-
cussed below, touch in varying degree upon Japanese national char-
acter. A recent book (Sofue and Wagatsuma 1959), based upon
Benedict's work and other published accounts, compares traits of
personality of Japanese, Americans, and Europeans. No synthetic
analysis approaching the stature of Benedict's work has, however,
yet emerged. Conservative scholars, both Japanese and foreign, are
well aware that the present state of knowledge of regional, class, and
occupational differences makes generalizations on the Japanese per-
sonality difficult, but the objective of an over-all characterization
has not been cast aside.

Content Analysis of Forms of Expressive Behavior

Postwar publications by Japanese social psychologists have pre-
sented a number of content analyses of Japanese movies, popular
songs, life-counseling columns in newspapers, novels, and common
folk-sayings, attempting to determine the values which stand out
most strongly in these forms of expressive behavior.^ The technique
is American derived, and in some instances the Japanese analysts
have made comparisons with similar research in the United States.
All of these studies have bearing on the subject of national charac-
ter, although none attempts to be comprehensive in the manner of
Benedict. We shall here present only a sample of the conclusions of
these reports.

The most ambitious of these impressionistic studies is Hiroshi
Minami's Nihonjin no Shinri (Psychology of the Japanese) , which
attempts to outline "those modes of feeling, thinking, and express-
ing which are peculiar to the Japanese." Minami uses in a highly
intuitive way popular songs, ideas expressed in fiction, common
sayings, writings on army life, essays by successful men, and similar
nonscholarly sources to deduce a number of themes or motifs. One
wonders whether the themes are, in fact, inferred or whether the
raw data are used to buttress preformulated themes. The work
nevertheless contains observations that seem apt and, like others of
its kind, provides information and interpretations that might serve

^ Many of these have been translated into English. See Kato, ed. 1959.

24 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

as starting points for future research. In a rather lengthy discussion
of conceptions of happiness and unhappiness, for example, Minami
observes that the Japanese seldom express happiness. Words con-
veying this idea are few, and when they are used, the turn of expres-
sion sounds awkward. The Japanese vocabulary is, however, rich
in words denoting unhappiness. Many aphorisms, songs, writings,
and personal philosophies of life contain as their central theme ways
to cope with unhappiness, and attempts are made to justify unhap-
piness on the grounds that it serves a useful purpose, as in ensuring
the proper ordering of familial relations. Other major sections of
Minami's work are entitled The Conception of the Self, Rationality
and Irrationality, Spiritualism versus Sensualism, and Patterns of
Human Relationships. No attempt is made to present a systematic
characterization of the Japanese.

An analysis of life-counseling columns in newspapers (Kato
1959) reports that letters from the lovelorn are much fewer than
is characteristic of similar columns in American papers. Letters are
placed under three classifications: those concerned with group or
international situations; those which center on human relations
with one other individual ; and those expressing concern with height,
weight, looks, and other physical features of the individual. Among
adults the greatest source of distress is interpersonal relations in the
family. Letters concerning relations between two individuals are
principally between a young male and a young female. Among
young girls the greatest concern is expressed over their own physi-
cal features. A majority of letters from mature adults consist of
complaints made against persons of higher social status than the
writers. Wives complain more about husbands than husbands do
about wives. This observation, it may be noted, seems contrary to
the stereotype of the uncomplaining Japanese woman.

Ananalysisof the lyrics of 61 postwar songs (Kato 1959), judged
to be the most popular on the basis of sales of phonograph records,
reports that the majority are sentimental, sometim.es telling of love
but never expressing happy sentimentality. The authors find in the
songs four prevailing motifs: pessimism, fatalism, "existentialism"
(explained as unexpressed feelings of loneliness and helplessness),
and "premodern humanism" (feudal values in interpersonal rela-
tionships).

A useful review and critique of early postwar Japanese writings
of similar kind that relate to traits of the Japanese personality has
been made by Dore (1953)-

JAPAN 2 5

Studies Using Projective Techniques

Among the techniques of personahty and culture research, Japa-
nese scholars have made by far the greatest use of projective tests.'"*
Unfortunately, analysis has generally been confined to interpreta-
tion of the tests themselves with little or no attempt to relate find-
ings to elements of culture. Results of most studies using the
Rorschach, for example, are relatively crude statistics on the types
of responses, giving means and percentages of color, movement, ani-
mal content, and whole responses. During World War II and shortly
afterward a number of studies were conducted by Japanese scholars
with a Rorschach in which certain standard blots were modified and
new ones added. It is, of course, highly doubtful that the results of
these studies can be directly comparable with those based upon the
standard Rorschach. For lack of other opportunity to learn, many
Japanese researchers using the Rorschach and other projective tests
in normative, nonclinical studies have been self-taught from reading
American publications, and their interpretations often indicate a
lack of familiarity with the potentials and limitations of the tech-
niques. It must be added that these scholars were sometimes emulat-
ing the manner of use of projective tests followed by a number of
American anthropologists some years ago.

Another weakness of Japanese scholars employing projective tests
has been a general reluctance to interpret findings of the tests. Even
when interpretation is made, the basis for the conclusions presented
is seldom clearly stated. Thus, although a number of studies attempt
to depict modal personalities for individual villages or occupational
groups, and many others describe types of responses, they are gen-
erally of little value except insofar as they might constitute accept-
able raw data.

Recent research using projective tests appears to be more promis-
ing, and we have already noted two of the major projects which
employ them. The Human Relations Research Group at Nagoya
University is presently preparing a report of the Rorschach tests of
over 700 urban and rural residents. This report is probably unique

Formosan natives were given Rorschach tests by a Japanese psychologist in 1930. This is said
to constitute the earliest trial of the Rorschach on a primitive people. A fairly extensive program
of psychological testing of Formosan aborigines was conducted from that time until World War II.
Projective tests have also recently been given to the Ainu by Japanese researchers. In very recent
years research by Japanese social scientists has again expanded into areas outside Japan, and projective
tests have been used on native populations of Nepal, Thailand, Brazil, Peru, and several other
countries. Analyses of most of these data have not as yet been made or have not been published.

26 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

in the field of culture and personality because it is based upon re-
search using many projective and nonprojective techniques, and
is the first large sample of its kind that crosscuts occupational
groups and social classes of a culturally elaborate, highly stratified
society. Findings with the Rorschach (T. Murakami and others,
personal communications) indicate that regional and class differ-
ences within the area tested, central and southwestern Japan, are
generally slight. On other tests, however, certain significant dif-
ferences appear — as noted in the pages that follow. Reports by Japa-
nese scholars on smaller Rorschach samples from other regions of
Japan support the interpretations of the Nagoya group. A recent
report (Kodama 1953) listing popular responses to the Rorschach
by Japanese adolescents of the Tokyo area, for example, is strikingly
similar to the findings of the Nagoya University Human Relations
Research Group. Japanese responses to the Rorschach indicate char-
acteristics markedly different from those regarded as general for the
population of the United States. They may be summarized briefly
as follows:

The number of responses is low in all social groups. Rejections are very high
(from 20 to 25 per cent) on colored card 9, and black and white cards 6 and 7.
There is a relatively high rate of rejection of card 10, which seems related to an
inability or reluctance to use the details on this complex card. Difficulty in han-
dling color freely and other indications attest to difficulty with spontaneous affect.
Although markedly lower among urban residents than among rural residents, per-
sonal rigidity is generally very high in comparison with norms for the United
States. A great deal of organizational drive in the use of intellectual functions is
indicated; the Japanese subjects are prone to push for complex, integrated whole
responses. The sense of reality is generally very adequate. Although sometimes
imaginative, responses include little fantasy of an extreme sort in directions con-
sidered primitive or psychopathological. The form level is characteristically quite
high. Labile color responses are usually perceptually tolerated when they are in-
corporated in some complex overall concept. Pure color by itself is almost com-
pletely lacking. These and other signs attest to the effectiveness of ego control
that appears to be characteristic throughout the population.

Although less commonly used than the Rorschach until recently,
other projective tests have been employed to interpret Japanese
values and attitudes as well as personality dynamics, and they have
yielded interesting results. Basing his arguments principally on re-
sponses to the Thematic Apperception Test and a problem-situation
test, De Vos (1960a) argues against the widely held view that Japa-
nese culture may best be regarded as a "shame" culture in a guilt-
shame dichotomy. He holds that the strong achievement drive so
often noted among the Japanese is not to be understood solely in

JAPAN 17

terms of shame-oriented concern with community standards, but
is also hnked with a deep undercurrent of guilt. The Japanese seem
to suffer from guilt which is not associated with any complex of
supernatural sanctions, but is instead derived from the system of
loyalties which cements the structure of their traditional society.
Guilt in Japanese is hidden from Western observation because we
do not understand Japanese familial relationships, and because con-
scious emphasis on external sanctions helps to disguise the under-
lying feelings of guilt which, severely repressed, are not obvious to
the Japanese themselves. The keystone toward understanding Japa-
nese guilt is held to be the nature of interpersonal relationships
within the Japanese family, particularly the relations of children
with the mother. The Japanese mother, without conscious intent,
has perfected techniques of inducing guilt in her children by such
means as quiet suffering. She takes the burden of responsibility for
their behavior and, as also with bad conduct on the part of her hus-
band, will often manifest self-reproach if her children conduct
themselves badly or in any way fail to meet the standards of success
set for the community. If one fails to meet social expectations, he
thereby hurts his mother, and he also hurts other familial members;
as a result, he suffers unhappiness and feelings of guilt. ^

Another study based upon responses to the Thematic Appercep-
tion Test (De Vos and Wagatsuma 1959) reports a high incidence
of concern over death and illness, which the authors interpret as
introjection of guilt. Death and illness of parents, as seen in cards
of the Thematic Apperception Test by respondents, is very often
related by them in stories to failure of a child to comply with paren-
tal wishes in entering an arranged marriage, or in meeting other
standards of behavior and achievement. Another recurrent theme
found in responses is that of expiation; achievement of honor or
success on the part of a child atones for egocentric or profligate
behavior. The manner of introjecting guilt among the Japanese is
thus seen to be related to the strong drive toward achievement that
Western observers have long noted and pondered upon. The Japa-
nese interpretation of the meaning of illness is also contrasted by
the authors with that of various groups of American Indians who,
in attributing illness to witchcraft, make use of the mechanism of
projection.

An unpublished report on Japanese attitudes toward arranged
marriages (Wagatsuma and De Vos) analyzes responses to the

*For another approach to the subjects of shame and guilt, see Hsu (1949).

28 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Thematic Apperception Test and compares them with data derived
by techniques ehciting more consciously controlled attitudes. Al-
though current public opinion in Japan is increasingly lenient to-
ward love marriage, as opposed to the traditional arranged marriage,
individuals who have contracted love marriages are often reported
to feel considerable guilt and inner restriction. Dependent upon the
level of consciousness involved, attitudes and emotional reactions
toward the two forms of marriage differ. A phenomenon labeled
"psychological lag" appears to exist. In responses to the Thematic
Apperception Test many respondents give clear evidence of strong
internalized feelings against love marriage, although, as revealed
by opinion surveys and direct interviews, when speaking on a con-
scious level these individuals express approval of this form of union.

The Thematic Apperception Test has also indicated differences
in attitudes between occupational and social groups that conform
with and amplify observations made by ethnologists using tradi-
tional techniques of interviewing and observation. A farm com-
munity, in which the so-called "traditional" Japanese pattern of
hierarchical authority according to age, sex, order of birth, and
status in the household is well established, is compared with a fishing
community, where social relationships within the family do not
follow such a strict hierarchy (De Vos & "Wagatsuma, in press).
Responses to tests indicate markedly less rigidity, freer expression of
aggression between the sexes, and less guilt in connection with intra-
f amilial relations among people in the fishing community.

Projective tests have also been put to use in the study of Japanese
communities abroad, and, to a lesser extent, in research on child
training. Discussion of these studies follows.

Sfudies of Early Socializotion

Japanese customs of rearing and socializing children have been
the focus of more research in the field of personality-and-culture
than any other subject. Perhaps the outstanding feature of published
accounts resulting from this research has been conflict of opinion.
The principal controversy in the entire field of Japanese culture-
and-personality has revolved about interpretations of the influence
of practices of child rearing on the adult personality. Early wartime
studies conducted in the United States emphasized customs of toilet
training and weaning, and contended that Japanese practices, par-
ticularly in toilet training, were harsh and strongly influenced the
adult personality. In this as well as other instances where interpre-

JAPAN 29

tatlons have conflicted, differences by region and class, changes in
practices, and cultural influences other than child training were
overlooked or ignored. Haring's (1953) observation seems note-
worthy here. The Japanese personality, he states, is what might be
expected of the people of a police state.

The pioneer studies of Gorer and LaBarre, long looked upon with
question, were based upon information drawn from a limited num-
ber of informants residing in the United States who appear to have
held middle-class ideas of child training current at that time. The
results of an investigation of practices of toilet training among
Hawaiian Japanese (Sikkema 1948) presented conflicting data, and
cast further doubt on the idea that severity of toilet training con-
tributed to the compulsive personality traits of the Japanese. The
sample in this instance was composed of individuals stemming prin-
cipally from rural Japan, who had presumably been exposed to
American ideas.

More recently, Betty Lanham (1956) has reported on a fairly
extensive investigation in a community of southwestern Japan on
practices of weaning, toilet training, and forms of sanctions used
to discipline children. Her statements, based upon a questionnaire
devised and administered by Japanese associates, generally agree
with unquantified observations made by Margaret and Edward
Norbeck (1956) in a fishing community approximately 200 miles
from Lanham's community. Miss Lanham concludes that although
there are a number of sharp differences between Japan and the
United States in other customs of child training, practices of toilet
training differ little.

Lanham's report has been criticized by Japanese scholars, who
report different findings. The greatest point of dispute has been
practices of weaning. Japanese scholars (e.g., Hoshino, Sofue, and
others 1958) have expressed doubt about Lanham's information.
Basing their statements upon field investigations of their own in
Nagano Prefecture and, especially, upon huge samplings by pedia-
tricians in the Tokyo area, they find that weaning begins and ends
earlier than Lanham reports. Part of the argument here appears
to hinge on the definition of weaning. Japanese scholars hold the
view the weaning begins with the introdtLCtion of supplementary
"solid" foods, and thus the span of time from the beginning of
"weaning" until the child ceases to nurse is long. Research planned
or presently under way by Lanham, Sofue, Hoshino, and others
should do much to clear up points of contention in this and other
matters of child training.

3 0 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

One of the more noteworthy of the Japanese studies that does take
cognizance of differences by social class (Ishiguro 1955) describes
practices of child training in three Japanese social strata called "old
middle class," "new middle class," and "lower class," and compares
these practices with those reported for the United States. As Lan-
ham also notes, the nursing period in Japan is reported to be longer
than in the United States, and nursing tends to be on demand rather
than on a fixed time schedule. Toilet training begins and ends earlier
in Japan, but, unlike circumstances in the United States, control
over urination precedes bowel control. In both countries weaning
is abrupt in approximately 20 per cent of the cases reported. Prac-
tices of the American lower class are reported to resemble most those
of the Japanese "old middle class," and practices of the American
middle class are most similar to those of the Japanese "new middle
class" and "lower class." Although this study recognizes that change
has occurred in customs of child training (the category "new mid-
dle class" is composed of salaried men in industry, commerce, and
public service, a relatively new social group in Japan) , it is depend-
ent upon the recall of the mothers who served as informants, and is
thus subject to distortion — probably in the direction of modern
trends of change in these practices.

A subject of recent investigations by Japanese scholars has been
the psychological effect of the ejiko, a type of cradle for children
used over a wide area of rural Japan. The most common type of
ejiko is made of straw and is bowl-shaped. When it is necessary for
the mother to leave the child unattended, it is placed in a squatting
position within the cradle, wrapped in a quilt, and tied by a rope
so that hardly any movement of the body is possible. Preliminary
papers on the distribution and local varieties of the ejiko have been
published ( Sof ue 1958; Sue 1958; Sof ue. Sue, and Murakami 1958).
An intensive study directed toward determining its psychological
significance was conducted in 1958 and 1959 by Sofue and others
in a hamlet of Nagano Prefecture. It is interesting to note that prac-
tices of child training differ with social class even in this small rural
community (Sue, personal communication) . This project includes
the use of projective tests, and the data gathered will be compared
with those obtained from other communities. It is not clear how the
researchers intend to relate the findings of the tests to the custom
of using the ejiko, or how the possible effects of use of the ejiko may
be distinguished from those of other childhood experiences.

Increasingly, both Japanese and American scholars engaged in
research on Japanese practices of child rearing, as related to the

JAPAN 3 1

adult personality, have come to realize the weaknesses of an ap-
proach that deals with formal customs such as toilet training or the
use of the cradle. They have looked to multiple and less formalized
factors, including the identity of the adults concerned in the sociali-
zation process and affective relations between the socializers and
the socialized. Greater attention is now given to such questions as
the length of time the child sleeps with its parents, who bathes a
child or accompanies it in the bath, and the manner of gratifying
impulses (e.g., Caudill 1959c).

An indication of the multiplicity of factors involved in the for-
mation of the adult personality is provided by the results of a psy-
chological testing of Kihei, American-born Japanese who, after
spending their early childhood in the United States, are taken to
Japan for a number of years for schooling, and then return to the
United States (De Vos 1955) . From the standpoints of personality
rigidity and maladjustment, the Kibei were generally intermediate
to the Issei and Nisei. If the earliest practices of socialization are in
fact the most powerful, little difference should of course be found
between Kibei and Nisei, as they appear to have been exposed to
essentially identical practices of training in infancy and early child-
hood. Assimilation of Japanese values later in childhood and during
adolescence seems to be the source of conflict for the Kibei.

Although not focused directly on the subject of customs of child
rearing, research presently being conducted by Ezra Vogel on the
linkage between intraf amilial social relations and emotional disturb-
ances has much relevance. The project consists of the intensive study
of familial relations among the members of twelve Japanese families
of comparable social and economic backgrounds, of which six have
"normal" children and the remaining six have one or more emo-
tionally disturbed children under intensive treatment at the Japa-
nese National Institute for Mental Health. Vogel reports that the
emotional attachment of the Japanese child to his family is greater
than that of the American child and is maintained for a longer pe-
riod, and that tensions arising out of relationships with kin are more
common in Japan. Conflicts within the family follow a limited
number of characteristic patterns, such as tension between a man's
wife and his mother, and tension on the part of the wife because of
the husband's habit of seeking sexual and other gratifications out-
side the home. The degree and type of conflict among adults are
related to the intensity and type of emotional disturbance of the
children. This research is organized so as to allow direct comparison

32 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

with similar studies of the Harvard Psychological Clinic on fa-
milial relations among Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and
old Americans.

Somewhat more peripheral to the subject of child rearing is Wil-
liam Caudill's current research on the subject of impulse gratifica-
tion and restraint. Basing his statements on responses to a picture
test similar to the Thematic Apperception Test, Caudill (1959c)
reports that there are differences between Japanese and Americans
in what is ego-syntonic (consciously acceptable to the ego and need-
ing no repression) . For example, a Japanese mother's sensual grati-
fication in nursing her infant is consciously acceptable to her,
whereas the feeling of gratification is generally repressed by the
American mother. The Japanese are also described as being more
ego-syntonic with reference to certain forms of mutual dependency
within the family. A young man, for example, may remain depend-
ent upon his mother for many satisfactions long past the age that
would be considered appropriate in the United States. The Japanese
are said to be much less ego-syntonic than Americans in direct ex-
pression of aggression. Caudill (1959b) relates the hypochondriasis
manifest in the Japanese to their inability to express direct aggres-
sion toward others easily and the consequent deflection toward the
self in various forms including hypochondriasis.

An interesting and useful film on child rearing gives a visual com-
parison of Japanese, Indian Hindu, French, and Canadian prac-
tices (National Film Board of Canada 1959) • The Japanese section,
prepared with the advice of William Caudill, depicts the events of
a day in the life of an infant girl, 10 months of age, from a farming
family of the Kanto Plain, near Tokyo.

Other current research using a personality and culture approach
and bearing upon the subject of child training is De Vos's study of
juvenile delinquents in the Tokyo area (1960b) . Data were gath-
ered by means of conventional interviews, Q-sort cards, the Thema-
tic Apperception Test, and the Rorschach on the attitudes of juve-
nile delinquents toward their parents and their conceptions of the
social roles of mother and father. These data will be compared with
findings on a control group of nondelinquent Japanese youth and
with similar material previously gathered on delinquent and non-
delinquent groups of juveniles, including Negroes and Mexican-
Americans, in the United States.

Japanese child psychologists and pediatricians have carried out a
considerable number of studies of child training, but these are often

JAPAN 3 3

fragmentary, and they have not attempted to analyze systematically
the interrelationships between child rearing and the formation of
personahty. Little consideration is given in these studies to the social
class of the informants used. The studies are also characterized by
some degree of "culture-blindness." Much that is pertinent to an
understanding of the relationships between personality and culture
is overlooked simply because it is so familiar to the scholars them-
selves that it escapes notice or is deemed unworthy of it.

Although they have wider significance, a group of unique papers
by the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi (1956, 1958, i960) touch
indirectly upon child training. Doi calls attention to Japanese words
and concepts as illustrative of Japanese psychology, and states that
terms referring to the emotions and interpersonal relationships
often have no suitable English equivalents. He cites as an example
the noun amae, derived from the verb amaertt, which he defines in
English (1958, writer's English abstract) as fo depend and presume
upon another's love or indulge in another's kindness. (A popular
Japanese-English dictionary [Masuda 1957] translates this word,
dependent upon context, as: to baby; to act like a spoiled child;
to coax, to be coquettish; to faivn upon; and to avail oneself of an-
other's kindness.) In Western psychological terms, Doi holds, the
word amae (or aniaeru) has a central meaning referring to de-
pendancy needs. To Japanese minds it usually means what a child
feels about or how he acts toward his parents, particularly his
mother, and thus it distinctly relates to the nursing period. Think-
ing in terms of this familiar Japanese concept, Doi states, easily led
Japanese psychoanalysis to formulate theories about the importance
of oral dependency in the formation of neuroses, an interpretation
which has only recently become the focus of psychoanalytic work-
ers in Western nations.

Studies of Japanese Overseas

A group of studies which give promise of being particularly use-
ful in a number of respects is that conducted on Japanese immi-
grants to foreign countries and their descendants. Sociologists,
educational psychologists, anthropologists, and scholars in other
disciplines of social science have engaged in research of this kind,
which has been concerned principally with Japanese in the con-
tinental United States and Hawaii. Interest has grown to include
Japanese in South America and Canada, where field research has
recently been conducted or is now in progress,

34 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

One of the earliest studies was an investigation by educational
psychologists of school behavior of Nisei children on the Pacific
coast. An extensive series of studies, most of them summarized by
E. K. Strong ( 1934) , compares Caucasian-American and Japanese-
American grade school and high school children in intellectual func-
tioning and related features of personality. These studies fail to
make any explicit use of the concept of culture and for this reason
appear naive in the light of present-day theory and knowledge in
the social sciences. They bring out distinctly, however, a number of
traits that characterize the Nisei. Psychological tests indicated no
differences in the intellectual functioning of Nisei and Caucasian-
American children, although they did indicate different artistic
sensibilities. The sense of composition and the use of line of the Nisei
was found to be superior; their use of perspective inferior. Other
traits noted are of greater interest. One of these is close conform-
ance with middle-class American norms of behavior. Behavior of
the Nisei children in the schools is described as characteristically
docile, patient, and respectful and obedient to the teachers. Motiva-
tion to achievement is strong, and it is clear that parents of the Nisei
exerted strong pressure to inculcate in their children the idea that
meeting American standards of achievement and other norms of
behavior is desirable. Nisei students tended to earn higher grades
for school work than others and to receive greater recognition from
teachers for exemplary conduct.

Interest in the Japanese of the Pacific coast and elsewhere in the
United States was heightened during "World War II, when many
were sent to relocation centers. A number of published accounts
deal with the adjustment of the Japanese to life in these camps and
the new surroundings to which they moved when the war ended
and the camps were closed (e.g., Leighton 1945) , but they do not
relate directly to the Japanese personality.

Postwar interdisciplinary research on the acculturation of Japa-
nese in the Chicago area has yielded publications on acculturative
changes in personality and on the nature of psychological conflicts
which the bridging of Japanese and American cultures has produced
among the Japanese- Americans. Among these is Caudill's (1952)
extensive analysis of psychological aspects of the drive toward
achievement and other value attitudes of the Nisei. A study, based
on Rorschach tests, of acculturative changes in structural aspects
of personality of Issei and Nisei (De Vos 1955) reports a high level
of rigidity and certain indications of maladjustment among the

JAPAN 3 5

Issei. Nisei were much lower in rigidity, and displayed fewer indi-
cations of maladjustment. Comparison with data on Japanese in
Japan of the same social backgrounds (i.e., rural residents) revealed
equally high rigidity, but indications of severe maladjustment were
found only among the American Issei and appear to be related to
stress in adjusting to the alien American culture.

A focus of continuing interest in the study of the Japanese in
America has been attempts to analyze their drive toward achieve-
ment. The question has been asked why Issei and Nisei have ap-
parently adopted the attitudes and values, including the strong
motivation to achievement, of the American middle class when cer-
tain other immigrant groups under comparable circumstances have
not done so to the same degree (see, for example, Norbeck 1959
on ethnic groups in Hawaii) . Scholars have also asked why the Japa-
nese have made such apparently successful adjustments to life in the
United States when other minority groups, some of them suffering
less social discrimination, have failed to do so.

Similarities and compatibilities in certain American and native
Japanese values and attitudes have been offered in partial explana-
tion (Caudill and De Vos 1956). Japanese are described as ex-
tremely sensitive to stimuli from the outer world and as having a
superego structure that depends strongly on external sanctions for
reinforcement. Cultural values are internalized in a socialization
process that emphasizes long-range goals, perseverance, obedience
to authority, and a sense of obligation to parents. Socialization takes
place within the family, but the drive to achievement is satisfied by
conforming with expectations of the outer society. (This observa-
tion, it may be noted, is in keeping with opinions expressed by
numerous other scholars. For example, a study comparing the
vocational aspirations of American and Japanese schoolchildren
[Goodman 1957] describes the Americans as "self-oriented" [ego-
centric] and the Japanese as "others-oriented.") Attitudes and
community values to which the Nisei, as a minority group, are most
strongly exposed in extrafamilial contacts, and which the Nisei
internalize, are those of the American middle class. Thus native
Japanese and American attitudes of valuing conformance and
achievement and stressing long-range goals reinforce each other.
Success for the Nisei differs from success for the non- Japanese
American, however, in being closely related to the fulfillment of
filial obligations. The feeling of necessity to succeed as a means of
satisfying obligations to parents is brought out in clinical studies

^6 PSYCHOLOGIC AT. ANTTIROPOT.OCY

of individual Nisei (e.g., Babcock and Caudill in G. Seward, eJ.
1958) . A tendency toward psychological depression among Nisei is
well documented in a collection of papers on culture conflict related
to psychiatric problems of the Nisei (G. Seward, ed. 1958) , which
includes a particularly pertinent paper by Marvin Opler on psy-
chological stress as related to filial obligations in the case history of
an individual Kibei.

A study which compares acculturating Arabs in Algeria and
other minority groups with Japanese- Americans reports that cer-
tain indications of intrapsychic stress appear in the Rorschach rec-
ord of all groups, although they are less marked among the Nisei
than among the Jssei. Stress is seen to be connected with accultura-
tion or status as members of minority groups because the indications
do not appear in the records of individuals when they are members
of a majority group (De Vos, in Kaplan, ed. 1961 ) .

Data on immigrant and South American-born Japanese in Peru
and Brazil that will allow comparison with studies in the United
States have recently been collected under the direction of Seiichi
Izumi of Tokyo University. Results of Rorschach, Thematic Ap-
perception Tests, and problem situations tests are now in the process
of analysis, and promise to allow direct comparison of personality
traits and problems of acculturation among Japanese of the United
States and these two South American countries. Preliminary analy-
sis (Hiroshi Wagatsuma, personal communication) indicates that
results of projective tests administered in Peru differ from those
obtained in Brazil and the United States as well as Japan. Japanese-
Peruvians appear to be less strongly motivated toward personal
achievement than Japanese-Brazilians, Japanese-Americans, or
Japanese in Japan, and, as indicated by the Rorschach, to be more
pragmatic, presenting less emphasis on the integrated conceptions
characteristic of the Japanese in the United States and at home.

An interdisciplinary study under the direction of R. P. Dore of
the University of British Columbia and Masao Gamo of Meiji Uni-
versity on a fishing community of British Columbia populated by
Japanese immigrants and their descendants is worthy of note. The
aims of this study include investigation of problems of accultura-
tion and research on personality, and the project includes projective
tests among its tools.

Although the R^^ukyu Islands are hardly "overseas" in the same
sense as North and South America, research in personality and cul-
ture on the inhabitants of these islands is of significance for com-

JAPAN 37

parison in quite the same way as data on Japanese in faraway lands.
Although to some degree culturally and perhaps physically distinct
from the residents of Japan proper, the Ryukyu Islanders speak a
Japanese dialect, regard themselves as Japanese, and are so regarded
by the people of the principal islands of Japan. The Ryukyus were
a part of the Japanese nation for many centuries before the end of
World War II, but because of their isolated geographic position
the islands escaped or were only lightly affected by many cultural
innovations that swept Japan proper. In a provocative short article
on the island of Amami Oshima, Douglas Haring (1954) describes
the islanders as having more "open" personalities than the residents
of Japan proper. He suggests that the lack of sustained direct con-
tact with Japan proper prevented the spread to this small island of
attitudes and values which permeated the principal islands during
the Tokugawa era (1603 — 1868). The modern Amami Oshima
islanders, more impulsively labile and directly expressive of emo-
tions than modern mainland Japanese, may represent a type of per-
sonality that characterized the whole nation before Tokugawa
times.

J. Moloney's controversial writings on the Okinawans describe
them as relatively free of conflict and assert that as a result of per-
missive practices of nursing there is little mental illness among them.
A detailed field study of child-rearing practices in an Okinawan
community conducted in 1957 by T. W. and H. S. Maretzki (per-
sonal communication) casts much doubt on the statements of
Moloney. Research by the Maretzkis centered on dependence-
independence, aggression, and internalization of values with the
objective of relating measures of children's personality to ante-
cedent factors of socialization. They observe that both adults and
children indulge in a great deal of verbal aggression, and they report
many traits that differ from observations made on Japanese in the
main islands. Notable among these is less parental stress upon
achievement by their children. Tightly knit social relationships
throughout the whole community, encouraged by the customs of
community endogamy, are tied in with the high sociability and little
concern with competitiveness which characterize the children. Out-
standing features in Okinawan socialization include an emphasis
on nurturance, a high diffusion of caretakers of children, and the
importance of the role of peers in every stage of child development.
The community as a whole is almost an extension of the household
environment. Additional research by the Maretzkis in i960 is fo-

3 8 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cussed on the adult personality and will provide data for more de-
tailed comparison with Japan proper as well as other countries.

A study of another Ryukyu community on Ishigaki Island by
Allan H. and Ann Gertrude Smith now in press (American Philo-
sophical Society) provides additional data on Ryukyuan practices
of child rearing, including mechanisms of social control.

Pertinent investigations that fall outside the classifications we
have used here, but are worthy of notice, include research on pat-
terns of suicide in Japan and types of therapy used in Tokyo hos-
pitals to treat psychopathology. Seiichi Kato of the National
Institute for Mental Health (of Japan) has been conducting re-
search for ten years on Japanese suicides and attempted suicides with
the objective of determining their patterns and social correlates.
It is interesting to note that statistics since 1882 show that incidence
by age groups has been essentially constant until the end of World
War 11. Postwar statistics reveal a rise in suicides among young
males and, although figures for this group are still high, a decrease
among young women. Caudill has completed field research (1959)
on the psychiatric techniques and social environment of three To-
kyo mental hospitals, one of which emphasizes organic therapy,
another psychoanalytic treatment, and the third a distinctively
Japanese form of treatment named Morita therapy after its founder
and derived in part from Zen Buddhism.

Summary and Conclusions

An over-all view of research in Japanese culture and personality
reveals both strengths and weaknesses. The absolute number of for-
eign and native scholars engaged in research on Japan in this field is
not great, yet few if any foreign cultures have been the subject of
study by so many individuals. The total of published studies, many
of them in the Japanese language, is impressive in volume, but it is
weak or deficient in a number of respects, some of which we have
noted. The techniques and theories of modern culture and per-
sonality research have as yet hardly had adequate testing in Japan —
but it is extremely doubtful that they have had adequate testing in
any other culture. Considerable progress has been made in deter-
mining differences in culture and traits of personality according to
region and social class in Japan, but much more is required before
generalizations on the nation may be made with assurance. A con-
spicuous failing of Japanese scholars has been concentration on
minute problems and a reluctance to go beyond mere description.

JAPAN 39

It must be added that research by Japanese scholars has been greatly
inhibited by lack of funds, and their emphasis on studies of small
scope is in part due to this circumstance. Japanese scholars have also
been at a serious disadvantage for lack of opportunity to receive
training in the techniques of personality and culture research. Only
in very recent years have a few had the opportunity to take profes-
sional training.

Despite these negative comments, research in Japanese culture-
and-personality has not been merely a spotty repetition of tech-
niques and interpretations borrowed from scholars of the United
States and Europe. It has made its own contributions of theoretical
significance and it holds unusually great promise of making future
contributions. Subjects of research have been examined in such a
way that their conclusions concern and shed light on issues of gen-
eral interest in the field of culture-and-personality and the social
sciences as a whole. Past or present research in Japanese culture-and-
personality has special relevance to the following subjects of general
interest :

1. The nature of human drives to achievement.

2. Variations in the cultural conditioning of basic psychological mechanisms:
shame versus guilt as motivating forces; different uses of introjection and pro-
jection.

3. Processes of acculturation: factors involved in making acculturation easy
and successful or difficult and unsuccessful; the relationship between accultura-
tion and psychic stress.

Motivation toward achievement has long been a subject of schol-
arly interest, and the practical value of an understanding of factors
that inhibit and encourage the growth of drives to achievement is
obvious. Explanations have been sought through examination of
religiously sanctioned ideals of behavior and in many other ways.
The eagerness and speed with which Japan assimilated Western
culture, the startling rapidity with which it rose to a position as a
major international power, and the remarkable recovery of the na-
tion after devastating defeat and economic collapse in World War
II have stimulated much curiosity and theorizing. Historians have
pointed to the long-established receptiveness of the Japanese to
items of foreign culture and their equally long record of successful
adaptation of borrowed items. Other scholars have held that the
hierarchical ordering of Japanese society, especially the former
tight control of ruler over subject, has made the industrialization
and "modernization" of Japan easy. Robert Bellah's recent and in-

40 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

teresting Tokugawa Religion (1957) approaches the problem so-
ciologically after the manner of Max Weber. He concludes that an
equivalent of the Protestant ethic, evident in Tokugawa times,
served as a spur to Japanese economic growth. T. C. Smith (1959)
has argued effectively that the road to industrialization was paved
by indigenous developments during Tokugawa times.

All of these studies leave off where culture-and-personality be-
gins. The pattern of psychological integration of the personality
that encourages diligence and self-denial for the purpose of attain-
ing long-range goals is of particular interest in understanding the
achievements of Japan as a nation. It is here that research in culture-
and-personality can be very helpful. As we have noted, much evi-
dence from studies in culture-and-personality indicates that strong
motivation toward success exists among the Japanese of Japan and
Japanese-Americans. Other research has suggested the means by
which motivation is inculcated and reinforced. Research under way
on intrafamiiial relations gives promise of telling us more about
motivation as it is related to Japanese social structure as well as
contributing to our understanding of psychological stress arising
from social living. These theoretical matters are, of course, highly
relevant to the problem of understanding other Asian countries
where economic developments have followed quite different courses,
and to the understanding of motivation and achievement for all
mankind.

In connection with the problem of understanding the drive to
achievement of the Japanese, published studies in personality and
culture have presented hypotheses that should stimulate re-
examination of theories of the relationships between superego and
ego ideal as these are related to guilt and shame. Perhaps all scholars
working in the field of culture-and-personality would agree that
theorizing on the subject of guilt versus shame has often been over-
simplified. Certainly, the Japanese studies suggest strongly that
shame and guilt are not necessarily antithetical or mutually incom-
patible. The question of the weighting of the sanction of shame
versus that of guilt in any society cannot be investigated satisfac-
torily without consideration of several other related subjects, in-
cluding the mechanisms of introjection and projection. Research
on Japan on this latter subject points up the necessity of re-
examination of theories and of further cross-cultural comparison.

Perhaps the most promising avenue of research in Japanese per-
sonality and culture bears on the subject of acculturation. The fact

JAPAN 41

that Japanese citizens of similar backgrounds have migrated to sev-
eral nations with quite different cultures provides a unique oppor-
tunity for cross-cultural comparison of processes of acculturation.
Research completed to date indicates that the Japanese of the United
States differ considerably in traits of personality from those who
have settled in South America. Studies of the Japanese in these areas
suggest that compatibility rather than duplication of values be-
tween the minority and majority group are necessary for successful
acculturation, and that quite different patterns of psychological re-
inforcement of values may yield results that are similar. Delineation
of the values as well as interpretation of associated psychological
mechanisms are problems which appear to yield best results when
approached through the methods of personality and culture.

Research conducted to date on the Japanese also indicates that
projective tests are useful instruments for detecting intrapsychic
stress arising from difficulties of acculturation. Further comparison
with data on Chinese-Americans, American Negroes, Puerto Ri-
cans, Filipinos, and other minority groups and acculturating peoples
in the United States in this and other matters should be extremely
fruitful.

The promise which future research holds seems particularly great.
Japan is a large and culturally complex society with many social
strata representing subcultures, and many regional differences. This
circumstance provides an unusually fine opportunity for compari-
son to aid in gaining understanding of many questions concerned
with personality and culture. The Japanese abroad offer another
useful avenue of comparison. Japan is, moreover, a highly literate
society with much recorded history. During the past century it has
undergone tremendous cultural change, proceeding at an acceler-
ated rate since the end of World War II, and much of the change
is well documented. In these respects, Japan offers an exceptional
opportunity for observation of sociocultural change and its rela-
tionship to personality. In all of these matters, the prospect of fu-
ture contributions to knowledge is particularly favored by the fact
that both native and foreign scholars in several disciplines are en-
gaged in research directed toward solving the same problems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(Titles of Japanese works have been Romanized, and English
translations are given. When Japanese journals and serials have offi-

42 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cial English as well as Japanese titles, both are cited. English abstracts
are published with some Japanese articles, and these have been
noted.)

Babcock, Charlotte, and William Caudill

1958 Personal and cultural factors in treating a nisei man. In Clinical studies
in culture conflict, Georgene Seward, ed. New York, Ronald Press.
Bellah, Robert N.

1957 Tokugawa religion; the values of pre-industrial Japan. Glencoe, Free
Press.
Benedict, Ruth

1946 The chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of Japanese culture. Bos-
ton, Houghton Mifflin.
Bennett, J. W. and Michio Nagai

1953 Echoes: reactions to American anthropology — Japanese critique of the
methodology of Benedict's "Chrysanthemum and the sword." Ameri-
can Anthropologist 55:404-411.

Buchanan, D. C.

1954 Japanese character and personality as revealed in their culture, ht Un-
derstanding other cultures, William A. Parker, ed. Washington, Ameri-
can Council of Learned Societies.

Caudill, William

1952 Japanese-American personality and acculturation. Genetic Psychology

Monographs 45. Provincetown, Mass., Journal Press.
1959a The relationship of anthropology to psychiatry in the study of culture
and personality. Seishin Bunseki Kenkyu (The Japanese Journal of
Psychoanalysis) 6:57—65.
1959b Similarities and differences in psychiatric illness and its treatment in
the United States and Japan. Nagoya University, Seishin Eisei (Mental
Hygiene) 61/62:15-26.
1959c Watakushi no piknchd intabyil gipitsu (The use of a "Picture Inter-
view" technique in the study of impulse gratification and restraint).
Yokohama, Hiyoshi Byoin, Seishinbunsekigaku no Susume 3:1—13.
Caudill, William and George De Vos

1956 Achievement, culture and personality: the case of Japanese Americans.
American Anthropologist 58:1102-1126.
CoLTON, H. A., Jr. and F. G. Ebaugh

1946 Japanese neuropsychiatry. American Journal of Psychiatry 103:342-
348.
Dening, Walter

1 891 Mental characteristics of the Japanese people. Trans, and Proc. of the
Japan Society, old series, 19(1) : 1 7-3 6.
De Vos, George

1954 A comparison of the personality differences in two generations of Japa-
nese Americans by means of the Rorschach test. Nagoya Journal of
Medical Science 17 (3 ) :i53— 265.

1955 A quantitative Rorschach assessment of maladjiostment and rigidity In

JAPAN 43

acculturating Japanese Americans. Genetic Psychology Monographs
52 (First Half) : 5 1-87. Provincetown, Mass., Journal Press.

1960a The relation of guilt toward parents to achievement and arranged mar-
riage among the Japanese. Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Inter-
personal Processes Vol. 23, No. 3.

1960b Psycho-cultural attitudes toward primary relationships in Japanese de-
linquents— a study in progress. Seishin Eisci (Mental Hygiene) , No. 66.

1961 Symbolic analysis in the cross-cultural study of personaUty. In Studying
personality cross-culturally, Bert Kaplan, ed., Evanston and White
Plains, Row Peterson.
Df. Vos, George and H. Wagatsuma

1959 Psychocviltural significance of concern over death and illness among
rural Japanese. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 5:5-19.

1 96 1 Variations in traditional value attitudes toward status and role behavior
of women in two Japanese villages. American Anthropologist, in press.
Doi, Takeo

1956 Japanese language as an expression of Japanese psychology. Western
Speech 20:90—96.

1958 Shinkeishitsti no sehhinbyori (Psychopathology of "shinkeishitsu") .
Seishinshinkeigaku Zasshi (Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica) 60:733—
744 (English abstract).

i960 Jibtm to amae no seishinbyori (Psychopathology of "jibtm" and
"amae"). Seishinshinkeigaku Zasshi (Psychiatria et Neurologia Ja-
ponica) 62:149—162 (English abstract) .
Embree, J. F.

1939 Suye Mura, a Japanese village. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

FUJIOKA, Y.

1952 Rorschach test ni yoru personality no chosa (I) — Nara-ken, Seiki-gtm,
Hirano-mtira no baai (An investigation of personality by means of the
Rorschach test, I, Hirano Village, Seiki-gun, Nara Prefecture). Ky5to
Daigaku Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyusho Chosa Hokoku (Social Survey
Report of The Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto Uni-
versity) , 8.

1957 A statistical approach to group comparison based on the distribution
of Rorschach responses. Memoire of The Research Institute for Hu-
manistic Studies, Kyoto University.

1958 Jinruigaku ni okerti personality no mondai — Rorschach test ni yorn
hikaku kenkyii (Some problems of personality studies in anthropology
— comparative research by means of the Rorschach test). Shiso
412:34-44.

1959a Rorschach hanno no ingakuteki bumpu ni yoru group hikaku no koko-
romi (An attempt to compare groups by means of the mathematical dis-
tribution of Rorschach responses). Shinrigaku Hyoron (Psychological
Review) 1:35—49.

1959b Rorschach hannoshn — Nihon nosanson dansei shotaishu no baai (Tables
of Rorschach responses of male house-holders in Japanese farming and
mountain communities). Kyoto Daigaku Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyusho
Chosa Hokoku (Social Survey Report of the Research Institute for
Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University), i8.

44 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

FujioKA, Y., Y. Maki, T. Ikeda, and M. Okano

1956 Rorschach test ni yoru personality no chosa (III) — Nara-ken, Yoshino-
gun, Totsngawa-viura no baai (An investigation of personahty by means
of the Rorschach test, III, Totsugawa Village, Yoshino-gun, Nara Pre-
fecture) . Kyoto Daigaku Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyusho Chosa Hokoku
(Social Survey Report of The Research Institute for Humanistic Studies,
Kyoto University) , 14.

Goodman, M. E.

1957 Values, attitudes and social concepts of Japanese and American children.
American Anthropologist 59:979—999.

GoRER, Geoffrey

1942 Japanese character structure and propaganda: a preliminary survey.
Prepared for the Committee on National Morale and the Council on
Human Relations. Yale University (mimeo).

1943 Themes in Japanese cultvire. Trans. New York Academy of Sciences,
Series II, 5:106—124.

Haring, D. G.

1943 Comment on Japanese personal character. Excerpts from Blood on the

rising sun, by D. G. Haring.

Reprinted in Personal character and cultural milieu, D. G. Haring, ed.

Syracuse, Syracuse University Press.
1946 Aspects of personal character in Japan. Far Eastern Quarterly 6:12—22.
1949 Japan and the Japanese. In Most of the world, Ralph Linton, ed. New

York, Columbia University Press.
^953 Japanese national character; cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis and

history. The Yale Review 42:375-402.
1954a Comment on field techniques in ethnography; illustrated by a survey

of Amami Oshima. Trans. New York Academy of Sciences 16:271-

Z76.
1954b Comment on field techniques in ethnography; illustrated by a survey

of the Ryukyu Islands. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10:255-

267.
HosHiNO, Akira, Takao Sofue, Hiroko Sue, and Yoshikazu Imai

1958 Ikii]i yoshiki to paasonaritei (Infant training and personality) (I), In-
ternational Christian University, Kydiku Kenkyu 5:148-216.

Hsiao, H. H.

1939 Mentality of the Chinese and Japanese. Journal of Applied Psychology
13:9-31.

Hsu, F. L. K.

1949 Suppression versus repression: a limited psychological interpretation of
four cultures. Psychiatry 12:223-242.

Imanishi, K.

1952 Mura to ningen (Villages and people). Tokyo, Shinhy5ronsha.

Imanishi, K., Y. Maki, and Y. Fujioka

1955 Rorschach test ni yoru personality chosa (A study of personality by
means of the Rorschach test). In Taclfikuiyo no kenkyu — gijiitsJi,
seikatsu, ningen (Studies on a pottery-making village, Tachikui — tech-
nology, way of life, the people), K. Yabuuchi, ed. Tokyo, Koseisha
Koseikaku.

JAPAN 45

ISHIGURO, TaIGI

1955 Haha-ko kankei no shinrigakicteki kenkyu {sonoichi) — Nyuyoji-kJ no
shitsukekata no jittai (Psychological study on mother-child relations
(I) — actual circumstances in child training). Nagoya Daigaku Kyoiku
Gakubu Kiyo (Bulletin of the Faculty of Education, Nagoya Univer-
sity) 1:74-86 (English abstract).

Kaplan, Bert, ed.

196 1 Studying personahty cross-culturally. Evanston and White Plains, Row
Peterson.
Kato, Seiichi

1956 Suicide. In Annual Report of Mental Health of the National Institute
of Mental Health, Chapter IV, Section 22. Tokyo.

Kato, Hidetoshi, ed. and trans.

1959 Japanese popular culture. Tokyo and Rutland, Vt., Charles E. Tuttle.
Kawashima, Takeyoshi

1951a Giri no kannen ni tsuite (On the concept of giri) . Sbiso, Sept., 21-28.

1951b On no is/yiki no pttai (The nature of the concept of on). Chuo Kdron
56:119-129.

1957 Ideorogii to shite no kazokti seido (The family system as ideology).
Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten.

Kerlinger, F. N.

1953 Behavior and personality in Japan: a critique of three studies of Japa-
nese personality. Social Forces 31:250—258.

KiDA, MiNORU

1956 Nihonbiinka no kontei ni hisoviiimono (What lies at the bottom of
Japanese culture). Tokyo, Kodansha.

KODAMA, HaBUKU

1953 Nihonpn no ryorusbyakku banno no kenkyii (A study of Rorschach
responses of Japanese). Shinrigaku Kdza 7:1-92.

Kyugakkai Reng5 Tsushima Kyodo Chosa Iinkai

1954 Tsushima no shizen to bunka (Nature and culture in Tsushima).
S5g5 Kenkyu Hokoku, 2. Tokyo, Kokinshoin.

LaBarre, Weston

1945 Some observations on character structure in the Orient: the Japanese.
Psychiatry 8:319-342.
Lanham, Betty B.

1956 Aspects of child care in Japan: preUminary report. In Personal char-
acter and cultural milieu, D. G. Haring, ed. Syracuse, Syracuse Uni-
versity Press.

Leighton, Alexander H.

1945 The governing of men; general principles and recommendations based
on experience at a Japanese relocation camp. Princeton, Princeton Uni-
versity Press.

Maretzki, T. W.

1957 Child rearing in an Okinaw^an community. Yale University, Ph.D. dis-
sertation.

Masuda, K.

1957 Kenkyusha's new pocket Japanese-English dictionary. Tokyo, Kcnkyu-
sha.

46 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Meadow, Arnold

1944 An analysis of Japanese character structure. Prepared for and dis-
tributed by the Institute for Intercultural Studies, New York City
(mimeo).

MiNAMI, HiROSHI

1954 Ni/jonjin no sbinri (Psychology of the Japanese). Tokyo, Mainlchi
Shimbunsha.
Moloney, J. C.

1945 Psychiatric observations on Okinawa Shima. Psychiatry 8:391-399.
195 1 A study of neurotic conformity: the Japanese. Complex 5:26-32.

1953 Understanding the paradox of Japanese psychoanalysis. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (part 4) :i-i3.

1954 Understanding the Japanese mind. New York, Philosophical Library.
Mori, Shigetoshi and Tadashi Miwa

1958 Okmoerabiiid-iomin no paasonaritei (Personality of Okinoerabuto
Islanders). Jinruikagaku, 10.

National Film Board of Canada

1959 Four families (film on practices of child rearing). Box 6100, Montreal,
Quebec.

NoRBECK, Edward

1959 Pineapple town — Hawaii. Berkeley, University of California Press.
NoRBECK, Edward and Margaret

1956 Child training in a Japanese fishing community. In Personal character
and cultural milieu, D. G. Haring, ed. Syracuse, Syracuse University
Press.

Okano, M.

1956 Shiidan kozo to personality (Group structure and personality). Shin-
rigaku Kenkyu (Japanese Journal of Psychology) 27:8-14.

Seligman, C. G.

1930 Japanese temperament and character. Trans, and Proc. of the Japan
Society. London. 28:123-142.

Seward, G. H., ed.

1958 Clinical studies and cultural conflict. New York, Ronald Press. [Chap-
ters pertaining to Japan] : C. G. Babcock and W. Caudill, Personal and
cultural factors in the treatment of a Nisei man; T. E. Bessent, An
aging Nisei anticipates rejection; N. L. Farberow and E. S. Schneidman,
A Nisei woman attacks by suicide; L. B. Olinger and V. S. Summers,
The dividing path: psychocultural neurosis in a Nisei man; and M. K.
Opler, Cultural dilemma of a Kibei youth.

SiKKEMA, Mildred

1947 Observations on Japanese early training. Psychiatry 10:423-432.

SiLBERFENNIG, JUDITH

1945 Psychological aspects of current Japanese and German paradoxa. Psy-
choanalytic Review 32:73-85.

Smith, T. C.

1959 The agrarian origins of modern Japan. Stanford, Stanford University

Press.

JAPAN 47

SOFUE, TakAO

1954 Patterns of the Japanese personality indicated by the Rorschach test.
Japanese Journal of Projective Techniques, i.

1958 Ejiko ni tsuite — sono btnnpti to jinniigakuieki igi (Ejiko: its distri-
bution and anthropological significance). Shonika Shinryo (Journal
for Pediatric Practice), 21.
SoFUE, Takao, Hiroko Sue and Taiji Murakami

1958 Ejiko ni kans7iru bunkajinruigaktiteki kenkyil — bttmpu oyobi chiikiteki
bent ni tsuite (Anthropological study of the E]iko, a Japanese cradle
for child: its distribution and areal varieties). Jinruigaku Zasshi (Jour-
nal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon) 66:jj-^i (English ab-
stract) .

SoFUE, Takao and Hiroshi Wagatsuma

1959 Kokumin no shinri — Nihonjin to Obeijin (National character — Japa-
nese, Americans, and Europeans). Tokyo, Kodansha.

Spitzer, H. M.

1947 Psychoanalytic approaches to the Japanese character. In Psychoanalysis
and the social sciences. Vol. i, G. Roheim, ed. New York, International
Universities Press.
Stoetzel, Jean

1955 "Without the chrysanthemum and the sword; a study of the attitudes
of youth in post-war Japan. New York, Columbia University Press.

Strong, E. K.

1934 The second-generation Japanese problem. Stanford, Stanford University

Press.
Sue, Hiroko

1958 Ejiko ni kansnru bunkajinruigakuteki kenkyil — Miyagi-ken no ejiko

shiyd chiiki ni okeru chosa (Anthropology study of ejiko (cradle) —

intensive study of an ejiko-Msing community in Miyagi Prefecture).

Jinruigaku Zasshi (Journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon)

66:128-136 (English abstract).
Tsukishima, Kenzo

1954 Noinin no paasonaritei — Kitakami-gawa churyuiki no noson no baai
(The personality of farmers, as seen in the farming villages of the mid-
dle reaches of the KItakami River). Tokyo University, Toyo Bunka
Kenkyusho Kiyo (The Memoirs of the Institute for Oriental Culture)
5:1-76.

1955 Gyomin no paasonaritei — Nanao-wangan no gyoson no baai (The per-
sonahty of fishermen, as seen in the fishing villages of Nanao Bay).
Tokyo University, Toyo Bunka Kenkyusho Kiy5 (The Memoirs of the
Institute for Oriental Culture) 7:147-190.

1957 Nihon kdzan bnraku no ningenkankei ni kansnru bunka shinri gakuteki
chosa hokoku (A study of human relations in Japanese mining com-
munities from the standpoint of cultural psychology). Tokyo Univer-
sity, Toyo Bunka Kenkyusho Kiy5 (The Memoirs of the Institute for
Oriental Culture )i3:i49-i88.

Wagatsuma, Hiroshi, and George De Vos

In press "Attitudes Toward Arranged Marriage in Rural Japan," Hinnan Or-
ganization.

chapter 3

AFRICA*

ROBERTA. LeVINE

University of Chicago

Introduction

SuBSAHARAN Africa is one of the world's great strongholds of non-
literate peoples. Its ethnographic literature is vast, yet studies of
culture and personality are exceedingly few. There has probably
been less research on socialization processes, the psychodynamics of
cultural behavior, the application of projective techniques, per-
sonality and culture change, and culture and mental disorder in
Africa than in any major continental area of the world. Anthro-
pologists working there have generally eschewed such research, leav-
ing it to psychiatrists, educators, and missionaries. The latter, many
of whom were untrained in anthropology or scholarly research of
any kind, have produced works which are at best straightforward
descriptions of childhood or psychotic behavior, at worst racial
stereotypes with scientific window dressing. All too often such
studies concern The African Mind or The African Mentality, ig-
noring cultural differences among Africans. We are told that TJoe
African is impulse-driven, fear-ridden, incapable of long-range
planning, and unable to distinguish between himself and his kin
group.

The case of J. C. Carothers, whose works are among the most
widely read on the subject of mental disease and personality in
Africa, is illustrative. Dr. Carothers is a psychiatrist who practised
in Kenya for many years and was in charge of the Mathari Mental
Hospital (for Africans) there. His articles have appeared in Psychi-
atry (1948) and the Journal of Mental Science (1951) ; a mono-
graph by him was published by the World Health Organization
(1953), and a topical report. The Psychology of Man Man, was

* Prepared with the assistance of National Institute of Mental Health Grant No. M-4037 (A).

48

AFRICA 49

published by the Kenya Government (1954). The following quo-
tations are characteristic of his writings.

The native African in his culture is remarkably like the lobotomized Western
European and in some ways like the traditional psychopath in his inability to see
individual acts as part of a whole situation, in his frenzied anxiety and in the
relative lack of mental ills (1951:47).

In summary, by the nature of African experience in infancy and childhood, no
firm foundation is laid for clear distinction of the subject and object, or for a
proper balance in regard to those of love and hate. Tendencies to later readjust-
ment (especially in the field of impersonal intelligence) of this distorted state
are consistently frustrated, so that in later life there is Httle approach to a total
personal integration, and, in dealing with any situation for which no pattern of
behavior is prescribed by local custom, such behavior is impulsive and is marked
by concentration on immediately presenting aspects of that situation, without
regard for the sum of stored experience, of present perception, or of implications
for the future (1953:107).

If one scans the faces of the passers-by in any town in Western Europe it is
clear that most of the people observed are impelled by some continuing inner pur-
pose and yet are also alert to the events around them. If one leaves the ship for a
moment at any African port, it is equally clear that most of the faces observed
express either exclusive interest in some immediate affair or complete apathy
(1953:108).

In The Psychology of Man Man, in which Carothers was forced
by the nature of the subject to consider the Kikuyu apart from
other Africans, two factors adduced specifically to explain Kikuyu
behavior are their "forest psychology" which comes from living
near the edge of the forest and explains their willingness to return
to it in Mau Mau bands, and the fact that "in Kikuyuland authority
lacked strength" (1954:5).

Equally ethnocentric and unscientific as the writings of Ca-
rothers, and more Freudian, are the works of J. F. Ritchie (1943)
and S. Davidson (1949). These authors seek to discover why The
African is irrational, lacking in curiosity, and so forth; Ritchie, a
school principal in Barotseland, attributes it to excessively late and
traumatic weaning; Davidson, a psychiatrist among the Bemba,
sees adolescent sexual promiscuity as the cause. Such analyses are
primarily relevant, not to culture-and-personality investigations,
but to the sociology of knowledge as examples of the use of psycho-
logical concepts to support race prejudice.

Although many British social anthropologists specializing in
Africa observe what Richards has called a "psychology taboo"
(1958:118), their field reports contain much data of interest to the
student of culture-and-personality, particularly on family relation-

50 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ships, sexual behavior, the Kfe cycle of the individual, and religion.
That they have so rarely availed themselves of psychological theory
in the analysis of their data is perhaps attributable to the persistence
of a tradition concerning the separation of social and psychological
facts. Like Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, the present upholders
of that tradition reject explicitly psychological explanations of
sociocultural phenomena but often interpret field data in terms of
individual sentiments and attitudes. Gluckman's Custom and Con-
flict in Africa (1955) is an example of this ; much of what he terms
conflict is equivalent to culturally patterned ambivalence within
individuals. Another example is Nuer Religion; in it Evans-
Pritchard makes the following comments on psychological theories
of primitive religion:

The psychological explanations were very varied, changing with changes in
psychological theory. Intellectualist interpretations were succeeded by emotion-
alist interpretations and they by psycho-analytical interpretations. Religion was
discussed and explained in terms of association of ideas, of personification of nat-
ural phenomena, of awe, of thrill, of fear, anxiety and frustration, of projection,
and so forth. Most of these theories have long ago been discredited as naive
introspective guesses (1956:312).

In spite of this strong statement, Evans-Pritchard also rejects
strictly sociological explanations of primitive religion and subse-
quently concludes, "Though prayer and sacrifice are exterior ac-
tions, Nuer religion is ultimately an interior state" (1956:322). He
discusses the Nuer "sense of guilt" which he claims "is not just fear
but a complex psychological state" and which "varies in intensity
from one situation to another" (1956:31 2-3 1 3 ) . At another point
it is stated "Nuer religious conceptions are properly speaking not
concepts but imaginative constructions" (1956:321). This seems
to approach a psychological view, as does his general characteriza-
tion of Nuer religion:

We can say that these characteristics ... of Nuer religion indicate a distinc-
tive kind of piety which is dominated by a strong sense of dependence on God and
confidence in him rather than in any human powers or endeavors . . . this sense
of dependence is remarkably individualistic. It is an intimate personal relationship
between man and God. This is apparent in Nuer ideas of sin, in their expressions
of guilt, in their confessions, and in the dominant piacular theme of their sacri-
fices. It is evident also in their habit of making short supplications at any time.
This is a very noticeable trait of Nuer piety, and my conclusions are here borne
out by Dr. Lienhardt's observations. He tells me that when he was in western
Dinkaland he had in his household a Nuer youth whose habit of praying to God
for aid on every occasion of difficulty greatly astonished the Dinka (1956:317-
318).

AFRICA 5 1

This description of a modal habit pattern as characteristic of a
rehgious system is similar to one that might be written by a be-
havioristically oriented student of personality and culture. The
difference is that Evans-Pritchard believes that the underlying proc-
esses are better analyzed by a theologian than a psychologist
(1956:322). In any event it is apparent that, though personality
theory as such is either rejected or ignored by most British Af rican-
ists, even some of the most antipsychological of them do not over-
look the individual and his response patterns in their ethnographic
analyses.

Culture and personality studies are not entirely missing from the
anthropological literature on African peoples. Indeed, such studies
can be found among the writings of some of the most eminent Af ri-
canists — Melville J. Herskovits, S. F. Nadel, Audrey I. Richards,
Meyer Fortes — though rarely in their best-known works. Further-
more, a few younger scholars such as S. G. Lee combine psychological
training with cultural sophistication to produce culture-
personality studies of high quality. At the Fifteenth International
Congress of Psychology at Brussels in 1957, several papers were
presented reporting African personality research of variable qual-
ity. The number of papers was encouraging, as was the attitude
expressed by Dr. S. Biesheuvel of the National Institute of Person-
nel Research, Johannesburg, in his introduction to their published
form :

Psychology owes a considerable debt to social anthropology for its elucidation
of the social systems and functions that govern African community life. . . .
Psychological research . . . should be social in its orientation, closely related to the
work of social anthropologists, and preferably conducted on a team basis (1958a:
161).

In the remainder of this paper I shall outline the cultural back-
ground to personality in Africa and then review African studies of
culture and personality under the headings of infant experience and
the family environment, personality development in childhood and
adolescence, the T.A.T. in South Africa and the Congo, person-
ality and acculturation, psychocultural interpretation of ritual,
witchcraft, and dreams, and culture and mental disease.^ The re-
view is not exhaustive; works of primary interest and relevance are

^ I am indebted to my wife, Barbara B. LeVine, for an extensive search of the psychological
literature for relevant sources, to Igor Kopytoff for bringing to my attention studies conducted in
the Congo, and to Hans Panofsky of the African Studies Library, Northwestern University, for
invaluable bibliographical assistance.

52 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

discussed. Works on African intelligence (e.g., Biesheuvel 1943)
and many psychiatric studies have necessarily been omitted. My
intention has been to select for discussion those studies which, by
their insights or their errors, help to point the way for future re-
search.

The Cultural Background to Personality in Africa

Cultural variation among the millions of people and hundreds of
linguistic groups in subsaharan Africa is so great as to defy any
attempt to describe "African Culture." Ignorance of this variation
has vitiated the attempts of many nonanthropologists to contribute
to culture and personality studies. The culture area classifications
ofHerskovits (1948) andMurdock (1959) provide means of com-
prehending cultural similarities and variations at an intermediate
level of generality between the particular culture and the entire
continent. There are numerous cultural characteristics, however,
which may be said to be distinctively African, although they are
neither limited to Africa nor universal throughout it. For purposes
of comparison with other areas of the world, I present a list of those
distinctively African characteristics which have demonstrable or
potential relevance to personality variables.

1. Pastoralism. Cattle, camels, sheep, and goats are raised in
many parts of Africa, sometimes along with agricultural activities,
less frequently as the sole subsistence activity. A distinctive ethos or
attitude has often been attributed to strictly pastoral and nomadic
peoples, such as the Masai and pastoral Fulani, and to peoples such
as the Nuer among whom pastoralism is highly valued but not ex-
clusively practised. Herding is an important childhood occupation
in many areas of Africa.

2. Large and Dense Populations. African ethnolinguistic units
tend to be large by comparison with nonliterate societies in other
parts of the world. There are numerous African ethnic groups of
more than a million persons (e.g., Zulu, Xhosa, Kikuyu, Ibo, Mossi)
and many more over a quarter of a million in population; linguistic
groups of less than 100,000 are often considered small by local
standards. Within those large groups there is local variation in cul-
tural practices which makes comparative studies of communities or
districts both feasible and valuable. Population densities are high
among many of the sedentary peoples, ranging up to 2,000 per
square mile. In West Africa there are indigenously urban and infra-
urban communities.

AFRICA 5 3

3. Highly Developed Prestige Economy and Acquisitive Culture
Patterns. Indigenous economic institutions are varied, but acquisi-
tive values and status distinctions based on wealth are common
throughout Africa. In west and west central Africa these patterns
are related to trading and markets; on the eastern side of the con-
tinent they most frequently involve livestock. Plural wives are al-
most everywhere items of conspicuous consumption.

4. Centralized Political Institictions and Institutionalized Lead-
ership. Stateless societies outnumber centralized states in Africa,
but the latter are found in greater abundance there than in any
other nonliterate area of the world. Chiefs, headmen, and royal and
aristocratic lineages play an important part in the functioning of
many African social systems.

5 . Unilineal Descent Groups. These are not only the most wide-
spread form of kin group, but serve political functions in stateless
societies and form the basis of local organization in many areas.

6. Bridewealth. Marriage payments are customarily made to
the family of the bride, although bride service and sister exchange
are found in some societies.

7. Polygyny and the Mother-child Household. Polygyny is ex-
tremely common in Africa on the whole (see Dorjahn 1958b) and
has important consequences for patterns of sexual behavior and
child rearing. In many societies each wife occupies a separate house
with her children.

8. Initiation Kites and Genital Operations. Male and female
initiation rites at or around puberty can be found in every major
region of Africa, with groups lacking the rites interspersed among
those that practise them. Circumcision and clitoridectomy are also
widely distributed, sometimes associated with initiation, often not.

9. Ancestor Ctdts. Beliefs and practices pertaining to ancestors
are often associated with unilineal kin groups and are the most
prevalent single form of African religion. The worship of nature
deities and other gods and spirits is also found, however.

10. Witchcraft and Sorcery. Beliefs and practices concerning
magical aggression by humans against one another are extremely
widespread, though their form and intensity vary. Exuvial magic
is common.

11. Importance of Proverbs in Folklore. In most African so-
cieties much traditional wisdom, both moral and cynical, is sum-
marized in proverbs which are used in everyday life and taught to
children.

54 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Infant Experience and the Family Environment

Much of what has been written on childhood in Africa by re-
searchers and casual observers has emphasized the closeness of the
mother-child relationship, the prolonged indulgence of infants, and
the traumatic character of weaning. One of the few observational
studies of African infants is that of Geber (1958), whose work was
part of the research program organized by the International Chil-
dren's Centre and carried out in four European cities as well as
Africa. The children whose psychomotor development she tested
consisted of 308 in Kampala, Uganda (cultural group unspecified
but apparently all Ganda) , 16 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and
30 in Dakar, Senegal (cultural groups unspecified) . The published
conclusions do not distinguish between the groups in different parts
of the continent but contrast them as a whole with European
children.

Using Gesell tests for infants past the neonate stage and methods
devised by Andre Thomas for testing neonates, Geber found striking
evidence of precocity in African infants. Nine-hour-old infants
drawn into a sitting position were able to prevent their heads from
falling back, which European children cannot do until six weeks
after birth; two-day-olds looked at the examiner's face and seemed
to focus their eyes, a feat not performed until eight weeks by Euro-
pean infants.

... up to the fifth month, the motor precocity was remarkable, especially in re-
gard to posture. Between the fifth and seventh months, adaptivity, language and
personal-social relations came to equal the motor development: the level was that
of European children two or three months older (1958:186).

Geber suggests that the initial motor precocity might be due to
the attitude of the pregnant mother: "The arrival of a baby is al-
ways looked forward to with great pleasure . . . and is not a source
of anxiety. . . . The mother ... is active up to the moment of de-
livery" (1958:194). Her "happy acceptance of motherhood may
be related to the slight degree of tonic flexion in her new-born child"
(1958:195). The continued precocity of older infants is attributed
to the fact that the African children live "surrounded by affection,"
especially the "loving and warm behavior of the mothers." Geber
states, "Before the child is weaned, the mother's whole interest is
centered on him. She never leaves him, carries him on her back —
often in skin-to-skin contact — wherever she goes, sleeps with him,
feeds him on demand at all hours of the day or night, forbids him

AFRICA 55

nothing, and never chides him" (1958:194). In support of this
hypothesis, she cites (without specifics) the cases of some African
children whose westernized parents kept them in cots most of the
time and fed them on schedules; they "did not show similar precoc-
ity after the first month, and later were inclined to be quiet and
subdued" (1958:195). Furthermore, children examined before and
after weaning are said to have shown "marked differences" in their
behavior and test results; afterwards they were less lively and pre-
cocious. This is attributed to the withdrawal of the mother's love
and attention at the time of weaning; the Ganda custom of sending
the child away to grandparents for months at the time of weaning
is mentioned here. But "children for whom weaning had not caused
a sudden break in the way of life retained their liveliness after the
weaning, and developed without interruption" (1958:195).

Despite the brevity of the article by Geber and its lack of detailed
evidence, she does raise some intriguing hypotheses concerning the
effect of desire for children, maternal love, and mother-infant con-
tact on infant development. Like many nonanthropologists, how-
ever, she assumes cultural uniformity for Africans, so that the
patterns of infant care found among the Ganda of Kampala are
generalized by implication to her South African and Senegalese
samples. Although our knowledge of infant care in Africa is some-
what scant, several relevant pieces of information are reliably re-
ported and should not be overlooked:

1. Not all African luomen desire motherhood. Among the Ila
of Northern Rhodesia, where childbirth is followed by a 2^/2- to
3 -year prohibition on female sexual activity, young married women
induce abortions so that they can go on with their marital and ex-
tramarital sexual lives. ^ Furthermore, in those groups which dis-
approve of childbirth before marriage, the unwed mother often
endures pregnancy in anxiety and disgrace.

2. The close and constant relationship between mother and un-
weaned child is jar from universal in Africa. In much of East and
South Africa the infant is introduced to gruel within the first
month by forcefeeding, and is left in the care of an older sibling
during the day while the mother is working in the fields. This con-
trasts sharply with the pattern of unbroken mother-infant contact
found not only among the Ganda but in numerous Central African
societies. Such variation provides the conditions for natural experi-

*I am indebted for this information to Arthur Tuden, who did field work among the Ila m
1956-57-

56 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ments within Africa on the effects of mother-child relationships.

3. There appears to be considerable variation among African so-
cieties in the degree of maternal tuarmth and affection. My own
observations indicate that there are groups in which mothers play
with and praise their children, and others in which they ignore them
even when ministering to their needs for nourishment and physical
comfort. If the findings of Harlow (1958) concerning monkeys
apply to humans, it may be that affection is a less important variable
than the simple availability of the mother for physical contact with
the infant.

4. In at least some African groups mothers and other adults do
punish and scold umveaned children for wandering too near the fire,
for crying too much, for m^asturbation, for striking an adult, and
so forth. The picture of total indulgence may hold for some so-
cieties but is often exaggerated by persons who have not observed
African families at length.

5. Weaning from the breast is not a ''stage'' which occurs at the
same age or with the same effects in all African societies. The mean
ages of weaning for African groups probably range from less than
a year to well over two years, which is a substantial segment of the
world-wide range of variation. Evidence marshaled by Whiting
(1954:524-525) suggests a curvilinear relationship between age at
onset of weaning and amount of emotional disturbance the child
shows. The greatest amount of emotional disturbance occurs in
societies where weaning is begun between thirteen and eighteen
months; weaning beginning before one year or over two years re-
sults in much less emotional disturbance. This evidence is consistent
with the common finding of traumatic weaning in African socie-
ties, since so many of them wean in the second year of life, but it
also suggests greater variation in amount of weaning disturbance
(when the early- weaning and late-weaning societies are included)
than has been recorded to date for Africans.

Age of weaning in African societies is related to degree of poly-
gyny, since women whose husbands have other wives tend to give
birth at less frequent intervals (seeDorjahn 1958a) and are thereby
able to nurse each child longer. The length of customary restrictions
on the postpartum sexual activity of women is also involved in the
determination of child spacing and hence often age of weaning as
well. In some societies the postpartum taboo is justified on grounds
of allowing the mother to devote a long time to the care of a par-
ticular child without getting pregnant again.

AFRICA 57

6. Methods of weaning vary among African groups. Although
some, hke the Ganda mentioned by Geber, send children away to
relatives to be weaned, others slap, frighten, or smear repellent sub-
stances on the breast while keeping the child at home.

In sum, there is variation in attitude toward motherhood, mother-
infant contact, maternal warmth, punishment of infants, age of
weaning, and method of weaning among African societies. They
constitute a ready-made laboratory for the investigator who wishes
to explore the effects of such variations on personality development.

Albino and Thompson (1956) have carried out a study of Zulu
weaning which could well serve as a model for future research on
African infants. The Zulu wean suddenly, on a day set in advance,
and this culture pattern provided the investigators with an oppor-
tunity to observe the immediate effects of this alleged trauma on
infant behavior. A group of sixteen Zulu infants from a single
rural neighborhood were selected for intensive study before, during,
and after weaning, and they were compared with a control group
of ten urban Zulu children of roughly the same age who had been
weaned considerably earlier. The sixteen children were given full
nutritional examinations before and after weaning (no signs of
marked malnutrition were found) , and they were also provided
with a more than adequate daily ration of milk for three weeks,
beginning a week before weaning, in order to eliminate nutritional
discontinuity as a factor in behavior change. The mothers were
interviewed and the children observed for seven weeks after wean-
ing. They were tested one day before weaning, one day after, and
one week after, on a modified Gesell Development Schedule, which
was administered at similar intervals to the urban control group.

The Zulu children were allowed almost unlimited access to the
breast before their weaning, which took place at an average age of
18.9 months by the smearing of the breast with the bitter juice of
the aloe in their presence. When the aloes were applied to the breast,
immediate reactions of the children took two forms: "apathetic"
bewilderment with no attempt to run away, and running away
from the mother without attempting to approach her again. Dur-
ing the first few hours, only one child accepted the breast to suck
more than once again, though most of them touched the mother's
breasts. Negativistic, aggressive, and fretful behavior was common
in the first two hours after weaning. In the following days, the
child's relationship with his mother was disturbed, going through
three distinct stages in ten of the cases: ( i ) a period of alternately

58 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

attacking and ignoring mother, attacks occurring mainly at night
in connection with attempts to nurse, and avoidance of mother
occurring in the daytime; (2) a stage in which the child makes
attempts to gain his mother's attention and to be constantly near
her; (3) a period of increasing independence of the mother, with
the child spending more time with other persons and showing no
anger toward her or other signs of disturbance.

Other changes following weaning included the following: closer
relationship to members of the family other than mother, with
increasing aggressiveness directed against a sibling; increasing ma-
turity of behavior — helping in domestic tasks, imitating elders,
speaking more distinctly with a larger vocabulary; apathy and
anxiety during the first week, disappearing gradually thereafter;
a marked increase in aggressive behavior, continuing in some cases
to the end of the investigation; a marked increase in behavior disap-
proved of by mother, such as spilling water and playing with fire;
disturbed sleep; increase in appetite and food-demanding behavior.
Although no change in developmental level was observed, on the
Gesell test, the children changed from cooperative before weaning
to negativistic or quietly uncooperative on the second administra-
tion. This change did not occur in the control group. The authors
conclude that weaning causes a temporary disturbance in the child's
emotional and social life but that in the longer run it facilitates the
development of sociability, self-reliance, and socially valued ag-
gressiveness, and is therefore adaptive, rather than merely traumatic.

Several anthropologists have analyzed the termination of in-
fantile dependency on the mother in African societies by invoking
hypotheses adapted from the psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus
complex. M. and F. Herskovits discovered that the classic Oedipal
theme of killing the father "does not figure significantly in the
corpus of Dahomean mythology," but that, "invariably, it is the
father who initiates the hostility. His fear of eventual replacement
by his offspring, usually made known to him through some form of
supernatural revelation, causes him to have the son exposed, or
killed outright." (1958:10-11). They also found sibling rivalry
to be an important theme in Dahomean myths. They relate this to
the life of the infant in Dahomey, who is "constantly with its
mother" until she gives birth again; the replaced child has "a sense
of rejection and neglect" out of which develops hostility toward the
younger sibling. When the male grows up and becomes a father, his
"jealousy of the son can be conceptualized as that aspect of the

AFRICA 59

sibling rivalry complex which, through projection, reactivates the
infantile competition for the mother in terms of competition for
the affections of the wife" (1958:14). Thus the mythological theme
of fathers killing their sons to avoid replacement by them is ex-
plained as the expression of intergenerational competition which
began "in infancy on the intragenerational level in the situation of
sibling rivalry" (1958:1).

A somewhat more orthodox Freudian view of the Oedipus com-
plex provides the basic hypotheses for a cross-cultural study of male
initiation in fifty-five societies (twelve of them African) by Whit-
ing, Kluckhohn, and Anthony ( 1958) . They take as their cultural
consequent the presence or absence of male initiation ceremonies
at puberty involving painful hazing, tests of endurance and man-
liness, seclusion from women, and genital operations. They find that
such ceremonies are more likely to occur in societies where mother
and infant sleep together for at least a year to the exclusion of the
father, or where the mother is prohibited from sexual intercourse
for at least a year after the birth of her child. In the latter case, it is
suggested that the mother may obtain some "substitute sexual
gratification" from nursing and caring for her infant. This intense
relationship and/or the exclusive mother-child sleeping arrange-
ment is seen as leading to a great emotional dependence of child on
mother which is frustrated by the father's resumption of sexual
relations with the mother. The child becomes hostile and envious
toward his father, and though these feelings may be latent in child-
hood, when the boy reaches adolescence, it is necessary for the so-
ciety to have an initiation rite of the type mentioned above "to put
a final stop to ( i ) his wish to return to his mother's arms and lap,
(2) to prevent an open revolt against his father who has displaced
him from his mother's bed, and ( 3 ) to ensure identification with
the adult males of the society" (1958:362).

Six African societies ( Azande, Chagga, Dahomey, Nuer, Thonga,
Tiv) are classified as having the male initiation rite and its hypoth-
esized childhood antecedents. While M. and F. Herskovits focus
on the Dahomean child's replacement in the mother's affection by
the next child, Whiting et al. go farther back to the point at which
the mother resumes sexual relations with her husband; they view
this as the crucial replacement, which has an impact on the child
even before his mother is pregnant again. It is true that in Dahomey
"the cultural ideal dictates her complete abstinence from sexual
relations for two years at the least; a year's abstinence is still gen-

60 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

erally observed" (Herskovits 1958:5), so that the hypothesized
conditions for an exclusive mother-infant relationship are present,
and this relationship is terminated in part when the period of ab-
stinence ends. On the other hand, the custom in Dahomey is for each
nonlactating wife to live with the husband in his house for four
days at a time, leaving the children in her own house, so that they
"do not witness the sexual act of their parents." This appears to
weaken the point of Whiting et at., since they have mentioned the
presence of the newly replaced child at the scene of parental inter-
course by which means "the child may truly become aware of his
replacement" (1958:362). It may be, however, that the mother's
leaving the child for four days at a time, may function equally well
to make him aware of his replacement and jealous of his father. The
Herskovits hypothesis has the support of evidence from Dahomean
culture that sibling rivalry is more important than jealousy of the
father; the hypothesis of Whiting et al. is strengthened by the fact
that it could "predict" patterns of childhood experience in Da-
homey from a knowledge of its male initiation rites.

A third analysis based on the notion of the Oedipus complex is
that of LeVine (1959), who attempts to explain the high fre-
quency of rape among the Gusii and the culture pattern of sado-
masochistic heterosexuality in terms of structural and psychological
factors. Within the Gusii family there are four kinds of parent-child
relationships with varying degrees of sex avoidance (i.e., verbal
and physical modesty) : father-daughter, which is strictest; father-
son, which is next strictest; mother-son; and mother-daughter,
respectively. The mother is more nurturant to all children than the
father, who is rather aloof and described (by the mother) to the
children as a strict disciplinarian. If, according to an Oedipal hy-
pothesis, the relationship of child to cross-sex parent determines his
later heterosexual adjustment, then we would expect the Gusii boy,
whose mother was nurturant, to seek heterosexual experience, and
the Gusii girl, whose father was modest in her presence and fear-
inspiring, to fear heterosexual experience. This does not help ex-
plain the apparently sadistic motivation of Gusii men but it is con-
sistent with the fact that Gusii girls are more sexually inhibited
than boys.

Both Dahomey and Gusii, among whom father-son hostility or
avoidance is pronounced, are patrilineal peoples. The matrilineal
Ashanti as described by Field (i960) are characterized by an ex-
tremely warm and affectionate father-son relationship beginning

AFRICA 61

in infancy, while it is the mother's brother-sister's son relationship
which involves hostility and tension: "They say that a son loves his
father too much to kill him for the sake of inheritance, whereas
he has no such sentiments regarding his uncle" (1960:27). This
contrast between patrilineal and matrilineal peoples in regard to
father-son relationships, and the role of the mother's brother in
the matrilineal situation, constitute another confirmation of Ma-
lino wski's assertion that the Oedipus complex is differently struc-
tured in matrilineal societies.

Sibling rivalry is a prominent feature of polygynous families in
Africa; it is mentioned not only by Herskovits for Dahomey but
by anthropologists describing many other groups (for example,
Evans-Pritchard 1953, on the Nuer) . There is a close connection
between sibling rivalry and the co-wife rivalry which is engendered
by certain types of polygynous family structure. In many societies
each wife has her own house, is allotted her own fields, and is, with
her children, a subfamily unit operating under the more or less
frequently exercised authority of her husband. In those groups
which have what Gluckman ( 195 1 ) has called "the house-property
complex," each mother-child unit is termed "a house" and is semi-
autonomous for purposes of property holding and inheritance.
Thus, the cattle that are paid in bridewealth for a woman's daughter
are to be used for the marriage of one of her sons. If the family head
decides to use the cattle to marry another wife, the bride establishes
her "house" owing the amount of her bridewealth to the "house"
of the older wife, and the debt should be paid from her own daugh-
ter's bridewealth. These debts cause friction among co-wives and
are often carried down one or two generations, causing dissension
between the children and grandchildren of the co-wives. Further-
more, in societies of this type, inheritance is patrilineal but the sons
of each "house" inherit much of their wealth through their mother,
to whose cattle and habitually used fields they have a legitimate
claim. The more property assigned to their mother's "house" during
the father's lifetime, the more the sons will inherit. This is also a
factor in co-wife rivalry which becomes translated into the rivalry
of half-brothers. In those societies where the family head appoints
his successor or can disinherit a son, the wives vie with each other
to have their own sons obtain paternal favor. The mother not only
wants to see her sons prosper for their own sake and for the eleva-
tion in status it will give her, but also because she will be dependent
on their support in her old age.

62 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

What impact does this "interhouse" rivalry have upon the child?
He often grows up in a family in which relations between his mother
and her co- wives are tense or even hostile; accusations of witch-
craft and sorcery among the father's wives may be among his
earliest memories. Children understand these hostile relationships
while still young, and boys come to feel their personal stake in the
struggle. Usually, good surface relations among half -siblings are
maintained so as not to antagonize the family head, but there is
likely to be considerable underlying aggression. A strong, affection-
ate, and mutual loyalty develops between mother and sons. Mem-
bers of the family outside his own "house," including his father, are
likely to be viewed by the son with suspicion and treated with re-
spect (for the father) or courtesy. This constellation of familial
attitudes does not die easily in the individual who has acquired it.
In many societies with segmentary patrilineages, it becomes a prin-
ciple of social organization. When a lineage divides, it is often de-
scendants of different wives of the founder (through their sons)
who form the separate (and sometimes hostile) segments, which are
frequently named after the founder's wives. In such groups the
rivalry of co-wives and half-brothers is considered the normal pat-
tern of social life, represented as it is in the group structure and
mythology as well as in family interaction.

Personality Development in Childhood and Adolescence

There is a good deal of scattered information on the training of
African children between weaning and puberty, but few note-
worthy analyses. Fortes (1939) emphasizes how much the Tal-
lensi child learns by observation without instruction by adults, and
how a strong and early identification develops which results in spon-
taneous imitation of adult sex role behavior, in play and, insofar as
possible, in real life situations. Raum (1940) graphically describes
the punitive discipline of Chagga parents. Simmons (i960) has
provided a brief but careful description of childhood and adoles-
cence among the Efik. In a previous work (LeVine i960) I have
contrasted the Nuer and Gusii with respect to aggression training.
The Nuer encourage children to fight for themselves, while the
Gusii train their young to report quarrels and attacks to adult au-
thority. The difference is seen as related to the greater tendency of
the contemporary Nuer to settle quarrels by the feud, and of Gusii
to resolve them in litigation.

Another comparison is that by Biesheuvel (1959:11-14) of the

AFRICA 63

Pedi and Lovedu in the Northern Transvaal. These two Bantu
groups are closely related and similar in many aspects of culture, but
they differ in the requirements of their social systems. The Pedi are
warlike, group oriented, and accord a low place in society to women.
The Lovedu, protected from attack by geographical features, are
peace loving and individualistic, with women having high status in
their society. Child training among the Pedi involves "frequent and
severe corporal punishment," with the education of boys being "di-
rected towards the development of aggressive virtues," while the
Lovedu consider corporal punishment an "insult to personality."
This concomitant variation, not elaborated by the author, is seen
by him as illustrating the importance of social structure and values
as causal factors in the socialization process. He endorses the view
of Barry, Child, and Bacon (1959) that child rearing practices are
adaptations to the socioeconomic environment as well as formative
influences on the individual.

The monograph by Read (i960) on Ngoni childhood is the first
extended analysis of traditional African education in terms of values
and personality. She sees values as determinants of child training
practices, operating through an "ideal personality" or cultural self-
image which the Ngoni aristocrats with whom she worked hold up
to their children as a standard. Socialization is viewed as a conscious
attempt to shape children's behavior in the direction of cultural
ideals, and Read does not deal with unconscious processes of learn-
ing and personality development. Her mode of analysis is illustrated
by the following quotation.

Two other qualities were emphasized in child training since they were expected
of all Ngoni people in interpersonal relations. One was generosity in sharing
anything a person had. It was a quality demanded of everyone, from the small
child who was made to unclench his fist in which he was hiding three ground-nuts
and give two of them to his fellows, to the big chief whose duty at a feast was to
see that everyone had enough and to send food from his own portion to anyone
who looked hungry (1960:155).

An outstanding characteristic of childhood among the Ngoni
aristocrats as described by Read is their emphasis on training in re-
spect, obedience, and formal politeness, which is clearly related to
the requirements of roles in their political system. I have also de-
scribed the learning of authority relationships, contrasting child-
hood experience among the "authoritarian" Gusii with that of the
"egalitarian" Nuer (LeVine i960) . The entire problem of how the
dominance-submission patterns — which are so striking a feature of

64 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

many African political systems — are learned by individuals, de-
serves more attention and comparative analysis than it has received.

Some of Piaget's hypotheses concerning child development have
been reviewed and tested on West African children by Jahoda
(1958a, 1958b, 1958c). The most relevant of these studies is that
of immanent justice in 120 school children of Accra, Ghana (cul-
tural group unspecified). Jahoda criticizes the study by Havig-
hurst and Neugarten (1953), which found that the belief in im-
manent justice (i.e., that punishment by the physical world is an
automatic consequence of wrongdoing) increases with age in
Southwestern American Indian children, on the grounds that their
scoring procedures were too "mechanical" and tended to inflate
their results. In his Accra study, Jahoda found that "pure imma-
nence" decreases significantly with age, naturalistic explanations
(of accidental injuries following wrongdoing) increase signifi-
cantly, and there is also a marked but not significant increase in
explanations classified as "acts of god." He cites a study done in the
Belgian Congo which found a steady decrease in punishment of
unspecified origin ("immanent justice") , and an increase in "sim-
ple accident" and "punishment by God." Since considerable differ-
ence in age trends remain even when the Havighurst and Neugarten
data are scored according to Jahoda's criteria, it would seem that
the African children are being socialized to a different moral and
cosmological order than Indians of the Southwestern United States.
The paucity of cultural data in the African study allows no further
conclusions.

M. H. Lystad (1960a) asked eighty-three Ashanti secondary
school boys, aged thirteen to seventeen, to paint pictures of their
choice. Although the pictures were analyzed primarily in terms of
the predominance of western or traditional values, the author pro-
poses antecedents to the form characteristics of the pictures as a
group:

The Ghanaian pictures are free rather than restrained in form and design.
Ghanaian children are brought up casually. They live in an extended family set-
ting where there is always some family member available for their needs and for
play. Adult roles are assumed gradually as the children become more and more
physically capable of assuming them. The relative freedom afforded them by the
adults around them thus appears to be related to the relative freedom expressed
in these paintings (i96oa:24i).

This freedom is compared with the rigidity of paintings by
French children described by Wolfenstein, who related it to the

AFRICA 65

rigidity of behavior demanded of the French child. The correlation
between amount of behavioral demands and amount of "freedom"
in graphic expression, though vaguely defined, is susceptible to
cross-cultural testing on a larger sample of cultural groups.

Puberty rites and other initiation rituals in Africa offer a fertile
field for culture and personality study, but relatively little has been
done to relate such ceremonies to individual development. The
world-wide analysis of male initiation at puberty by Whiting,
Kluckhohn, and Anthony (1958) has been mentioned. The female
initiation ceremony of the Bemba has been analyzed by Richards
( 1956) , who points out the multifunctional character of such rites.
They can be recognition of sexual and/or social maturity; they can
sever mother-child bonds and serve as a vehicle for the expression of
ordinarily repressed emotions by adults. Richards concludes her
analysis by stating:

Bemba evidence supports the suggestion that there is a correlation between
matrilyny and girls' initiation ceremonies which emphasize the importance of
fertility. In any society in which it is believed that women provide all the physi-
cal substance from which the foetus is formed, this would be natural; it is the
case in Bem.ba society. Moreover, the connection between matrilyny and girls'
initiation ceremonies has been observed in a number of other African communi-
ties. ... I have also suggested, very tentatively indeed, that in this particular
matrilineal society there may be a connection between the lack of open hostility
between the sexes and an unconscious feeling of guilt at robbing the man of his
children, which is expressed in fears on the part of the women that the men will
leave them, and on the part of the men that their wives will not respect them
unless taught to do so by the Chisungu (initiation ceremony) (1956:160).

In a valuable appendix, Richards surveys the literature on female
initiation rites in Central Africa and finds that:

. . . the correlation between girls' individual puberty rites and matrilineal
organization is very marked in Central Africa, and that both the glorification of
the role of the nubile girl and the praise of the man from another clan who gives
her fertility, are consonant with the beliefs on which matrilineal organization rests
in this area (1956:185).

This areal survey indicating an association between matrilyny
and girls' initiation rites in Central Africa suggests a method that
could be used to gain a better understanding of the psychocultural
aspects of initiation rites in many parts of Africa. In every major
culture area, societies that have certain types of initiation cere-
monies live right next to groups that do not have them. In western
Kenya, for example, there are groups that have initiation and geni-
tal operations for both sexes (e.g. Kipsigis, Gusii, Kuria) , peoples

66 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

having initiation and genital operations for boys but not girls (Lo-
goli and other Luhyia peoples) , and one large cultural group, the
Luo, with no initiation or genital operations for either sex. In Ni-
geria there are regions with an even greater variety of practises ; one
group may perform clitoridectomy on infants without ceremony,
while in the next group clitoridectomy may be an elaborate cere-
monial prelude to marriage, and so forth. Such variation within
regions provides the student of culture and personality with a labo-
ratory. If our hypotheses linking puberty rites to child rearing on
the one hand and social structure on the other are of any value, they
should be able to predict from areal data on puberty rites, what dif-
ferences in child rearing and social structure should be found in the
area. If they cannot make valid predictions, then new hypotheses
must be developed. In Africa there are even enough recorded in-
stances of societies adopting and giving up initiation practices to
enable the analyst to make comparative studies of the correlated
factors involved in changes of this type.

The T.A.T. in South Africa and the Congo

Although few projective technique studies have been carried out
in Africa, the past decade has seen at least four adaptations of the
Thematic Apperception Test (T.A.T.) for use with African sub-
jects, and some published studies, mostly of a methodological na-
ture so far. Lee (1953) has designed a set of twenty- two T.A.T.
cards (eight for each sex and six for both sexes) and published a
manual for its use with African subjects. The subject matter for
the pictures was based on fantasies collected from "Bantu inmates"
of a South African mental hospital. Lee indicates that the pictures
were originally made for use with Zulu subjects "but have since
been found to serve their purpose adequately among Sutho, Zulu,
Ovambo, Fingo, Xosa, Tswana, Griqua, and Swazi" (i953:pref-
ace) , as well as among both educated and uneducated subjects. He
recommends that the test be administered by an African, to elimi-
nate the telling of stereotyped stories which the subjects consider
will gain the approval of a European, and that it should be written
or spoken in whatever language the subject finds easiest for the pur-
pose. The procedure includes a follow-up interview, conducted a
day or two after the test, in which the subject is asked to explain
the sources of his plots, in particular whether they have been de-
rived from his own experience or from folktales, myths, legends,
books, and so forth.

AFRICA 67

The comments by Lee on sources of the plot illustrate the impor-
tance of knowing the history and folklore of the people to whom
the T.A.T. is administered. For example, a certain type of folktale
concerning a character named Cakyana is common among the
stories told by the Zulu and Xosa subjects. If the analyst knows the
traditional version of the story, he can interpret the idiosyncratic
distortion (if any) which the subject has made; otherwise he con-
founds cultural norm with individual response pattern. In another
case Lee identifies a very dramatic plot as "the stereotyped story of
Nongquase, the Xosa prophetess" (1953:14). One can easily imag-
ine a psychologist who lacks knowledge of the culture and who
has not interviewed concerning sources of the plot making incor-
rect interpretations of such responses.

In his manual Lee gives detailed suggestions for the analysis of the
form and content of stories elicited by his T.A.T. cards. One of
the most valuable sections is that giving the two most common re-
sponses (in brief) of Zulu adults to each of twenty-two pictures.
The author cautions that these common stories are not norms, that
they vary considerably from one culture to another, and that par-
ticularly noticeable differences appear with variations in age and
degree of Westernization of subjects. Much of the content analysis
is in terms of Murray need-press categories. A fifteen-page speci-
men analysis of the stories of one subject (an educated Tsonga male
from the Transvaal) is presented, using the subject's autobiograph-
ical material and sentence completion test responses as confirmatory
evidence for specific interpretations. One of the major findings of
the specimen T.A.T. analysis is as follows.

There is a certain conflict engendered . . . between the Western and tribal roles
of the subject. His usual solution is to give unquestioning obedience (in def-
erence) to those in authority in the tribe. This reaction is probably a reflection
of Gilane's attitude to his father, whom he feels to be a better man than himself,
both from the point of view of effectiveness and that of moraHty (1953:38).

Biesheuvel, who has done a great deal of psychological testing on
South African subjects, expresses some skepticism concerning the
use of T.A.T. pictures.

The rules of perspective drawing are not understood. . . . Conventional graphic
details in the postural or facial representations of persons frequently suggested
mutilation or blindness. Whether the latter association symbolizes the state of cul-
tural confusion experienced by many Africans today, whether it is an expression
of their preoccupation with a scourge which is common in Southern Africa, or
whether it is merely a misinterpretation, at a purely perceptual level, of con-

68 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ventiunal pictorial cues, it is not possible to say in the present state of our knowl-
edge concerning African perceptual habits (1958b: 176).

One of the few publications reporting in detail the results of a
T.A.T. study in Africa is the monograph by Ombredane (1954) .
In a brief trip to the Belgian Congo, Ombredane administered his
"Congo T.A.T." to twelve Basuku subjects, seven Bapende of
Mbata-Kondo, ten Bapende of Gungu, and five workers of "varied
races" in the town of Tshikapa. He regrets not having large enough
samples to use statistical analysis. His analysis consists largely in
searching for content characteristics, some of which serve to differ-
entiate the cultural groups. For example, the Basuku often men-
tioned food in their stories, while the Bapende, who occupy a more
fertile and abundant environment, rarely mention food. There are
many methodological difficulties with this study. Of the eleven
pictures reproduced in the monograph, eight are drawings by a
Belgian artist. The human figures are grotesquely elongated and in
most cases suggest violent activity or macabre events; in fact they
seem to be outpourings of aggressive impulses rather than the some-
what ambiguous stimuli which most researchers recommend. Le-
blanc (1958a), in a critique of the Ombredane study, reports the
shock with which her Congolese subjects reacted to the same pic-
tures. She criticizes Ombredane on a large number of points in-
cluding sample size, administration, and failure to consider form
in his analysis.

Leblanc (1958a, 1958b, i960) has had T.A.T. pictures made up
and has used them in a study of women in Katanga Province of the
Belgian Congo. Her pictures, in contrast with those of Ombredane,
were drawn by a Congolese artist and are schematic and two dimen-
sional. The hypotheses and results of her published study will be
discussed below; at this point the methodology is of primary inter-
est. The tests were administered by the European researcher herself
in Swahili, which is not the native tongue of any Congolese. This
violates the rules laid down by Lee (1953) on two counts. Further-
more, nowhere in her 1958 report does she mention the cultural
groups to which her subjects belong; she refers to them as "Katan-
gese," but the Katanga is a province containing numerous cultures.

One of the most sophisticated contributions to T.A.T. methodol-
ogy in Africa has been made by E. T. Sherwood, who has devoted
a long article (1958) to the problem of designing a set of pictures
for acculturation studies in South Africa. His own preference is
for pictures which are structured in the sense of being aimed at par-

AFRICA 69

ticular variables. The criteria he sets up for picture design, on the
basis of much experimenting with different kinds of stimuh, may
well serve as a guide to researchers in other areas. His substantive
study was a comparison of the responses of Swazi adults who had
been in Johannesburg less than four years with those of Swazi who
had been there for a much longer time; it is not yet published at
this writing.^

Personality and Acculturation

More and more of the psychological studies being carried out in
Africa have to do with acculturation. This is particularly true of
personality testing and attitude research, in part because amount
of education and place of residence (rural-urban) are readily avail-
able indices of acculturation and provide the researcher with a
source of variation on which to test hypotheses. Unfortunately,
some investigators using acculturation as an independent variable
have completely ignored differences in traditional culture in the
samples being surveyed or tested. They make the bland assumption
that more educated or urbanized Africans have more of "Western
culture" and less of "African culture," which they characterize as
fear-ridden or secure, restrictive or undisciplined, as they happen to
imagine it. With the increasing number of ethnographic accounts
of African urban life, such as Southall and Gutkind (1956) on
Kampala, Uganda, and Longmore (1959) on sex and marriage in
the Johannesburg metropolitan area, ignorance of the sociocultural
context in studies of urban respondents is becoming less excusable;
yet such studies continue to be produced.

An example of such a study is that of Leblanc (1958b, i960)
cited above. Subjects were drawn from the most "advanced" sec-
tions of the Congolese populations of Elisabethville, a city of 130,-
000 Congolese settled there since the 193 o's, and Kolwezi, a smaller
city with 30,000 Congolese settled there since World War 11. A sen-
tence completion test was administered to 137 subjects of both sexes
from both cities, and a T.A.T. to 29 women from both cities. The
sentence completion test concerned "the tribal traditional attitude
toward women" as measured in areas of behavior "governed by a
number of strict native customs and rituals: marital and extra-
marital relations, sources of marital conflicts, such as aggressiveness,
arguments about food, fecundity, sex separation, woman's infer-

'^ An unpublished version of the Sherwood study (1961) became avnilnble too late for discussion
in the present article.

70 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

iority" (i958b:258). The author does not take into account the
possibihty that the various cultural groups represented in her sam-
ples might have different traditional attitudes toward extramarital
relations and woman's inferiority, for example. She finds that men
showed a more traditional attitude toward women than did women
in her sample, and that Kolwezi subjects (less acculturated) also
had a significantly more traditional attitude toward women than
Elisabethville subjects (more acculturated) .

In the T.A.T. section of the study, Leblanc selected fourteen
women from Elisabethville and fifteen from Kolwezi, and formu-
lated the unusual general hypothesis that acculturation would have
the effect of ''bringing about better personality adjustment." The
only significant differences she found between the Elisabethville
and Kolwezi samples were greater productivity (length of stories) ,
optimism, and characterization (mentioning sex, age, and role
characteristics of individuals as opposed to "someone" or "people") ,
in the former. If one considers that the tests were administered by a
European in Swahili, a foreign language to all subjects, it is evident
that most of the differences could be attributed to greater fluency
in Swahili and more experience in contact with Europeans on the
part of the Elisabethville women. Leblanc states that the sentence
completion test "is a valid measure to differentiate the attitude of
groups ... in accordance with degree of acculturation," while "the
T.A.T. produced more doubtful results" (i958b:2 63). But she
devises a new substantive hypothesis to explain the difference: "The
tribal traditional attitude toward women which is unacceptable to
the white man tends to disappear before the deeper personality var-
iables which determine it are really modified" (i958b:2 63). Con-
sidering the inadequacy of the research instruments employed, this
generalization cannot be said to have received confirmation in the
study.

Two studies of the changing values of African students are rele-
vant here, although they do not directly involve personality. Pow-
dermaker (1956) analyzed the imagery in essays written by stu-
dents of the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt; M. H. Lystad
(1960b) analyzed, in sociological terms derived from Parsons and
Levy, the favorite stories recounted by students in a secondary
school outside of Accra, Ghana. In both cases, many of the students
had been born in rural areas, and the predominance of traditional
themes and values over urbanized western ones was a major finding
in both studies, as it was in Lystad's (1960a) analysis of paintings

AFRICA 71

by Ashanti schoolboys. Both the copperbelt and Accra samples,
however, contained individuals from numerous tribal groups with
contrasting cultures, and no attention is paid to differences in cul-
tural background.

In a study by Doob (1957) account is taken of cultural differ-
ences among Africans. One of the numerous hypotheses tested con-
cerned the relation between amount of Western education and
deviation from traditional beliefs and practices concerning the
family. Differences between responses of more and less educated
groups were great (.01 level of significance) for the Zulu, weak for
the Ganda (.10 level), and nonexistent for the Luo. This finding
is consistent with the duration and intensity of Western influence
in the areas in which these three cultural groups are located: Natal,
South Africa (Zulu), Buganda, Uganda (Ganda), and Central
Nyanza, Kenya (Luo). Doob concludes:

Psychologically . . . the person (African) who is like a European in many re-
spects because during or after adolescence he has learned European ways may
resemble only superficially the person who was raised like a European in the same
respects by his acculturated parents (1957:156).

Thus, as in many acculturation studies outside of Africa, child-
hood experience is seen as a crucial factor leaving persistent marks
on the individual's response patterns. Although Doob compares
samples of persons from differing cultural groups, he does not at-
tempt to relate the content of traditional cultures to the attitudes
or personality characteristics of his subjects. This remains to be done
by students of culture and personality in Africa.^ Some of the stud-
ies discussed in the following sections take acculturation into ac-
count, but concentrate on interpreting culture content.

Biesheuvel (1959) is alone in having attempted to generalize in
broad outline about the psychological consequences of culture
change, particularly urbanization and industrialization, in Africa.
His analysis, which applies primarily to South Africa, is that urban-
ization has weakened traditional African norms and sanctions with-
out replacing them with other means of social and psychological
control. The majority of township dwellers are portrayed as lack-
ing the kinship bonds, the effective child training practices, and the
conformity of traditional life, so that they are "directed only by
impulse" and approach being "devoid of culture." This explains
the lawlessness, violence, and laxity of sexual morals among urban

' E. T. Sherwood (1961) has done this in his recent study of Sw.izi personnhty.

71 PSYCHOLOGJCAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Africans. Biesheuvel considers this similar to developments in Eu-
rope during the dissolution of medieval society, and finds hope in
viewing the "id-directed self" a phenomenon of transition. The
smaller group of middle-class Africans are portrayed as closer to
the Western values, which they learn not from their parents but
from teachers, supervisors, and employers of European descent at
a fairly late stage in life. Their anxiety level is high. Citing evidence
from Rae Sherwood (1958a, 1958b) and using Riesman's typology
of character structure, Biesheuvel concludes concerning middle-
class Africans:

The circumstances under which they grow up and function in the Union of
South Africa encourage the development of the other-directed personahty type,
in which conformity is normally regulated by anxiety. Hence it would appear
that African personality development is proceeding straight from tradition- to
other- direction, and that the historical stage where behavior was controlled by
an internalized code, by guilt rather than by shame as it used to be, or by anxiety,
as it is now, has passed them by ( 1959:18-19) .

Turning his attention to industrialization, Biesheuvel asserts that
traditional subsistence economies favored personal qualities which
are not particularly adaptive for work performance in a wide range
of industrial settings. The least westernized South African workers
have been found to prefer the lot of a migrant mine worker because
it allows traditionally valued leisure (even if only sporadically)
and because of its paternalistic protection from the hazards of ur-
ban life. However, industrial workers with a long period of urban
residence

... no longer look upon work as an interruption of the more meaningful and
satisfying life of the African areas. They are committed to their daily task and
hope to be able to advance in it. It is evident that within this group a new motiva-
tion has made its appearance, in which the need to work is recognized as an en-
during feature of life, capable of creating and satisfying other needs beyond the
mere subsistence level (1959:27).

Biesheuvel asks whether there is a unique element in the person-
alities of Africans, and tentatively concludes he has found it in
negritude as expounded by Leopold Senghor.

Negrltude ... is in keeping with the concept of vitality which I consider to be
characteristic of the behavior of African peoples. A culture in which this concept
concerning the meaning of life reigns, can dispense with an excess of activity,
. . . such activity is required mainly for sustained effort in pursuit of some self-
imposed duty or goal. It has no need of the inner-directed personality structure
which Africans are not now likely to develop to any extent, and it repudiates the
drive element in work motivation, which is relatively lacking in Africans, as

AFRICA 75

destructive of the main purpose of life. Though esseniially a West African creed
and in keeping with hmitations imposed on human effort by the tropical cHmate,
it is by no means inappropriate to certain features of African personality develop-
ment at all cultural levels as we have found it here in the South. Indubitably,
the philosophy of ncgritudc is far more likely to provide the black masses, in their
transition from traditionalism, with a meaningful new culture than is provided
by the more alien model of the West (1959:36-37).

It would be easy to criticize this lecture by a usually rigorous psy-
chologist for its facile generalizations, its awkward applications of
social theory to African situations, and its occasional ethnocentrism,
but these faults seem less important than the service he has per-
formed by raising a number of important problems concerning the
psychological dimension of culture change in contemporary Africa.
Social control in urban society, adaptation to new economic cir-
cumstances, and the development of nontraditional motives are
problems relevant to culture and personality which are becoming
increasingly important in the African scene.

Psychoculturol Interpretation of Ritual, Witchcraft, and Dreams

For many years ethnographers have been describing African cul-
ture patterns which allow the occasional expression of feelings usu-
ally kept strictly in check. In one of the earliest attempts to apply
psychoanalytic theory to African data, Herskovits stated that "so-
cially institutionalized release constitutes an outstanding character-
istic of the Negro cultures of West Africa and of the New World"
(1934:77) . He described the Dahomean institution of the avogan,
the market place dance at which people are obliquely ridiculed in
song, and the calumnious songs which co-wives sing against one
another. Rattray was quoted to the effect that West Africans, by
incorporating into their folklore descriptions of behavior ordinarily
forbidden, "had discovered by themselves the truth of the psycho-
analysts' theory of 'repression'," and "sought an outlet for what
might otherwise have become a dangerous complex" (Herskovits

1934:77)-

More recent reports indicate similar phenomena in cultures of

South Africa, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and Nigeria, among
others. The institutionalized expression of ordinarily repressed hos-
tilities and other emotions is seen by anthropologists as a safety valve,
functional for the maintenance of institutions which require re-
straint of individuals. Most commonly these culturally patterned
outlets involve the expression of political hostility or antagonism
between the sexes. In both cases, the form is frequently one of status

74 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

reversal: the subject or vassal reprimands his chief or lord; the sub-
missive female dons male clothes, swaggers, insults men. Gluckman
(1955) has discussed these phenomena at length in sociological
terms; he considers them prime illustrations of the positively func-
tional nature of conflict in African societies. Mayer (1950) has de-
scribed the noisy, demanding behavior of the usually obedient Gusii
wife toward her husband at the enyangi ceremony which completes
their marriage rites. Richards notes that in many girls' initiation
rites "the women, who are bound to be submissive and humble to
men at other times, are allowed to be quite outrageous in the cere-
mony, to swagger, to shout obscenities or to attack the men" (1956:
60) . This is true for the Gusii as it is for many other societies, but not
among the matrilineal Bemba. Among the Nupe of Nigeria, each
community has one of three annual ceremonies which allow "ca-
thartic release" for impulses which are repressed in secular life
(Nadel 1954). All three of the ceremonies concern adolescence,
though in varying degrees, and two of them, gunnu and gani, have
periods of sexual license as well as the imitation and caricature of
women by boys. The third, vavu, involves (or did involve before
it was banned by the government) an all-night battle with torches,
sticks, and stones, between the adolescent boys of opposing village
factions, in addition to some licentious heterosexual activity and the
good-humored "kidnaping" and ransoming of women and old
people by gangs of young men. Nadel uses psychoanalytic termi-
nology in his analysis of these rituals, concluding that Nupe religion
"in providing these outlets . . . anticipates as well as canalizes the
working of psychological mechanisms, which might otherwise oper-
ate in random fashion or beyond the control of society, in the 'pri-
vate worlds' of neuroses and psychopathic fantasies" (1954:274) .
In analyzing witchcraft and ritual, Nadel formulated his own
version (apparently influenced by Kluckhohn's analysis of Navaho
witchcraft) of psychoanalytic theory in relation to culture. Briefly,
this theory is that magico-religious beliefs and practices reflect the
anxieties and unconscious desires of a people, but that the anxieties
and desires thus expressed have their origins in adult roles (sex and
age roles in the context of family and kinship relations) rather than
childhood experiences. Although it is the contemporaneous frus-
trations and tensions of adult life which are viewed as the starting
points, their expression in religious phenomena are discussed in terms
of standard psychoanalytic defense mechanisms such as projection,
displacement, and compensation.

AFRICA 75

Nadel's position, particularly his rejection of the importance of
child rearing, is most clearly illustrated by his comparative analysis
of the Nupe and Gwari, two closely related tribes of Northern
Nigeria (1952). Both have witchcraft beliefs, but the Nupe in-
variably accuse women of witchcraft, while the Gwari accuse indi-
viduals of both sexes. Nadel attributes this difference to the fact that
marriage "is without serious complications and relatively tension-
free in Gwari, but full of stress and mutual hostility in Nupe"
(1952:21). The stress in Nupe stems from the ideal of masculine
domination contrasted with the reality that many women are suc-
cessful itinerant traders, usurping economic dominance in the
family and engaging in independent behavior which is considered
immoral. This explanation is adopted by Nadel only after he has
searched for differences in child rearing. The only difference un-
covered is that, among the Nupe when the two to three-year post-
partum taboo on maternal sexual behavior is terminated, the woman
visits her husband in his hut, leaving her children behind in her own
hut, while the Gwari husband visits his wife so that cohabitation
takes place in the presence of the young children. On the assumption
that Freudian psychology would predict witnessing the primal
scene to be the cause of sex antagonism, Nadel rejects this hypothesis
on the grounds that the Nupe have sex antagonism but no primal
scene, while the Gwari have the primal scene but no sex antagonism.

An alternative explanation in terms of childhood experience is
overlooked. It could be asserted that the Nupe child feels abandoned
by his mother, who leaves him at night for the paternal hut, while
the Gwari child sees his father as an intruder upon his relationship
with the mother. One would then predict that the Nupe male
would hate women and the Gwari male would hate men older or
more powerful than himself. This is consistent with Nadel's state-
ment that "Gwari informants in fact claimed that a marked hos-
tility between father and son was a common feature of their family
life" (1952:21). Furthermore, there is considerable evidence of
maternal rejection among the Nupe: women practise abortion and
use alleged contraceptives to continue their trading activities, and
they tend to leave their children for itinerant trading when the lat-
ter are four or five years old. Nupe women may antagonize their
husbands by their economic activities and sexual independence, but
they also reject motherhood and abandon their children. Thus it
can be argued with equal cogency that the mother-child or husband-
wife relationship is the significant antecedent to sex antagonism in

76 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

witch beliefs. For a more crucial test than was provided by the Nupe
and Gwari, one would need a society, or sample of societies, in which
maternal rejection and female usurpation of male dominance in the
conjugal relationship, were not associated. In any event, the evi-
dence presented by Nadel is not convincing support of his rejection
of child-rearing determinants for supernatural beliefs.^

In the same article on witchcraft, Nadel contrasts the Korongo
and Mesakin, neighboring matrilineal peoples in the Nuba Moun-
tains of the Sudan. The Korongo have no witchcraft beliefs at all;
the Mesakin are obsessed with fears of witchcraft and frequently
accuse each other of it, a man's mother's brother being most com-
monly suspected. In both groups masculine vigor in youth is em-
phasized, and at the first sporting contest after puberty there is a
ceremony and a presentation of a gift in livestock — an "anticipated
inheritance" — made to the youth by his mother's brother. The dif-
ference is that among the Korongo, the gift is given spontaneously,
while among the Mesakin, the mother's brother always refuses to
give it at first and it often must be taken by force, a socially accepted
procedure. Quarrels over the gift between the Mesakin youth and
his mother's brother are frequent. If the former should fall ill, the
latter would be suspected of witchcraft. Nadel relates this differ-
ence to the contrasting age-class systems of the two groups: the
Korongo have six age classes in which the valued masculine physical
activity is gradually given up, while the Mesakin have only three
from birth to death, so that a man relinquishes his sporting life
abruptly at a fairly young age. For the Mesakin, "the resentment
and refusal . . . express the older man's envy of youth and virility,
the loss of which is brought home to him by the very request for
the anticipated inheritance" ( 1952:26) . This resentment is allowed
acceptable expression only in the sphere of witchcraft, and "every
man projects his own frustrations of this nature into the allegations
that others are guilty of witchcraft" (1952:26) .

As in the comparison of Nupe and Gwari, so for the Korongo and
Mesakin, Nadel examines child-rearing practices, finding them in
this case "identical in the two tribes." He does mention, however,
that among the Korongo premarital and highly promiscuous sex
relations are fully accepted and openly engaged in, "while the Mesa-
kin conceal such activity and recognize an ideal of premarital chas-
tity." This suggests the possibility, on which Nadel makes no

^ An extended analysis of the relation of sex antagonism to witchcraft beliefs among the Nupe,
complete with four case histories, can be found in Nadel (1954:172—206).

AFRICA 77

comment, that the sex training of children may differ in the two
groups. His role analysis is again plausible, but his attempts to elimi-
nate childhood experience as a factor are not.

Comparing two other Nuba groups, Nadel (1955) finds that the
religion of the Heiban is more pessimistic and fear-ridden than that
of the Otoro. He relates this to the greater degree of order in the
Otoro role system: wives are incorporated into their husband's lin-
eages, adolescence is regulated in a series of stages, male homosexuals
are allowed an accepted role as transvestites. All of these traits are
lacking in Heiban culture, where role ambiguity is pronounced.
Such ambiguity is seen as fostering tension which finds an outlet in
religion. In sum, Nadel's comparative analyses are some of the most
stimulating studies of culture and personality based on African
material. They illustrate the advantages of taking a point of view
wider than the single society, and the difficulties of achieving con-
clusive results when comparing only two societies. Future students
of culture and personality would do well to carry on the investiga-
tions of religion and age and sex roles which he pioneered.

In a different methodological vein, but equally concerned with
sex and age roles, is Lee's study of Zulu dreams ( 1958) . Dreams are
important in Zulu culture, being interpreted by diviners who fore-
cast the future and diagnose misfortunes from them. Lee collected
dreams from 600 Zulu men and women and made an intensive study
of another 1 20 women to whom he administered the T. A.T., as well
as interviewing on their dream life. He found that women reported
a much greater amount of dream activity than men, and that the
former dream more of intrinsically terrifying objects such as "mon-
sters," while the latter enjoy dreaming more. In terms of central
imagery, the number of different Zulu dreams was found to be very
restricted. A general conclusion was that "dream content, for the
particular sex, is derived almost exclusively from areas of social ex-
perience permitted by the culture in the indigenous system of sanc-
tions of some 50 to 75 years ago" (1958:270, italics in original).
Thus, women, "acting under a very strong cultural imperative,"
dreamed of babies and children but not cattle, while men dreamed
of cattle, their chief economic goal and source of prestige. This is
significant since Zulu women were formerly prohibited from han-
dling cattle, but now (in the absence of migratory-laboring hus-
bands) do so more than men. More males also dream directly of
fighting, which Lee interprets as related to the traditional warrior
role of men. In his intensive study of females, Lee found that tradi-

78 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

tional imagery and folklore were more accurate in dreams than in
T.A.T. responses. He tentatively concludes that "the unconscious
minds of individuals are very stable repositories of the past, and can
be used as a valuable source of ethnographic material" (1958:280) .
The cultural lag of the unconscious is attributed to its being ac-
quired in childhood, vv^hile living in comparatively traditional
circumstances and before exposure to European culture. This is
similar to Bruner's finding in his study (1956) of acculturation in
an American Indian group.

In his study of Zulu females, Lee was able to obtain evidence rele-
vant to the Freudian theory of dream interpretation. He found that
the contents of women's dreams tend to vary with their age: young
women dream of sex and childbearing more than older women,
unmarried women dream of weddings more than married women.
Many women reported dreaming of "a baby," while others men-
tioned a recurrent dream of still water, considered by Freud and by
Zulu diviners to symbolize childbirth. Adopting from Freud the
hypothesis that high motivation yields directly wish -fulfilling
dreams, while ambivalent or weaker motivation yields symbolic
dreams, Lee compared the motivational state of women who re-
ported baby dreams with those who mentioned still water dreams
as more frequent. He found that baby dreams, interpreted as di-
rectly wish-fulfilling, were more common among young married
women "on whom the social pressure to prove their fertility is very
great" (1958:274). Both unmarried girls, who look forward to
childbirth but fear the social disapproval of premarital pregnancy,
and married women with two or three children, who want to have
more but have proved their fertility, dream of still water more fre-
quently. Thus those who were assumed on grounds of social role to
be more highly motivated toward childbirth had less symbolic
dreams than those with weaker or ambivalent motivation in the
same direction. Lee takes this as confirmation of the Freudian hy-
pothesis.

Like Nadel, Marwick (1952) has related witch beliefs and ac-
cusations to aspects of social structure which generate or direct the
hostilities of individuals. He presents quantitative data to show that
the Cewa, a matrilineal group of Northern Rhodesia, tend to accuse
their own matrilineal kin of witchcraft, in contrast to the outgroup
scapegoating found by Kluckhohn in Navaho witchcraft. Marwick
suggests that the difference may be due to the fact that Cewa local
groups are not as small, isolated, or crucial for subsistence as those

AFRICA 79

of the Navaho; in fact "it may even be that among the Cewa witch-
craft accusations have the adaptive function of being catalytic to
the natural process of lineage segmentation" (1952:123) :

Cewa seem to have an almost neo-Freudian recognition of the inevitable danger
of repressing hostility for the sake of loyalty to one's close relatives. They express
this recognition neatly by saying that members of the same matrilineage tend "to
practice witchcraft against one another" because when they quarrel they are
inclined "to leave unspoken words of speech with one another" (1952:217).

Marwick interprets the Cewa data in terms of his hypothesis that
interpersonal competition is generated by nonascriptive status re-
lationships, that it develops into tension and conflict if the object
competed for is intensely desired and if there are no structural means
for regulating the competition, and that the "tension will be pro-
jected into witch beliefs ... if there are no adequate institutionalized
outlets for it" (1952:129). He concludes that witch beliefs and
accusations are positively functional for the Cewa social system in
that they destroy old social relationships, clearing away the ground
for new ones.

The studies reviewed in this section indicate some of the poten-
tialities of African research for work on sex roles, sex personality,
and the expression of culturally patterned anxieties and hostilities in
ritual and supernatural beliefs. It is to be hoped that the excellent
beginnings made by investigators such as Nadel and Lee will be
followed up by systematic, comparative research into the same theo-
retical problems.

Mental Illness

There is a body of psychiatric literature on Africans, much of it
authored by psychiatrists with little anthropological sophistications
who fail to distinguish one African cultural group from another
and who at best make comparisons between urban and rural Afri-
cans.*' One common finding is that "depressive" conditions are rare
among Africans and "schizophrenic" disorders frequent, relative to
Europe and the United States. In light of recent challenges to tra-
ditional diagnostic categories among U.S. psychiatrists, and the
drastic changes in psychodiagnosis which appear to be taking place,
these older studies of Africans are of dubious value. In any event,
there was rarely any attempt to relate the incidence or form of
mental disease to culture patterns in specific African groups.

* An exception is the description by Brelsford (1950) of concepts and treatment of psychopathol-
ogy among the Bemba.

80 PSYCflOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The most relevant of the strictly psychiatric studies is that by
Tooth ( 1950) , who surveyed mental illness in the Gold Coast (now
Ghana) . He found a correlation between the amount of European
contact (and traditional motives) in a region and the delusional
content of schizophrenics in that region.

In the North and among the "bush" peoples the delusional content was almost
invariably concerned with the ramifications of the fetish system. The fact of
lunacy means that an offense has been committed either against the nature spirits,
who then trouble the offender in the form of dwarfs or fairies, or against the
ancestral hierarchy who appear and influence the sufferer in person. Although it
is not unusual for the insane from this section of the population to speak of them-
selves as under the control of God, no example was found of identification with
the Deity. It is possible because of the concentration of missionary activity in
the South that the identification of the insane with an anthropomorphic God
is so common there. Messianic delusions were not met with outside the asylum,
where identification with Christ was sometimes combined with one or more of
the leading figures of international politics. Delusions of grandeur were not found
among the "bush" people but among the insane in Ashanti, delusions of great
wealth were common and often associated with claims to royal birth and con-
nections with powerful chiefs. It was only in the more sophisticated South that
living individuals or groups, usually connected with the government and operat-
ing by means of electricity, wireless or television, took precedence in the delu-
sions of the insane over the traditional supernatural agencies (1950:52).

Tooth hypothesizes that the situations of personal choice intro-
duced under Westernization lead to mental disorder, but he is unable
to find quantitative evidence of more psychosis among Westernized
segments of the population. With respect to treatment of psy-
chotics, he mentions the frequent sight of them at market places
(a possible locus for ethnopsychiatric field work! ) and contrasts the
attitude toward psychosis in three regions of the country. He con-
cludes that "the Africans have evolved a system which cares for
quite 80 per cent of their insane under conditions which compare
favorably with those provided by the European authorities"
(1950:65).

Among the few studies of culture and mental disease carried out
in Africa are those on related Nguni groups by Laubscher (1937)
and Lee (1950). Laubscher, a psychiatrist who did field work
among the Tembu and related Fingo of South Africa, describes the
role of mythical beings in their traditional explanations of psy-
chotic behavior, in the delusions of hospitalized psychotics, and in
the dreams of normals. The beings include hypersexual dwarfs,
blood-eating and hypersexual birds, and snakes harbored in the fe-
male organs. In many cases these creatures are viewed as gratifying

AFRICA 8 1

the extramarital sexual cravings of females. The imagery itself and
interpretations of it by diviners are so suggestive of Freudian con-
cepts that one might almost say that psychoanalytic theory is part
of the Tembu-Fingo belief system.

Lee has analyzed almost identical phenomena among the Zulu,
a closely related Nguni people, and his analysis is freer of a heavy-
handed early Freudianism than that of Laubscher. He describes the
syndrome known as "Bantu disease" or ufiifunyana, which is recog-
nized by the Zulu as a nonorganic condition similar to the state of
possession manifested by a "witch doctor" during his apprenticeship
(This is true of the Tembu and Fingo as well).

Stereotyped dreams involving the above-mentioned supernatural
beings and, among present-day Zulu, involving Indians (many of
whom live in Natal) , are an integral part of the syndrome. The dis-
ease is most commonly found among women, who complain of
pains in their lower abdomen, sometimes develop paralysis, and also
have seizures during which they talk incoherently in what their
neighbors assume to be an Indian language. The women often dream
of "tokoloshe," the bearded dwarf with a huge penis, and believe
that he rapes them at night. Lee describes three rather different
cases of nftifunyana, two of which he considers "pure cases of con-
version hysteria." The women afflicted suffer from obvious sexual
fears and frustrations and their disorders were precipitated by sexual
crisis, in one case desertion by a husband, in the other a threat by a
rebuffed lover. The third case, that of an old man, appeared to be
related to sexual jealousy. Lee states his conviction that this disease,
its high frequency among women, and its apparent increase in re-
cent years, are related to the "heavy anxiety load" of Zulu culture,
and indicates that he will carry out further studies "directed at the
discovering of specific reasons for the obviously insecure personality
pattern which seems to be so common among the Zulu people"
(1950:18). Loudon (i960) has speculated on the correlates of
ufufunyana, but without any convincing evidence.

Nadel (1946) has attempted to relate shamanism among the
Nyima and other peoples of the Nuba mountains in the Sudan to the
incidence of mental disease among them. The shamanism he de-
scribes is similar to that found in Central Asia, is highly institu-
tionalized, and plays an important part in the medical and religious
aspects of Nyima culture. The shaman must be capable of spirit
possession which is similar in overt behavior to cataleptic seizures;
instances of possession observed by Nadel appeared to him to vary

82 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

in their degree of "sincerity" and conscious fakery, but he was
convinced that a majority of them resulted in seizures over which
the shaman had Httle conscious control. "Insanity" (not defined) is
said to be rare among the Nyima, but epilepsy is widespread (esti-
mated at one in loo) and is recognized as frequent by the people
themselves and by medical officers in the district. Epilepsy is not re-
garded by the Nyima as spirit possesssion or as a qualification for the
role of shaman, but six of the shamans interviewed had epilepsy in
their families and, of eight hereditary shamans, only two claimed
that none of their relatives had been epileptic. The shamans them-
selves are not epileptics and have no histories of mentally deranged
behavior.

The possibility is considered that shamanism in the Nuba moun-
tains is associated with a low incidence of "insanity" and a high
incidence of epilepsy. However, the Dilling, who also have shaman-
ism, are estimated to have a relatively high incidence of insanity
(one in 300) but little or no epilepsy; the Koalib, another shamanis-
tic group, have much less of both conditions (one in 500 for in-
sanity, one in 1000 for epilepsy). Furthermore, nonshamanistic
Nuba groups have incidences of insanity both lower and higher
than those estimated for the shamanistic groups. Thus this simple
hypothesis is rejected. Taking into account the fact that shamanism
is increasing in intensity and frequency among shamanistic groups
and is also spreading to nonshamanistic groups, Nadel suggests its
relationship to the "psychologically unsettling" impact of culture
change brought about by contacts with Western civilization. This
change "among the Nyima as among all primitive communities . . .
must create and foster emotional instability, neurotic and hysterical
leanings, that is, the constitutional qualifications of a shaman"
(1946:36) . The hypothesis is formulated that shamanism is a pre-
ventive measure for mental health:

Shamanism still leaves in existence and without a social "niche," the deviant
and abnormal personality, though the borderline between normal and abnormal
differs from that valid in non-shamanistic groups. But it remains an open ques-
tion whether shamanism does not in a different sense "absorb" mental derange-
ment; the institutionalized catharsis which it offers may well have the therapeutic
effect of stabilizing hysteria and related psycho-neuroses, thus reducing a psycho-
pathic incidence which should otherwise be much larger (1946:36).

Thus the shamanistic groups may be able to cope with the general
psychological disturbance resulting from acculturation without a
higher incidence of mental disease. In other words, Nadel rejects a

AFRICA 8 3

synchronic hypothesis, that shamanistic and nonshamanistic groups
differ in their incidence of mental disease, in favor of a diachronic
hypothesis to the effect that the groups will differ in the amount of
increment in mental disease under changing conditions.

Thus the hypothesis I suggest is verifiable ... for if it is true, it must be pos-
sible to show that psychoses and kindred disorders are increasing among the non-
shamanistic groups, while in the shamanistic groups the increase of shamanism
would go hand in hand with a relatively undisturbed mental stabihty ( 1946:37) .

Nadel did not have the data to test this hypothesis, but his study
provides an excellent example of research design for future students
of the relation between culture patterns and mental disease in
changing African societies/

Messing (1958, i960) has analyzed the Zar spirit-possession cult
of the Amhara of Ethiopia as group psychotherapy for a wide range
of emotional disturbances ''ranging from frustrated status ambi-
tion to actual mental illness." Married women are the most frequent
patients, and the cult functions not only to mitigate symptoms,
but also to provide a group context in which deviants are reinte-
grated into society. The sexual symbolism of the relation between
the patient and his Zar, and the manner in which the cult reflects
Ethiopian social stratification, are some of the fascinating aspects
of the study. Spirit-possession phenomena of a similar type occur in
West Africa and the Caribbean; their comparative analysis in so-
ciopsychological terms would contribute greatly to our understand-
ing of the psychiatric functions of religion.

The most thorough investigation of mental illness in a single Afri-
can culture is that by Field (i960) among the rural Ashanti. Utiliz-
ing her previous experience as an ethnographer. Field returned to
the Ashanti as a psychiatrist and set herself up near a shrine where
troubled people come to receive help from a deity whose priest be-
comes possessed and communicates advice from the god. It was pos-
sible for her to observe and obtain case histories on those supplicants
who were mentally ill, and she conducted some local surveys as well.
The troubles and desires which normal people bring to the shrine are
described in detail before the psychiatric data are presented. For the
most part, standard diagnostic categories are used, and the emphasis
is on similarities between behavior patterns observed in the field and
those found among Europeans.

One of Field's findings illustrates perfectly the need for intensive

^Another excellent example is provided by Scotch (i960) in relating essential hypertension
to changes accompanying urbanization in a quantitative study of rural and urban Zulu.

84 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

community study outside the mental hospital to get a valid picture
of the incidence of various mental disorders in a given population.
As mentioned above, the older psychiatric studies (including that
of Tooth, who worked in Ghana) are unanimous in stating that de-
pression is extremely rare, and they present quantitative data to
prove it. However, Field states:

Depression is the commonest mental illness of Akan rural women and nearly
all such patients come to the shrines with spontaneous self-accusations of witch-
craft. . . . The depressive personality is, in sickness and health, self-effacing and
is seldom a disturbing nuisance. She is therefore the last type of patient who would
ever find her way to any kind of European hospital unless she had some concurrent
and conspicuous physical trouble. ... It is not surprising therefore that psychia-
trists and other doctors who see patients only in hospitals and clinics should have
the idea that depression in Africa hardly exists ( 1960:149) .

This discovery of depressive disorders is an important one and is
adequately documented in the case histories, but there is no discus-
sion of the psychocultural determinants of guilt in Akan individ-
uals. In fact, Field appears to regard the guilt and depression as a
tendency not produced by the conditions of Akan culture but oc-
curring equally among all peoples who actively believe in witch-
craft. She claims that only the confessions of depressives can keep
such beliefs alive in a group; the fantasies of paranoids are not suffi-
cient. This is contrary to fact, for there are numerous African so-
cieties in which witchcraft is a major preoccupation but no one ever
confesses to being a witch. Field does not take into account the vari-
ation of witch beliefs among African societies, and this leads her
away from investigating the peculiar conditions in Ashanti which
make confession a pronounced pattern.

Cultural norms are considered in the section on paranoid reac-
tions: "In a country where nobody looks twice at a lorry announc-
ing in big letters, 'Enemies all about me,' or 'Siiro nnipa' (Be afraid
of people) , it is clear that our ideas of what constitutes a morbidly
paranoid attitude must be revised" ( 1960:296) . Nevertheless, Field
asserts that it is quite possible to distinguish the controlled paranoia
of the normal Ashanti from abnormal paranoid reactions. The
valuable contribution of the study is that it presents psychotic be-
havior in cultural context, with the element of supernatural belief,
which is so important in these disorders, clearly delineated in its re-
lation to precipitating social circumstances and organic factors.
The etiology of the psychoses described is considered as being outside
the limits of the study, in part (I suspect) because the author be-

AFRICA 8 5

lieves that the Akan do not diflF er significantly from other peoples in
their mental illnesses but only in the cultural forms which these dis-
orders take.

Although Field's monograph contains the largest number of pub-
lished psychiatric case histories from a single African group, it
should be noted that Tooth (1950) also includes numerous case his-
tories, and Sachs (1947) did a book-length case history of a Johan-
nesburg witch doctor. The study by Bohannon (i960) of homicide
and suicide in seven African societies, although it is not a psychologi-
cal analysis, does contain case histories and is important as the first
comparative study of deviant behavior in Africa.

Conclusions

The foregoing survey bears out the initial assertion that relatively
little culture-and-personality research has been carried out in Af-
rica. In fact, considering how little has been done, it is remarkable
that there are studies of the quality of Albino and Thompson
(1956) on weaning, Lee (1950, 1953, 1958) on adult personality
and projective techniques, and Field (i960) on mental illness. The
still untapped and largely unrecognized potentialities of Africa as a
field for culture and personality study necessitate attention to the
possible lines of future research. In the recommendations which fol-
low, emphasis is placed on types of research which utilize the pecul-
iar advantages of Africa as a major ethnographic area. Thus the
large number of distinct ethnic groups suggests the feasibility and
importance of comparative studies; the vast accumulation of pub-
lished ethnographic material, particularly on social organization,
makes analysis of existing literature valuable, with personality and
social structure a natural emphasis; the recency of Western contact
in many groups is conducive to studies of culture change, and the
differential exposure to Western culture of persons with the same
traditional culture (in the rural-urban and educated-uneducated
dichotomies) makes controlled comparisons possible; the migrant
labor situation creates the conditions for studies of the impact of
absent fathers on personality development; variations in the pres-
ence and content of initiation rites present themselves as a problem
for psychocultural investigation, and so forth.

Comparative Analysis of Existing EtlmograpJoic Materials. No
area of the world has as much reliable information on social organi-
zation in as many different societies. Correlational studies of per-
sonality and social structure could include relationships between

86 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

family roles and sociopolitical roles, between the economic and so-
cial position of women and mother-child relationships, among dif-
ferent forms of culturally patterned aggression, such as warfare, the
feud, sorcery, and so forth, and between sex roles and patterns of
sexual behavior.

Comparative Socialization Studies. We need basic material simi-
larly collected on a large number of traditional African cultures.
The kinds of data required range from motor development and
infant nutrition through parent-child and sibling relationships to
the socialization of sex, aggression, and dependence, and training
in achievement, responsibility, and skills. Only by the collection of
comparable materials on traditional child-rearing patterns will it
be possible to find the conditions under which traditional culture
patterns were learned and adapted to individual needs, and to estab-
lish baselines for studies relating to socialization and culture change.
Feasible studies of special significance include: (i) the effect of
structural variations (different polygynous arrangements, virilocal
versus uxorilocal marriage, more and less authoritarian extended
family patterns, varying divorce rates, high and low status position
of women) on child experience and behavior; (2) the effect of eco-
nomic factors (pastoral versus agricultural subsistence patterns,
differentiated versus undifferentiated economic role systems) on
child experience and behavior; ( 3 ) the effect of mother-child sepa-
ration (at termination of postpartum sexual taboo, weaning, or re-
placement by a sibling) on children conditioned to varying amounts
of initial nurturance by mother, with dependency weaning varying
in its abruptness from one group to another; (4) the effect of dif-
ferential severity of sex and aggression training on cultural behavior
in those motivation systems; (5) the differing courses of adolescent
development in cultures with and without male and female initia-
tion rites at puberty; (6) the connection between varying political
values (for example, authoritarian versus egalitarian) and the values
concerning interpersonal behavior which are transmitted to chil-
dren.

Urbanization and Education. These two processes are of funda-
mental importance in contemporary culture change in Africa and
can be expected to have their correlates in personality change. In
one kind of research design, urban and ural, or educated and unedu-
cated, individuals belonging to the same ethnic group can be com-
pared on indices of culture stress (mental illness, psychosomatic
disorders, suicide, crime) , patterns of child rearing, and values con-

AFRICA 87

cerning interpersonal relations, supernatural phenomena, political
behavior, achievement, and ethnic parochialism. Another approach,
increasingly feasible under contemporary conditions, is to study
differences on these variables between the first urban or Western-
educated generation and later generations whose parents have been
urbanites or educated persons. The varying reactions of different
cultural groups to the same urban or school environment provide
another possibility for personality study, with the emphasis on the
extent to which traditional behavior patterns are persisting under
changed social conditions. The effect of labor migration on child
experience and identification processes, adolescent adjustment in
urban settings, and changes in female roles brought about by eco-
nomic development, are examples of specific topics which deserve
study.

Comparative 'Psychiatry. Primary attention must be paid to the
collection of basic data concerning the incidence of mental illnesses
of various types and their cultural contexts, in variety of African
populations. This is a tremendous task in itself, and will necessarily
involve medical investigators to distinguish functional disorders
from the behavioral effects of trypanosomiasis and nutritional defi-
ciencies, as well as anthropologically sophisticated personnel to con-
centrate on cultural reactions to behavioral deviance. Some special
problems which the African studies to date suggest include: the
development of sexual disorders such as impotence and conversion
hysteria in societies which set a high value on fecundity, but which
vary in the requirements of their sex roles; the particular relation
of cultural stresses affecting women to their development of de-
pressive conditions (as in Ashanti) and various forms of dissociative
behavior which involve spirit possession as a psychotherapeutic
technique; the differential incidence of mental illnesses in West-
ernized and non- Westernized segments of the population (men-
tioned above) ; the relation of sorcery and witchcraft beliefs to
paranoid conditions.

In making these suggestions I have avoided suggesting particular
techniques to be used. I assume that investigators will choose be-
havioral observation, projective techniques, interviews, question-
naires, dreams, or life histories, according to the problem under
study and their own assessment of the validity and reliability of
these research instruments.

In the long run, systematic studies of culture and personality in
Africa will benefit not only this developing subdiscipline but also

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the new nations of Africa in their attempts to modernize themselves
while meeting the needs of their culturally heterogeneous popula-
tions. This difficult task cannot be accomplished without an under-
standing of the behavior patterns and motivations of the changing
but still mainly traditional ethnic groups within their borders.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albino, Ronald C. and V. J. Thompson

1956 The effects of sudden weaning on Zulu children. British Journal of
Medical Psychology 29:177—210.
Barry, H., I. L. Child, and M. K. Bacon

1959 Relation of child training to subsistence economy. American Anthro-
pologist 61:51-63.
BiESHEuvEL, Simon

1943 African intelligence. Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race

Relations.
1958a Objectives and methods of African psychological research. Journal of

Social Psychology 47:161—168.
1958b Methodology in the study of attitudes of Africans. Journal of Social

Psychology 47:169—184.
1959 Race, culture and personality: The Hoernle Memorial Lecture 1959.
Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations.
Bohannon, Paul (ed.)

i960 African homicide and suicide. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University
Press.

Brelsford, W. V.

1950 Insanity among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia. Africa 20:46-54.
Bruner, Edward M.

1956 Cultural transmission and cultural change. Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology 12:191—199.
Carothers, J. C.

1948 A study of mental derangement in Africans and an attempt to explain
its peculiarities, more especially in relation to the African attitude to
life. Psychiatry 11:47—86.

195 1 Frontal lobe function and the African. Journal of Mental Science
97:12-48.

1953 The African mind in health and disease, a study in ethnopsychiatry. I
Geneva, World Health Organization Monograph Series, No. 17.

1954 The psychology of Mau Mau. Nairobi: The Government Printer, Colony
and Protectorate of Kenya.

Davidson, S.

1949 Psychiatric work among the Bemba. Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 7:75—
86.

AFRICA 89

DooB, Leonard W.

1957 An introduction to the study of acculturation. Journal of Social Psy-
chology 45:144—160.

DoRjAHN, Vernon R.

1958a Fertility, polygyny and their interrelations in Temne society. Ameri-
can Anthropologist 60:838-860.
1958b The factor of polygyny in African demography. In Continuity and
change in African cultures, W. Bascom and M, Herskovits, eds., Chi-
cago, University of Chicago Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E.

1953 Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. London, Oxford University

Press.
1956 Nuer Religion. London, Oxford University Press.
Field, M. J.

i960 Search for security: an ethno-psychiatric study of rural Ghana.
Evanston, 111., Northwestern University Press.
Fortes, Meyer

1939 Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland. London,
International African Institute Memorandum. XVII.
Geber, Marcelle

1958 The psycho-motor development of African children in the first year,
and the influence of maternal behavior. Journal of Social Psychology
47:185-195.

Gluckman, Max

195 1 Kinship and marriage among the Zulu of Natal and the Lozi of North-
ern Rhodesia. In African systems of kinship and marriage, A. R. Rad-
cliffe-Brown and C. D. Forde, eds., London, Oxford University Press.
1955 Custom and conflict in Africa. Glencoe, The Free Press.
Harlow, Harry

1958 The nature of love. The American Psychologist 13:673-685.
Herskovits, Melville, J.

1934 Freudian mechanisms in primitive Negro psychology. In E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, Raymond Firth, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Isaac Schapera,
Essays presented to C. G. Seligman. London, Kegan, Paul, Trench,
Trubner and Co.
1948 Man and his works. New York, Alfred A. Knopf and Co.
Herskovits, M. J. and Frances Herskovits

1958 Sibling rivalry, the Oedipus complex, and myth. Journal of American
Folklore 71:1—15.
Jahoda, Gustav

1958a Child animism: I. A critical survey of cross-cultural research. Journal

of Social Psychology 47:197-212.
1958b Child animism: II. A study in West Africa. Journal of Social Psychol-
ogy 47:213—222.
1958c Immanent justice among "West African children. Journal of Social
Psychology 47:241-248.

90 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Laubscher, B. J. F.

1937 Sex, custom, and psychopathology, a study of South African pagan
natives. London, Routledge.

Leblanc, Maria

1958a La problematique d'adaptation du T.A.T. au Congo. Zaire 12:339-348.

1958b Acculturation of attitude and personality among Katangese women.
Journal of Social Psychology 47:257-264.

i960 Personnalite de la femme Katangaise Louvain Publications Universitaire.
Lee, S. G.

1950 Some Zulu concepts of psychogenic disorder. Journal for Social Re-
search, Pretoria, 1:9—18.

1953 Manual of a thematic apperception test for African subjects. Pieter-
maritzburg, University of Natal Press.

1958 Social influences in Zulu dreaming. Journal of Social Psychology 47:
265-283.

LeVine, Robert A.

1959a Gusii sex offenses: a study in social control. American Anthropologist

61 :965-990.
i960 The internalization of political values in stateless societies. Human Or-
ganization 19:51-58.
LoNGMORjE, Laura

1959 The dispossessed: a study of the sex-life of Bantu women in and around
Johannesburg. London, Jonathan Cape.

Loudon, J. B.

i960 Psychogenic disorder and social conflict among the Zulu. In Culture
and mental health, M. K. Opler, ed. New York, Macmillan.

Lystad, Mary Hanemann

1960a Paintings of Ghanaian children. Africa 30:238—242.

1960b Traditional values of Ghanaian children. American Anthropologist
62:454-464.
Marwick, M. G.

1952 The social context of Cewa witch beliefs. Africa 22:120—35, 215—33.

Mayer, Philip

1950 Privileged obstruction of marriage rites among the Gusii. Africa 20:
113-125.

Messing, Simon D.

1958 Group therapy and social status in the Zar cult of Ethiopia. American
Anthropologist. 60: 1 1 20—1 126.

i960 Group therapy and social status in the Zar cult of Ethiopia. In Culture
and Mental Health, M. K. Opler, ed. New York, Macmillan.

MuRDocK, George Peter

1959 Africa, its peoples and their cultural history. New York, Macmillan.

Nadel, S. F.

1937a Experiments on culture psychology. Africa 10:421-435.
1937b Field experiments in racial psychology. British Journal of Psychology
28: 195-21 1.

AFRICA 91

1946 A study of shamanism in the Nuba mountains. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 76:25—37.

1952 Witchcraft in four African societies: an essay in comparison. Ameri-
can Anthropologist 54:18-29.

1954 Nupe religion. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

1955 Two Nuba religions: an essay in comparison. American Anthropologist
57:661-679.

Ombredane, Andre

1954 L'exploration de la mentalite des noirs congolais a moyen d'une epreuve
projective: Le Congo T.A.T. Memoire d'Institut Royal Colonial Beige,
T.37.

POWDERMAKER, HoRTENSE

1956 Social change through imagery and values of teen-age Africans in
Northern Rhodesia. American Anthropologist 58:783—813.

Raum, O. F.

1940 Chagga childhood. London, Oxford University Press.
Read, Margaret

i960 Children of their fathers; growing up among the Ngoni of Nyasaland.
New Haven, Yale University Press.
Richards, Audrey L

1956 Chisungu: a girl's initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Northern
Rhodesia. London, Faber & Faber.

1958 Review of Custom and Conflict in Africa by Max Gluckman. Man
58:117-118.
Ritchie, J. F.

1943 The African as suckling and as adult (a psychological study). Living-
stone, The Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, No. 9.
Sachs, "Wulf

1947 Black Hamlet. Boston, Little, Brown.

Scotch, Norman A.

i960 A preliminary report on the relation of sociocultural factors to hyper-
tension among the Zulu. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
84:1000—1009.

Sherwood, Edward T.

1957 On the designing of T.A.T. pictures, with special references to a set
for an African people assimilating Western culture. Journal of Social
Psychology 45:162—190.

1 96 1 Swazi personality and the assimilation of western culture. Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.

Sherwood, Rae

1958a The Bantu civil servant. UnpubUshed report to the National Council

for Social Research, South Africa.
1958b The Bantu clerk: a study of role expectations. Journal of Social Psychol-
ogy 47:285-316.
Simmons, Donald C.

i960 Sexual life, marriage, and childhood among the Efik. Africa 30:153-
165.

92 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

SouTHALL, A. W and P. C. W. Gutkind

1956 Townsmen in the making. East African Studies No. 9. Kampala,
Uganda, East African Institute of Social Research.
Tooth, Geoffrey

1950 Studies in mental illness in the Gold Coast. London, His Majesty's Sta-
tionery Office, Colonial Research Publication No. 6.
Whiting, John W. M.

1954 The cross-cultural method. In Handbook of social psychology, Gard-
ner Lindzey, ed. Vol. i. Cambridge, Mass., Addison-Wesley.
Whiting, John W. M., R. Kluckhohn, and A. Anthony

1958 The function of male initiation ceremonies at puberty. In Readings
in social psychology (3d edition) , E. E. Maccoby, T. M. Newcomb, and
E. L. Hartley, eds. New York, Henry Holt and Co.

chapter 4

NORTH AMERICA*

JOHN J. HONIGMANN,

University of North Carolina

Introduction

The distinction between ethnology or cultural anthropology and
that subdiscipline of anthropology, culture and personality, rests
on which of two ideally distinct points of view an observer adopts.
Paraphrasing Sapir (1932; cf. Kluckhohn 1944:602-604), an
ethnologist looks at a segment of behavior as a culture pattern, while
the student of culture and personality studies the same segment
from the standpoint of the persons whom it directly involves. The
behavior has "person-defining value." Using other words, in culture
and personality an observer focuses on the subjective side of culture,
that is, culture as experienced or manifested by a composite (or
typical) individual — the Hopi child, the Sioux Indian, or the U.S.
American. Or an observer studies a real individual or categories of
people to see how they experience a way of life. Culture and per-
sonality implies sustained concentration on the explicit and implicit
meanings which cultural traits (artifacts, ceremonies, legal norms,
or epic poems) possess for persons in the community. In a somewhat
different approach, demonstrated by Ruth Benedict (1932:24), the
student of culture and personality may choose to see culture as the
personality of its carriers writ large. True, all cultural anthropology
gives attention to persons, meanings, and to the subjective. In cul-
ture and personality there is simply more emphatic or explicit recog-
nition of the social actor as a person, often to the relative exclusion
of social structure, technology, ideological systems, and historical

* Several years ago with the assistance of Lewis Binford and under the auspices of tlie Insti-
tute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina, I gathered material for a
history of culture and personality. A portion of that material has been used for this essay.
I am grateful to the Institute for assistance in preparing the present work for publication; a
brief version was presented at the 1958 meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

93

94 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

background. In a work of culture and personality, whether it is a
record of children's development, a life history, or an interpretation
of Rorschach tests, the individual looms very large.

My object in this chapter is to review culture and personality
research which has been conducted in native North America and,
though somewhat more incidentally, below the border. I do not
propose to write an all-inclusive history but, rather, a judicious
record of general accomplishments. My emphasis will be on the
bench marks which reveal new interests, methods, or levels of so-
phistication. The chapter is divided into three parts: an introduc-
tion, which is herewith concluded; an evaluative review of research
on North American Indians; and a final section of assessment and
discussion. In this last part I realize that I go beyond reviewing
North American Indian studies.

Review and Evaluation

Aboriginally North America was a continent of varied lifeways,
traces of which still remain. Practically all over the continent, how-
ever, missions, schools, traders, and government administrators have
churned up culture change. The displacement of war, hunting, and
ceremonies brought about a profound alteration in the traditional
roles of men and women and in all other interaction patterns. The
socially standardized milieux in which children were aboriginally
socialized have been substantially transformed. In the United States,
as well as in southern Canada, Indians cluster on reserves and oc-
cupy a special status as far as the larger community is concerned.
Someone might regard these conditions as evidence that the Ameri-
can Indians, with a few exceptions, no longer possess truly exotic
cultures. He might believe that the Indians could hardly be worth-
while subjects to study in order to learn something about the diverse
systems of personality that occur under differing cultural condi-
tions. He might believe that, while the Indians who live under reser-
vation conditions might at best reveal traumatized personalities,
casualties of culture change, they will not provide the kinds of in-
sights that it is possible to obtain, say, in parts of Africa and the
Southwest Pacific. One could conceivably interpret some of the
works to be reviewed in this chapter as supporting such extreme
expectations. Anthropologists have indeed found some Indian social
personalities to be laden with conflict and uncertainty. But it is
worth remembering that the theoretical point from which much
culture and personality research departs has been almost deliber-

NORTH AMERICA 95

ately concerned with discovering pathology in people's world- and
self-views. Anthropologists who employed a crisis-oriented ap-
proach when they studied personality were much more responsive
to evidence of conflict and stress than to behavior that indicates per-
sonal wellness (Honigmann 1954:104; Maslow 1950; Dunn 1959).
Such personality stress need not have been produced by accultura-
tion. Acculturation or, to be more exact about the variable that is
probably crucial, uneven culture change (cf. Mead 1956), un-
doubtedly encourages personal stress, but stress is also evident in
American Indian personality as it became known in very early con-
tact times (Hallowell 1946). Characterological stress continues to
be found among remote northern people like the Kaska Indians who
adhere to a way of life not grossly changed from aboriginal times
(Honigmann 1949). I do not suggest that the American Indians
have from prehistoric times been subjected to more personality con-
flict than other people.

How far anthropologists' accounts of American Indian person-
ality have been influenced by factors such as reservation life remains
a question worth investigating in detail. The restricted range of
occupations, atmosphere of paternalism, and social arrangements
that relieve the Indian of considerable responsibility for creatively
solving his problems undoubtedly help to standardize behavior in
adults and children. Behavior, overt and covert, that is so stand-
ardized is what the anthropologist observes. Hence, reservation life
must have personal repercussions, but its influence need not be
predominantly pathological. My own experience also leads me to
believe that the transformation of the American Indian personality
has been less pervasive than superficial evidence of assimilation (in
clothing, housing, jobs, language, and other elements of reservation
life) leads some people to believe. Iroquois Indians in New York
State, Cherokee in North Carolina, Sioux in North Dakota, and
Makah in Washington do not structure experience precisely like
their Euro-American neighbors even though they may in some cases
speak the same language. Anthropology, of course, devotes itself
to more than the study of only highly exotic cultures or personali-
ties. However, to an extent truly exotic data are valuable and even
essential in order to accumulate comparative material on which to
base universal generalizations. Exotic material can still be secured
in our continent by someone capable of close, clinical observation
that dives below the superficial veneer of Americanization. One or
two summers of field research are insufficient to discover the social

96 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

personality of a community. Culture and personality research re-
quires an intensive understanding of individuals who must be seen
over long periods in their environment. With them the anthropolo-
gist must develop intensive rapport.

Culture and personality studies began among North American
Indians with the collection of personal documents, a category in
which I include autobiographies, biographies, and psychological
analyses such as Gregorio, The Hand-Trembler (Leighton and
Leighton 1949) or Devereux's (1951) account of a psychoanalysis.
American Indians have provided some notable personal documents,
including Radin's (1920) account of Crashing Thunder, Dyk's
story of Son of Old Man Hat (1938) , Simmon's (1942) rendering
of Sun Chief's own life, and Ford's Smoke from Their Fires ( 1941 ) .
However, the exploitation of this channel to present "person-
defining" behavior has not been very widely pursued. It is much to
be regretted that in most cases we do have no more than one first-
rate life history per culture. Nor have many innovations appeared
within the life-history approach. Oscar Lewis (1959) is responsi-
ble for a new departure in his portrayal of five family cultures in
Mexico, though his approach departs somewhat from the strictly
personal document. Life histories, as Kluckhohn ( 1945) points out,
are valuable for the insight they provide into the meaning which
social forms possess for the members of a given community. They
are analogous to the case histories which psychiatrists collect from
patients and study carefully because in those communications the
patient's style of life is revealed. But anthropologists are ultimately
interested in more than the record of a specific individual's experi-
ences. They note Sun Chief's attitudes toward sex not merely as
one individual's way of handling of a universal situation, but for
what they tell us about how that aspect of Hopi culture is generally
experienced — hence, the importance of accumulating personal
documents from a number of people who occupy different statuses
in a particular community.

Culture and personality research has not remained identified
with life histories. To understand how it came to apply theories
from child development, psychology, and psychiatry in the study
of culture, we must note the emergence at the end of the nineteenth
century of psychology as a science.^ Twentieth century psycholo-

^ Wundt's Voelkerpsychologie is only indirectly related to the origins of the culture and
personality movement which, however, shows definite traces of the Volka^eisf School of German
historians like Ranke and Grimm (Kluback 1956:24). For other antecedents see Meggers
1946:178-179.

NORTFI AMERICA 97

gists showed increasing interest in the relationship of personaHty
development (including the breakdown of personality organiza-
tion) to social conditions (Burt 1957) . Meanwhile, anthropologists
noted that culture after all is manifested only through individuals.
This conclusion occurred to Boas, for example, though he did little
to pursue it. He did, however, transmit his interest to a number of
his students who were to become extremely influential in the new
movement (cf. Kluckhohn 1944:596; Mead 1959:14).

Among those students was Edward Sapir, who, in his paper "Cul-
ture, Genuine and Spurious" (1924), distinguished between the
concept of culture as applied to man's whole material and spiritual
social heritage and to "those general attitudes, views of life, and spe-
cific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its
distinctive place in the world." Sapir was offering a new version of
an orientation that had long interested certain historians, like those
of the Volksgeist group in nineteenth century Germany. In subse-
quent papers (for example, "Cultural Anthropology and Psychia-
try," 1932) , Sapir advanced the germ of the definition of culture
and personality which I have offered at the start of this chapter.
Cultural anthropology, he said, emphasizes the group and its tradi-
tions but pays little regard to the individuals who make up the group
and who actualize its traditions in individual variations of behavior.
Anthropology might focus on persons and see culture in its "true
locus," namely "in the interactions of specific individuals and, on
the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of
these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his
participation in these interactions" — in much the same way as psy-
chiatry focuses on a whole individual and observes him in his world
of social relationships.

If I had to date the actual beginning of culture and personality
field research conducted in this spirit, I would choose the year 1928,
the year in which Margaret Mead — a student of Boas — published
Cofiting of Age in Samoa. However, we are concerned with North
American Indians. Here the signal event emerged from Ruth Bene-
dict's (1928, 1932, 1934) preoccupation with characterizing cul-
tures in psychological terms. In 1934 this brilliant student of Boas
published Patterns of Culture. The book attempts to characterize
several cultures in terms of contrasting psychological orientations.
One chapter of the book, in which she contrasts the Indians of the
Great Plains with the Pueblo people (Zuni) of the Southwest, will
illustrate Benedict's approach.

98 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The Plains way of life reveals a Dionysian quality. In personal ex-
perience the Plains Indians seek to press beyond the commonplace
toward excess in order to achieve a certain psychological state. The
Pueblo Indians in contrast are Apollonian, meaning that they dis-
trust excess, prefer to keep to the middle of the road, and avoid
meddling with disruptive psychological states. Benedict saw Plains
and Pueblo cultures as two configurations. The Dionysian and
Apollonian emphases reveal themselves in many parts of the con-
figuration, for example, in response to death. The Plains Indians
give way to uninhibited grief when a kinsman dies; mourning is
prolonged, and some people even mutilate their bodies in a form of
self-torture. The Apollonian Pueblos also react to death with sor-
row, but people seek to make as little, rather than as much, of the
event as possible. In each culture area the ideal personality type
reflects the dominant psychological orientation. The Plains value
the self-reliant man. By showing initiative in war or hunting, such
a man achieves honor. The Pueblos have a different ideal. They
value the mild-mannered and affable man who acts in moderate
rather than in grandiose or spectacular terms.

In another chapter of her book, Benedict describes the Kwakiutl
Indians of the North Pacific Coast of North America. She views
them not only as Dionysian, but characterizes them as obsessed
by megalomaniac ideas of grandeur, ideas which express themselves
in furious competitive feats (potlatches) and in the way chiefs
seek to gain the best of one another through boasting and mutual
ridicule.

The inspiration for Benedict's brand of configurationalism came
not from anthropology, nor from a school of psychology that was
already current, Gestalt psychology, but from a historian, Oswald
Spengler (1926) . Note that Benedict's interpretations of cultures
in psychological terms omits intensive, firsthand study of the peo-
ple whose behavior she describes. The Plains Indian and Kwakuitl
ways of life which she characterizes had long vanished and Benedict
relied on ethnographers' earlier accounts. Culture and personality
rarely again followed this method but instead put great reliance on
firsthand field work. For if personality is interpreted solely from
ethnographic materials which describe a culture, there is danger
that the actual underlying psychological organization of the people
who live that culture will be falsified. Explanation will be circular:
the cultural datum — people behave peaceably and co-operatively —
will be explained in terms of underlying peaceful, restrained, and
co-operative motivations. This danger is inherent in Benedict's

NORTH AMERICA 99

approach, though mostly she avoids f aUing into circularity because
she does not essay a direct account of personality. She tends to say
people act as if they had such motives. The safe position is never to
assume that overt peaceableness or any other cultural trait is moti-
vated by a similar state, like absence of hostility. It may or may not
be. The point is that the existence of motives cannot be directly
inferred from the outward form of behavior. Motivation and cul-
ture are not isomorphic. Motives must be assessed through studying
living individuals in depth using clinical methods. Or else the
various myths, films, and fictions of a community may be inter-
preted in a clinical manner (see Margaret Lantis' approach de-
scribed below) .

How shall Patterns of Culture be evaluated? Some anthropolo-
gists have condemned the book as subjective and unscientific. In
some instances such condemnation is motivated by anthropologists'
unwillingness to admit that their discipline includes a strong hu-
manistic tradition. Benedict, however, clearly thought of her work
as scientific. One reason why she may have identified with science
is that in her day, as in ours, categorizing a piece of research as sci-
entific surrounds it with greater authority. Patterns of Culticre
does partake of science, provided we are not too narrow in how we
define the concept and do not make science identical with the ex-
perimental testing of hypotheses. Any attempt to generalize knowl-
edge fits into the scientific tradition. Benedict offered a method for
generalizing many specific bits of behavior in order to see cultures
as wholes.

Patterns of Culture contributed much to stimulate thought con-
cerning method and interpretation (cf. Nadel 1937; Li An-Che
1937) . The very fact that people distrusted Benedict's interpreta-
tions and felt that she was too subjective made them refer back
to the same evidence she too had used. Her accounts of Pueblo and
Kwakiutl life have been found to be incomplete. She selected facts
to draw a picture that would be in accord with the way the Pueblo
and Kwakiutl themselves ideally view life. She ignored some in-
stances of behavior that were incongruent with the configuration
of dominant, ideal interests. Nevertheless Patterns of Cidture re-
mains timelessly important and in a certain sense indisputably valid
in the same way that any great interpretation of reality remains
valid because it expresses fully the aims of its creator. So too a ju-
dicious historian's work remains viable even after subsequent works
are written that contain more complete evidence and more up-to-
date interpretations.

100 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTLIROPOLOGY

One paper, written by John Bennett (1946) to review recurring
disagreements over the interpretation of Zuni and adjacent Pueblo
cultures, raises methodological implications that go quite beyond
the field of culture and personality. Bennett examines the interpre-
tations of Pueblo life made by Benedict and others and sets them in
opposition to another view of Pueblo culture, one that he calls the
"repressed" approach. His conclusion is that in each case the values
of the observer to a certain extent necessarily govern the way he
structures his data. We cannot determine on empirical grounds
once and for all which point of view is "right."

The publications that appeared in the latter part of the decade
and in the forties reveal that actual field research was already under
way in the thirties. In 1937 came the first of Landes* reports on the
Ojibwa (1937, 1938a, 1938b) and Hallowell's (1936, 1937; also
see 1942, 1946, 1951, 1952) work on another branch of the same
ethnic group. Hallowell's research among the Ojibwa indicates
that, although personality development is undoubtedly influenced
by cultural change, in some respects the personality system is also
highly autonomous and persists. In eastern North America, his evi-
dence indicates, the fundamental organization of personality per-
sisted through two centuries of culture contact. Hallowell's (1946,
1952) method was to compare the reports of seventeenth and
eighteenth century missionaries and explorers with the people as
he knew them. In the early period Europeans characterized the
Indians as emotionally restrained, stoical, strongly inhibited in the
expression of aggression, mild in the face of provocation to anger,
and suppressive of open criticism. In "deeper" or more nuclear
terms, Hallowell finds in the reports evidence that the aboriginal
northeastern Indian was anxious lest he fail to maintain the re-
quired standards of fortitude, express anger and resentment, or pro-
voke the anger of others. Essentially the same characteristics still
existed in the relatively unassimilated Ojibwa Indians whom Hallo-
well observed along the upper banks of the Berens River which
flows into Lake Winnipeg and even in the more assimilated Ojibwa
who live farther down the river. Indians who had been in more in-
tense contact with Euro-Canadians did differ in some respects from
their more isolated contemporaries. For example, they were more
extroverted. But the personality core, Hallowell found when he
scored responses to the Rorschach test given by both Berens River
groups, was fundamentally the same. No radical psychological shift
had occurred in the course of acculturation. Later Hallowell moved

NORTH AMERICA 101

to the still more acculturated Lac du Flambeau Indians in north-
ern Wisconsin, another branch belonging to the same ethnic group
of Ojibwa. Here, in spite of heavy culture change and cross breed-
ing between Indians and whites, he found that the Lac du Flambeau
people psychologically remained Indians. Obviously these people
who were being encouraged to live as Euro- Americans would have
a difficult time adjusting to the demands of their social environment.
Characterologically they were in another cultural world, says
Hallowell, anticipating one of the main conclusions of the U.S. In-
dian Education Research Project which will be described more
fully below. Presumably the core structure of the aboriginal per-
sonality was able to resist change because it could get along with the
traditional characterological system, though this cannot be ac-
cepted as a full explanation of how that traditional character struc-
ture manages to be transmitted from one generation to another.

Certain methodological aspects of Hallowell's work deserve spe-
cial note. In effect he applied to his three communities a variant of
the experimental method — actually the only kind of experimental
method that can be applied in studying living groups of people
(Chapin 1947) . His procedure involved a fruitful adaption to cul-
ture and personality research of the method of intercultural com-
parison, a method which has a long history in anthropology. His
groups illustrate three levels of acculturation. On Level One were
the least acculturated, pagan inland Ojibwa of Berens River. Then
came the Christian lakeside people, among whom aboriginal dwell-
ings had disappeared along with the old songs and ceremonies. About
20 per cent of this group were of mixed racial ancestry. On Level
Three we find the highly acculturated Lac du Flambeau Indians of
Wisconsin, 80 per cent of whom were racially mixed and all spoke
some English. The Lac du Flambeau children attended school, their
families had radios, and in general the people maintained a close
association with whites. However, at Lac du Flambeau the Mide-
wewin ceremony had been carried over from precontact times.

The Rorschach test offered Hallowell a common device which
he could apply in each group to measure differences in response. He
tested over 200 people with this instrument, recognizing, of course,
that it had never been fully validated for cross-cultural use (Hallo-
well 195 1 ) . One of his findings we have already stated: persistence
of personality independent of degree of assimilation to Euro-Cana-
dian or Euro- American culture. Another finding comes from
counting the number of signs of adjustment that appear in the

102 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Rorschach responses of each group. Differences in adjustment are
not significant when the two Berens River communities are com-
pared to one another, but there is a significant increase in personal
maladjustment in the records of Lac du Flambeau. For example, 9
per cent of the Level One records show signs of bad integration
compared to 18 per cent of the Lac du Flambeau subjects.^ We
should also recognize Hallowell's lasting interest in social psychi-
atry, a field he has pursued with the aid of North American cultural
data. He was one of the earliest anthropologists to distinguish be-
tween normal and abnormal anxiety ( 1936) .

Hallowell revealed new possibilities in using the ethnohistorical
method to reconstruct aboriginal personality. One other example
of this method may be mentioned, Esther Goldf rank's (1943) work
on the Teton Dakota. She shows how aspects of Dakota interper-
sonal behavior — notably aggression — altered in pace with other
changes in the way of life. Before 1850 the Dakota were horse-
mounted buffalo hunters and warriors. Ingroup violence was fairly
common and sprang partly from ingroup rivalries. The rich com-
peted with displays of wealth. The introduction of liquor by early
fur traders intensified violence toward the end of this early period.
Between 1850 and 1 877 increasing contact occurred with the white
man and there was a growing decimation of the wild buffalo, the
Indian's mainstay. Aggression was turned outward as wars broke
out between the Indians and Euro-Americans over the latters' en-
croachment on the land and on account of broken treaties. When
the Indians' aggressive energies began to be deflected against ene-
mies, a need for increased responsibility and in-group co-operation
arose. It is largely for this reason that ingroup aggression began to
decline, though competitive displays of wealth by the rich con-
tinued. What pressures were used to alter personality with respect
to aggression? The chiefs, whose position had grown stronger, gave
sermons on the importance of ingroup co-operation. Blood money
rather than blood revenge was used to settle murder. To borrow
terms which Anthony F. C. Wallace (1959) has introduced, the
periodic expression of impulses normally suppressed gave way to an
emphasis on the lasting suppression of incongruent motives and be-
havior. A similar phenomenon occurred among the Iroquois after
their disorganizing contact with Euro-American civilization. For
a time the Dakota managed to release aggression outward, against
rival tribes and the United States' troops, but their power to do so

^For other Ojibwa research see Caudill 1949. and Barnouw 1950.

NORTH AMERICA 103

was broken following Custer's massacre. Between 1877 and 1885
the Indian was "crushed." In this third period the buffalo disap-
peared and the old economy was wrecked. Most of the horses had
been taken by the victorious army. With the external threat re-
moved, acute internal aggression again broke forth. The chiefs' in-
junctions were ignored. But now a strong, foreign, legal system was
on hand to curb the disruptive trends that had almost free play
prior to 1850. From 1885 onward the people reluctantly turned to
making a living as farmers and also to religion. Chiefs entered the
ministry and became pastors of their people. The Indians eagerly
adopted one feature of Christianity, the blessedness of giving. Re-
ligion and law restored ingroup peace and generosity became an

ideal'

Goldfrank's work exhibits one difficulty encountered with the
ethnohistorical method: it too rarely permits psychologically so-
phisticated inferences of motivation. The nature of the available
data forces the student to deal largely with the overt features of
personality or interpersonal relations.

For most workers the dominant aim in culture and personality
research has been to throw light on motives and feeling states which
underlie overt behavior. Applying the Rorschach test in field work
and interpreting the responses with the aid of Rorschach theory
constitute one way of reaching the covert area of personality. Of
course, a person who relies solely on the test and ignores clues to
covert states present in other instances of overt activity is basing
his understanding on a very narrow foundation. One cannot infer
covert phenomena from outward forms without some kind of
theory, the purpose of which is to specify how to proceed with in-
terpreting in covert terms what people say, do, make, or write.
Some form of the psychoanalytic theory (usually not in its most
extreme, orthodox form) is still the most widely employed adjunct
to culture and personality research, though the utility of the theory
for cross-cultural research has been questioned at certain points,
for example, concerning the universal existence of an Oedipus com-
plex. However, with regard to defense mechanisms, the impor-
tance of childhood in personality formation, the overdetermined
nature of behavior, the motivated nature of dreams, and other
subjects, psychoanalytic theory has been confidently and on the
whole successfully utilized.

I shall not trace the somewhat complicated history of the appli-

'For other studies of Dakota (Sioux) personality see Erikson 1935), and Macgregor 1946.

104 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cation of psychoanalytic theory to culture and personality. The
psychoanalytic approach in anthropology came to maturity with
the publication of The Individtial and His Society, a book written
by Abram Kardiner, psychoanalyst, in collaboration with Ralph
Linton, anthropologist (Kardiner 1939) . The same year saw publi-
cation of another psychoanalyst's ''Observations on Sioux Educa-
tion" (Erikson 1939) . TJoe Individual and His Society is not based
on deliberately organized field work in North America, although
the authors do briefly examine the Zuni and Kwakiutl Indians and
also the Eskimo in terms of their theory. The book grew out of a
seminar jointly conducted at Columbia University by Kardiner
and Linton. The seminar continued and provided Kardiner with
material for a second volume. The Psychological Frontiers of So-
ciety (1945). In this book one American Indian group, the
Comanche, receives intensive consideration though no fresh data
were collected for the purpose of this analysis. As a matter of fact,
the interpretation pertains exclusively to the aboriginal Comanche
personality, that is, to the period when the Indians were warriors
and buffalo hunters on the southern plains.

Since a comprehensive statement of Kardiner's theory is given
by Thomas Gladwin in another chapter of this book (Chapter 5)
I need not do so here. We should, however, recognize the emphasis
which most schools of psychoanalysis put on the early years of life.
Childhood is the period when the meanings in terms of which indi-
viduals carry out other aspects of their culture — war, religion, child
rearing, and many other activities — are established in the personal-
ity. Ideally, psychoanalytic theory aims to predict the way an adult
will regard his world and himself in terms of the way he was reared.
But it is doubtful if an adult social personality can really be pre-
dicted in this way except in very general and not very useful terms.
What customarily happens is that the adult covert personality —
what Kardiner calls the "basic personality type" — is interpreted
using knowledge of how children are currently being socialized and
also by drawing simultaneous inferences from adult activity. In-
stead of really predicting, the researcher attempts to develop a
plausible explanation which will tie into a neat package both cer-
tain events of early life and certain selected features revealed by
adults' overt behavior.

In 1945 I was enough impressed with the potentialities inherent
in Kardiner's work and Karen Horney's (1939, 1945) version of
psychoanalytic theory to apply this approach to the Kaska Indians

NORTH AMERICA los

who live in northern British Columbia and southern Yukon Terri-
tory (Honigmann 1949) . My intentions among the Kaska were to
identify the emotional qualities which people revealed as they acted
their cultural roles and account for such qualities in terms of un-
derlying, dominant motivations. I also hoped to explore the con-
ditions of early life under which the dominant motivations are
learned.^

Kaska social personality is characterized by seven, very much
interrelated, dominant motivations, or value orientations, each of
which must be understood in terms of its context and not by other
definitions which the terms may have. The first of these motives is
egocentricity, defined here as a high evaluation of personal inde-
pendence in which interests are self -centered rather than group-
centered. This motivation colors the way Kaska Indians resist direc-
tion from sources outside the family. It enters into the positive
evaluation of work, which guarantees independence and self-suffi-
ciency in this trapping-hunting economy, and also into the mascu-
line striving of women, some of whom appear to be in part dis-
satisfied with their sex role.

A second dominant motivation is utilitarianism, a concept that
refers to a practical and resourceful attitude toward the problems
of living, an interest in concrete rather than abstract thinking. The
Kaska are present-oriented and little concerned with a remote fu-
ture. Deference is a third guiding tendency in the nuclear area of
Kaska social personality. The word denotes an attempt to maintain
f rictionless human relationships and a concern lest one becomes dis-
liked and rejected. In conformity with this value orientation, peo-
ple make requests obliquely, thereby not risking open rejection and
also not pressing on other people too aggressively. More directly, def-
erence is expressed by the avoidance of face-to-face quarrels. Hos-
tility is, however, expressed indirectly and covertly through gossip.
In other words, hostility is not lacking in Kaska social personality.
Evidence for it appears in dreams and more overtly in how some
people act when they are intoxicated, for example, threatening
others and themselves with violence. The normal suppression of
interpersonal hostility is very useful for people who live in an
atomistic social system, one without strong social controls.

The next dominant motivation, flexibility, is difficult to define
positively. It denotes a state of mind in which external necessity,

For a study of the Aymara Indians of Peru whicli employs a similar appro.icli to tlie core
personality see Tschopik 195 1.

106 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

duty and hurry are subordinated to personal inclination. This state
reveals itself in an absence of rigidity and in tolerant, even inde-
cisive, attitudes toward the demands of living. The absence of hurry
or of rigorous timetables, the people's easy conscience, the non-
compulsive way in which children are reared and dogs trained, and
the lack of obsessiveness all express this motive. In certain crisis
situations flexibility combines with dependence, another dominant
motivation, to produce procrastination and hesitation. As a result
of these behaviors, the critical state that confronts the individual
may grow worse instead of being resolved. The motivating state of
dependence needs little explanation, though it should be noted that
this tendency in the character structure is at variance with the em-
phasis characterologically placed on egocentricity and resourceful-
ness. It is quite possible for a social personality to reveal inconsistent
trends which people themselves occasionally have difficulty recon-
ciling in their day-to-day living.

Finally there is emotional isolation, perhaps the most dominant
note in Kaska Indian social personality. The concept includes a
strong desire to maintain aloofness from emotional experience and
emotional involvement as well as a tendency to suppress all feeling.
It is based on a characterological inability to tolerate strong emo-
tion, including affection. Egocentricity is quite congruent with a
social organization in which for much of the year families engaged
in trapping live in relative isolation from one another in the bush
and under a social system that is without superordinate authorities.
Sexual constriction is one specific mode in which emotional isola-
tion is expressed in interpersonal behavior. This form of expression
shows up in the ambivalence that marks the relations of men and
women, in the absence of public display of affection between
couples, in the reluctance to marry (that is, to enter a strong emo-
tional— even dependent — relationship), and, most dramatically,
in the behavior accompanying premarital sexual relations. Premari-
tal sexuality includes considerable preliminary teasing that cul-
minates in a chase, capture, struggle, and, finally, coitus. Such a
sequence, I discovered when I lived among the Indians, is often
difficult to distinguish from actual rape. Girls and also married
women conceive of the sex act as a hostile encounter, a perception
they reveal in dreams and in the associations spontaneously given to
dreams. The promiscuity of adults, since it offers the opportunity
for sexual satisfaction without risk of emotional involvement, also
reveals emotional Isolation.

NORTH AMERICA 107

In general the Kaska world-view wavers between the idea that
experience is manageable and the idea that life is difficult as well
as uncertain. The self -view also comprises two conflicting attitudes:
value placed on self-reliance and a tendency to abandon striving
and revert to passivity. The former is far more conscious, and much
more acceptable, than the second. Passivity particularly manifests
itself in crises, when there is eager reaching out for help (cloaked,
of course, by virtue of the tendency here called emotional isola-
tion) and surrender of active striving.

Emotional isolation is the motivation whose grounding in early
socialization is easiest to perceive. This value orientation is rooted
in the way a Kaska mother withdraws emotionally from her child
when the youngster is between two and three years old. She does
not outrightly reject the child but spontaneously withdraws show
of warmth and affection. The mother becomes more impersonal,
more concerned with herself, or more preoccupied with a younger
sibling. She shows herself less patient and indulgent to the young-
ster. In this situation the child unconsciously makes a decision never
again to invest strong affection in others. The significance of grow-
ing up and spending all one's life with relatively affectless people
who serve as role models must not be ignored in understanding how
the Kaska style of life is acquired.

Psychoanalytic theory suggests that the striving for independ-
ence, which also makes up Kaska social personality, is founded on
the indulgent care of infants. In this highly favorable period of life,
the Kaska baby develops an unverbalized attitude of confidence in
himself and hopeful expectations toward the world. These expecta-
tions are only loosely entrenched, however. They are contradicted
by the emotional withdrawal that comes as an early shock. The pas-
sivity of Kaska personality in certain crisis situations can be ex-
plained as it derives from this traumatic episode and also as it reflects
the hold which the passive-receptive state of infancy continues to
exert in the personality.

The major test of truth that can be applied to this kind of inter-
pretation is the test of consistency. Is the explanation sufficient,
reasonable, clear? Does the explanation offered explain the facts
in noncontradictory fashion? Does the evidence hold together sen-
sibly? Are contradictions between facts, if they occur, adequately
accounted for in terms of the theory that is being used? For reasons
that I shall examine more closely at the conclusion of this chapter,
anthropologists have become shy of research whose validity can be

108 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

assessed mainly on evidential grounds, that is, by applying tests of
consistency and reasonableness.

Culture-and-personality studies directed to the American scene
thrived in the forties. One development that added enormously to
our knowledge of American Indians as persons began in 1941 with
the start of the Indian Education Research Project (also called the
Indian Personality and Administration project) . This was a co-
operative venture in which the Committee on Human Develop-
ment of the University of Chicago was allied with the United States
Office of Indian Affairs where John Collier was Commissioner
(Havighurst and Neugarten I955:v-vi; Thompson 1951:12).
Their general purpose was to examine the whole development of
Indian children in six American Indian tribes in order to derive
practical, useful lessons for Indian education. What was happening
to the personalities of Indians under the impact of American civili-
zation? An answer to this question, it was believed, would help to
define the "real needs" and resources of American Indians and
would serve as a guide for administrators. In other words, although
the results of the project were expected to contribute substantially
to general knowledge, the project was designed as action research
or applied anthropology. Indian Service personnel, mainly teachers,
nurses, and school administrators, were recruited to do much of
the field work, but professional anthropologists were also assigned
to the six groups selected for intensive study. In addition to anthro-
pologists the project was carried through psychologists, psychia-
trists, public administrators, linguists, and other specialists. The
groups for which monographs of findings have been published are
the Hopi (Thompson and Joseph 1944) , Sioux (Macgregor 1946) ,
Navaho (Leighton and Kluckhohn 1947; Kluckhohn and Leighton
1946) , and Papago Indians (Joseph, Spicer, and Chesky 1949) . The
reports on Zia and Zuni Pueblos have unfortunately never ap-
peared.

The approach which these works follow may be called psycho-
genetic or developmental. With a variety of methodological aids
(Emotional Response, Moral Ideology, Rorschach, Thematic Ap-
perception, and other tests) as well as direct observation, the intel-
lectual and emotional development of children is followed from
birth to adolescence. The underlying theory draws from psycho-
analysis, but the various workers are concerned with more than
the earliest years of life and base interpretations on experiences
that occur considerably later than feeding, toilet training, or early
sexual training.

NORTH AMERICA 109

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to summarize and evaluate
the whole project. Fair evaluation especially would be difficult, for
clear evidence concerning how the results of the research entered
into the administration of the United States' Indians is hard to come
by. Laura Thompson (1951) has written on the significance of
the project for which she co-ordinated research activities. Six years
of field work, she says, were required before a general solution of
the welfare problem peculiar to each tribe could be formulated.
The research involved far more than the relationship of personality
to culture change. Other variables also had to be taken into ac-
count: ecology, health, social organization, language, arts, crafts,
ceremonies, and the core values of the people. The main findings
were, first, that a program of administration which was oriented
primarily to assimilating the Indians into the general American
population was highly detrimental to the welfare of Indian com-
munities and Indian personality. Second, a substantial increase in
costly schools, health services, and technological aid will not bring
about rapid assimilation of the Indians into the general population.
Thompson writes: "We may predict with assurance that the cur-
rent Indian Bureau pohcy of rapid assimilation and 'liquidation,'
in so far as it is effectively implemented at the reservation and the
community levels, will be detrimental to Indian personality de-
velopment and community welfare." On the other hand, her find-
ings support the wisdom of the Indian Reorganization Policy which
had been adopted under the early administration of Commissioner
Collier.

Perhaps the best way to give some conception of this research is
to take a specific tribe and describe findings which are relevant to
culture and personality there. For this purpose I have selected the
Hopi Indians (Thompson and Joseph 1944: Thompson 1950).

The birth of the Hopi child occurs in the mother's home. Shortly
thereafter rites introduce the newborn individual to his father and
to the Sun and also initiate a life-long series of gift exchanges be-
tween the child and his father's clanspeople. The infant spends prac-
tically all of the first three months of life in a supine position on a
cradleboard. After this time the cradle is used only as a place to
sleep until it finally becomes discarded between six months and a
year. The cradle, it is suggested, probably contributes to the baby's
feeling of security and also conditions the newborn individual to
expect restriction. But many other, less physical restrictions will
appear as the child matures. Weaning comes with little difficulty,
usually around the age of two years. Cleanliness training is intro-

110 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

duced gradually, without shock. Up until the age of six in boys
and throughout youth in girls the mother and other females of the
matrilocal household act as the primary agents of socialization. The
mother's brother is a source of stricter discipline. The general char-
acter of early life is permissive but the freedom of the youngster is
firmly limited in the interests of his physical safety. From such limi-
tation every Hopi probably gains an early conception of how haz-
ardous the environment is in his village. Adjustment is more difficult
for boys than for girls, a generalization that is revealed in boys'
behavior problems, like thumbsucking, temper tantrums, and steal-
ing. The explanation lies in the fact that girls grow up in a house
where they are expected to remain even after marriage. Boys,
already by the age of four or five, begin to break away from the
family group and spend more and more time in the kiva (a religious
structure) or in the fields and on the range. Eventually a young
man will marry into a strange house and there assume a very mar-
ginal position. Actually, the boy also gains freedom by breaking
away from his family around the age of five. In contrast, the girl's
role remains restricted. She must stay close to home and help her
mother, and she too experiences conflicts that show up in temper
tantrums, stealing, and fighting. Psychological tests show that five-
year olds among the Hopi are more relaxed and spontaneous than
older Hopi children. For one thing, they are not yet fully disci-
plined. The girl's inner life at this age is simpler than the boy's; he
is already quite introverted and shows a pervasive, vague anxiety.
Initiation into the Kachina cult marks the transition from child-
hood to youth. The ceremony introduces the child to the Kachinas,
his ancestors, who send rain and food in exchange for prescribed
ritual behavior. Initiation means a ceremonial whipping for some
children, depending on the sodality into which they are initiated.
Naughty boys, it is said, are usually initiated into the sodality that
calls for the more severe whippings. The boy is whipped while he
is stripped naked, but a girl initiate wears her clothes and is beaten
less severely. Following initiation, public opinion to a considerable
extent replaces the matrilocal household as the main control over
the child's behavior. The father remains a source of happiness to
youngsters but, tests show, the larger community becomes a source
of fear, punishment, anger, and shame. The tests also reveal the
child's conception of his family as a source of reward and praise.
Economic responsibilities also increase for the initiated boy. Both
sexes restrict their play to the evening. From six to twelve children

NORTH AMERICA 1 1 1

attend day school, an experience that girls particularly welcome be-
cause it liberates them from the house. At fourteen some boys go on
to boarding school. As seen in psychological tests, the period from
eight to ten is a time when outside contacts increase for both sexes.
Girls are finally aroused from their simple, unquestioning, walled-in
existence; their imagination develops; their personality becomes
more complex, more like the boy's. Just before puberty, however,
boys and girls reveal a tendency to withdraw into themselves, much
of the earlier spontaneous responsiveness to outside impressions dis-
appearing.

The transition to adulthood in Hopi life is not clearcut, though
marriage marks a profound change in role. Tests probe below the
surface to reveal what happens in adolescence as the sexual impulse
rises in consciousness. However vaguely sex is defined by the young
person, it is not perceived as evil. The force of the sex impulse now
halts the introversive trends so apparent at the threshhold of
puberty. An easier acceptance of outside contacts takes place. Boys
achieve sex indulgence more easily than girls. Hopi girls are not
allowed to roam around and must avoid showing themselves to be
boy-crazy. Hence, girls continue to demonstrate more emotional
withdrawal than boys.

The Hopi and other Indian samples of children were compared
to a Midwest, white sample in order to establish differences (Havig-
hurst and Neugarten 1955). In contrast to the latter, Hopi chil-
dren derive little happiness from personal achievement. This is
understandable for they have been taught to avoid any demon-
stration of achievement. Yet the Hopi youngsters are consciously
proud of being praised and respected. Tests also show that aggres-
sion makes Hopi children anxious, perhaps because of the enormous
pressure that the community exerts against fighting. Work is im-
portant in their young lives; in how well or poorly he performs it,
an individual demonstrates whether he is of good or evil character.
Conscience is reflected through belief in immanent justice — belief
that morality is sanctioned by an all-knowing unchangeable, and
unchallengeable external moral power. Belief in immanent justice
in Hopi children does not decline with age as it does in Midwest
children. In fact, the belief increases with age! Belief in animism
decreases more slowly among the Hopi than in the Midwest sample.

The Rorschach test reveals near-adolescent Hopi children to pos-
sess a deeply disciplined character structure. These youngsters are
carefully selective with regard to their emotions; they are cautious

112 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

and restrained. Yet they recognize pleasurable aspects of the world,
though these must be accorded their due place. Exuberance is toned
down. The children have average good imagination but it is seldom
richly fluid, lively, or vivacious. Here again appears the all-per-
vasive note of restraint. (Compare how closely these findings cor-
respond to Ruth Benedict's [1934] characterization of the Pueblo
Indians as Apollonian! Remember, Benedict achieved her insight
without the benefit of gathering her data clinically.) Instead of be-
ing primarily concerned with the emotional aspects of impressions
and events, Hopi children approach the world intellectually and
imaginatively, though without abandoning themselves to fantasy.
The Hopi child is cautious, especially in his approach to a new situ-
ation. He does not become confused by something new. He rather
firmly accepts or declines what is offered; his behavior sometimes
makes the Hopi youngster appear stubborn or unshakeable to his
teachers. The personality reveals a vague, free-floating anxiety
which is unattached to definite, fear-provoking objects. In this
character structure we see reflected the "price" that the Hopi child
pays in order to survive in an environment which he has been taught
is filled with potential danger and one which for these desert farm-
ers is actually perilous. The Hopi adapts by limiting his desires,
emotions, and ambitions. Limitation in turn generates an "inside
pressure" that lacks any definite outlet. The child feels discomfort
and fear without understanding that the source of the disturbing
force is his own overdisciplined self. Such fear is expected in the
Hopi community and is socially "normal." One area of personality
remains unaffected by discipline, the area of the instinctual (includ-
ing sexual) urges — the id. These impulses remain unusually vivid
and spontaneous.

Adult Hopi are much given to malicious gossip and frequently
suspect one another of witchcraft. Such behavior probably origi-
nates from hostility and anxiety. From whence do hostility and
anxiety arise? They arise from social relations carried on in a small,
town-dwelling group, a group that is vulnerable to danger of fam-
ine and epidemics and whose pressure is a source of anger, shame,
and punishment. The role of the mother plays a part. As a discipli-
narian she is a source of anger, shame, and discipline — more to the
boy than to the girl. Hostility and anxiety are also rooted in the in-
ability of the child to form deep, emotional attachments with any-
body, except the mother, a person with whom his relationship is
ambivalent.

NORTH AMERICA 113

Two further developments that brought culture and personality
to maturity in the forties must be mentioned. First, criticism began
to be leveled against the new movement. Particularly did critics
object because, they thought, too much was being claimed for the
formative years of childhood in the process of personality forma-
tion. Anthropologists doing such research, themselves deplored the
excessive weight that, under the inspiration of psychoanalytic
theory, was sometimes given to early disciplines (Goldfrank 1945;
Underwood and Honigmann 1947) . But this was only one contro-
versial feature of the vigorous, new approach. Others too received
a full, frank, and sometimes hostile airing. In her review of "Re-
cent Trends in American Ethnology" Betty J. Meggers (1946:186)
looked with alarm at the way Sapir had been heeded and attention
was being diverted from cultural to psychological problems. Cen-
sure, Meggers said, was being met by anthropologists who chose to
study culture. "That this trend will continue for some time to
dominate anthropology cannot be doubted," she wrote. "In the
meantime, however, the province of culture is being neglected."

Critical notice was not the only indication of the maturity which
culture and personality had achieved. A second was the appearance
of two collections of mainly reprinted readings (Haring 1948;
Kluckhohn and Murray 1948). These, naturally, did not limit
themselves to data from North America. Both quickly went into
new editions and were joined by a textbook in culture and person-
ality (Honigmann 1954) .

The new decade opened with two contributions from Latin
America which marked new levels of development. Holmberg's
(1950) study of the Siriono is essentially ethnographic, but the un-
derlying problem derives from psychological theory. Where a sparse
and insecure food supply exists, do frustrations and anxieties cen-
tering around the hunger drive have major repercussions on be-
havior? Holmberg found overwhelming evidence for strong anxiety
responses toward food among the Siriono and he traced their de-
velopment back to Siriono childhood. In the other work, John Gil-
lin (1951) examined cultural sources of threat and security
affecting Indians and Ladinos in a Guatemalan community.
Rorschach analyses had already appeared comparing these two pop-
ulations and had also examined the motivational makeup of six
witch doctors (Billig, Gillin, and Davidson 1947-48) . In the same
year as Gillin's publication, Oscar Lewis (1951) published his study
of Tepoztlan, a book important as much for the questions it poses

114 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

pertaining to the re-examination of already studied cultures as for
itself being a meticulous approach to personality conceived of
largely as manifesting itself in interpersonal relations.

One major development of the fifties transcends the North
American culture area. This is a comparative approach that utilizes
statistical techniques to test cross-ndhirally the relationship be-
tween aspects of child rearing (the antecedent variables) and sub-
sequent personality or cultural variables. The principal work of this
type is Whiting and Child's (1953) Child Training and Personal-
ity: A Cross-Ciiltural Study, Several other publications followed in
the late fifties (Child, Storm, and Veroff 1958; Spiro and D'An-
drade 1958 ; Barry, Child, and Bacon 1959) . Quantitative inquiries
and correlation analyses have a long history in cultural anthropol-
ogy. In this case they have been facilitated by the existence of the
Human Relations Area Files developed at Yale University.

The comparative method, relying on statistical tests of relation-
ship, coincided with a continuing and mounting wave of criticism
directed against what is still sometimes called the "excesses" of cul-
ture and personality studies. Orlansky's (1949) literature search
had already assembled much material showing that, contrary to
psychoanalytical theory, no consistent or meaningful relationship
linked early forms of nursing and personality traits in latter child-
hood. In the next year, further searching questions were asked by
an anthropologist, psychologist, and two sociologists (Goldman
1950; Farber 1950; Lindesmith and Strauss 1950) , not to speak of
Roheim's (1950) strictures directed against members of the "cul-
turalist school" for rejecting pure Freudian theory as being too
biological! Against this background let us examine briefly some re-
cent methodological innovations in North American research, par-
ticularly those introduced by the Harvard Values Project (Kluck-
hohn 1951); by Spindler (1952, 1955) in his careful research
design for studying personality variation as correlated with differ-
ential assimilation of a foreign culture among the Menomini, and
by Wallace ( 1952) , who demonstrates how the Rorschach test can
help in deriving a true modal personality type.

All research in values is not equally concerned with studying
personality. For example, Northrop's (1946) and Albert's (1956)
interests hardly seem to be. But the Flarvard Values Project has
tended to keep its focus on individuals, and Clyde Kluckhohn
( 1 9 54 : 69 1 ) said that the work of his colleagues is partly in the field
of culture and personality. The special attraction of values research

NORTH AMERICA 115

lies in the fact that it provides a procedure promising a higher meas-
ure of objective rehabihty than many people would see residing in
the more subjective approach keynoted in Patterns of Culhire, or
in the diagnoses of psychoanalytically oriented workers. Projective
tests it is true also did much to reduce subjectivity and heighten re-
liability (as far as test protocols, not interpretations, are concerned)
but they still leave unanswered the question of the validity of the
test itself. Note that George Spindler (1955), in a work to be re-
viewed, sharply separates his interpretation of Rorschach data from
the scored responses which he analyzes statistically. His first and
main proof of personality differences between categories of people
is in the objective and statistically defensible scores (pp. 1 22-123) •
Wallace's modal Tuscarora personality, too, we shall see, is first con-
structed out of test scores. In using the Rorschach technique, it is
the validity of the interpretations that presents the problem.

Vogt's (1951) work among the Navaho can be taken as a fair
example to illustrate the contribution that the values approach
makes to understanding people. Some Navaho men who served in
the U.S. Armed Forces significantly shifted their value orientations
{cf. Florence Kluckhohn 1950) , for example, dropping the Navaho
orientation that views man to be subjugated to nature and adopting
the position that man controls nature. Some veterans also adopted
a future outlook in place of being primarily oriented to the present.
All veterans, however, did not assimilate Euro-American values.
Vogt shows that sociocultural variables, like disruption of the fam-
ily of orientation as well as the size and structure of that family,
are conditions which governed the veterans' acculturation. Large
extended families, to take another specific instance, tended to con-
serve Navaho values, exerting a negative influence on assimilation.
The individual's personality adjustment also related to his readiness
to alter his values. Those Navahos who accepted white values tended
to be characterized by stronger personal conflicts and insecurity.

The experimental method that Hallowell pioneered when he ex-
amined personality and acculturation cross-culturally was ad-
vanced by Spindler (1955) in his well-designed study of the Me-
nomini Indians on their Wisconsin reservation. He too relied on
the Rorschach test. Spindler graded a sample of 68 male Menomini
Indians (all at least half Indian in ancestry) in terms of degree of
assimilation. At one extreme of his five-point continuum are the
native-oriented population, people who obtain subsistence from
wage work but also continue with hunting and fishing. They con-

116 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

sciously maintain kinship ties and traditional ceremonies. All per-
sons in this category speak Menomini. In character structure they
show a passive but not hopeless orientation toward life unmarked
by strong threat. This narrowly defined personality is hardly suited
to competitive struggle or to the expression of aggression. They
keep a damper on emotional expressiveness.

Next come the peyotists, the members of the peyote ritual group
who practice a ceremony that is not traditional and in which visions
are a key feature. They are people over whom the old culture main-
tains a substantial hold although they do not fully endorse its tra-
ditions. Characterologically they reveal a quality of hopeless, pas-
sive soul searching that expresses individual anxiety.

Then come the reservations' transitional people who have no
overt ties with the old culture and have adopted a full measure of
the new way of life. On a deeper level, however, nostalgia for the
past reveals itself along with identification with Euro-American
culture. Transitionalists are less passive and more aggressive than
the native-oriented population. They do not deal with anxiety
through hopeless soul searching. In them aggression sometimes takes
explosive forms.

In fourth place are the lower-ranking, assimilated Indians who
obtain their living from lumbering and belong to the Catholic
Church. People on this level of assimilation are no longer passively
oriented but the character structure is deeply disturbed.

Most assimilated are the members of the elite-assimilated cate-
gory, Spindler's fifth category of reservation people. The men hold
supervisory jobs in lumbering and other fields and also belong to the
Catholic Church. Personality reveals a quality of ready emotion-
ality. There are no signs of disturbance as in the previous group and
little evidence of passivity.

Spindler's study is notable for several things. It confirms and am-
plifies the thesis that acculturation has been detrimental for some
American Indians. Instead of speaking globally of all Menomini
men, it divides the population into categories based on degree of
assimilation and demonstrates meaningful psychological differences
between the categories. This represents a degree of refinement in
culture and personality research though it does not invalidate gen-
eralizations based on a community as a whole, generalizations that
for some purposes continue to be very useful. Principally, Spindler's
work is meritorious for the precision and objectivity it reveals,
qualities that it has not been possible to demonstrate adequately

NORTH AMERICA 117

here in this small summary. But the Menomini study is mainly de-
scriptive. We miss in it the painstaking examination of socialization
that would enable us to understand how each of the five categories
achieves its particular behavior style. The almost complete reliance
on the Rorschach is unfortunate in one respect. Good clinicians do
not rely exclusively on one test. There are characteristics of behavior
that the Rorschach test cannot pick up but which a sensitive ob-
server could bring out. The loss in objectivity would to my way of
thinking be balanced by the enriched picture of personality pro-
duced.

Anthony Wallace's (1952) work with the Tuscarora demon-
strates how the Rorschach test and appropriate statistical pro-
cedures allow a strictly modal-personality type to be constructed.
The term "modal personality," of course, was used before Wallace
but there is a substantial difference between usages. The usual con-
structs of so-called modal personality (for example, by Honigmann
1949; DuBois 1944) or of what Kardiner calls "basic personality"
are really ideal types and not constellations of traits most frequently
(modally) appearing together in a community (cf. Aberle 1954:
669). Wallace sampled deliberately and his work deals with true
modal types. If culture and personality have usually been delineat-
ing ideal types, then doesn't it follow that certain criticisms of na-
tional-character studies must be reconsidered? I have in mind par-
ticularly the criticism which condemns such research as invalid
when it does not sample a national population by class, region, and
similar attributes. The heterogeneity of a modern nation need not
be incompatible with the construction of an ideal personality type
of the country as a whole, although the usefulness of such a type
may be queried.

Bert Kaplan's monograph, A Study of Rorschach Responses in
Four Ctdtures (1954), is a very astute, experimental appraisal of
culture and personality method and of the Rorschach test applied
in such research. In a sense it is a reply to the critics of culture and
personality research. Kaplan asks whether, objectively'', there is such
a thing as social personality. Specifically, can the Rorschach test
pick up personality differences between the culturally different
communities? Comparing Zuni, Navaho, Mormon, and Spanish-
American Rorschach records Kaplan proves that, generally speak-
ing, each of these groups does perform differently in the Rorschach
test situation and concludes that systematic differences in person-
ality do occur from one community to another.

118 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

As we come up to the present it is hard to gauge the long-range
significance of a given piece of work. But the new, good sense that
Anthony F. C. Wallace (1955, 1956) makes out of certain of the
ethnohistorical data pertaining to North American Indian accul-
turation will probably count in future anthropology. He has intro-
duced the concept of "revitalization" to designate the psycho-
logical processes that operate in persons during certain kinds of
nativistic movements. Such movements, he shows, can be inter-
preted in psychological terms quite meaningfully. The sequence of
a typical revitalization movement, according to Wallace, begins
with a period of constantly mounting stress. Over the years people
look for a way out, for some way to restore a more satisfactory cul-
ture. Some people "succeed" in effecting rather narrow-base, per-
sonal "solutions" for their stress through such behaviors as alco-
holism or neurosis. War and changes in political leadership are also
tried, and new economic doctrines are advanced, but generally with-
out much success. At one point a prophetic leader appears. He an-
nounces a solution that came to him, perhaps from a divine source.
At this point, assuming that the leader is indeed heeded, revitali-
zation sets in as order is restored in the community's world of mean-
ings. People become more satisfied and hopeful; the stressful condi-
tions of their existence are alleviated, at least for a time. The prophet
shows an intense concern for cultural reforms. The changes he pre-
scribes range from minor ritual innovations to institutional rear-
rangements that add up to a substantially new culture. Wallace
focuses on the prophet and tries to account dynamically for his
behavior. Typically prophets have been disturbed people exposed
to intense personal and social stress. Wallace looks to the level of
physiological functioning for much of the explanation of the
prophets' personality resynthesis. When the prophet's stress reaches
a critical point "the physiochemical milieu for resynthesis is auto-
matically established." A convulsive effort to redesign his percep-
tion of the situation occurs and becomes the basis of his teaching.
Of course, what message the prophet hears and what lines of action
he recommends cannot be explained physiologically. They depend
on his prior experience and intelligence.

Wallace's work is notable for the courageous way in which he
attempts to fuse social and physiological levels of analysis. He opens
himself to the charge of being reductionistic, that is, of explaining
phenomena on one level by phenomena belonging to another system
of events. But for many people such criticism carries little weight,

NORTH AMERICA 119

provided that the explanation which is offered really explains what
is being studied. His explanation, of course, is hypothetical, and we
may not know for a long time, if ever, whether physiochemical
changes are indeed associated with prophetic revelations. (For a
related work of the American Indians' response to the United States
civilization, see Voget 1956, though he does not write primarily
from the psychological point of view. )

We have said several times that the prevailing tendency in cul-
ture and personality research is to observe with the aid of appropri-
ate theory and with clinical exactness living people in their normal
environment in order to infer the underlying psychological states
by which they can be characterized. But we have also noted that
Goldfrank, Hallowell, and Wallace utilized ethnohistorical data
in pursuing personality studies. The work of Margaret Lantis
(1953, 1959) demonstrates well how theory can be applied to a
rich mythology in order to assess personality. Her work with Nuni-
vak Island Eskimo mythology draws on a close and detailed knowl-
edge of the people, knowledge based on long-term acquaintance.
Lantis offers theoretical justification for using myths as evidence
of psychological processes. Mythology, like folklore, brings out peo-
ple's objective view of reality and also offers insight into their sub-
jective perception of what that reality means to them. The sharing
of myths in a community offers all members an opportunity to
standardize their views of human behavior and of the rest of the
natural world. Myths, in other words, constitute an amalgamated
body of science, philosophy, and religion through which people give
structure to reality. Radcliffe -Brown (1930-31:63), a British
anthropologist, in similar terms speaks of a social structure that
includes not only human society but also that society's relationship
with its total environment.

Elimination, sex, intercourse, and other bodily functions are re-
ferred to very casually in Nunivak Eskimo myths. Their relative
de-emphasis may, of course, be due to repression, but such an in-
terpretation is not confirmed by other evidence (for example,
extant cultural patterns) . Apart from sex, myths indicate that
the relationship of men and women is quite a complex problem for
the Eskimo. Men pursue in women an idealized mother image. Yet
the terms in which the myths portray women (that is, the way men
perceive them) suggests that men are often disappointed in their
quest.

Nunivak Eskimo individuals seem to possess a firm idea of what

120 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

they want to be and a clear image of the world in which they realis-
tically strive to attain desired ends. The characters in the myths are
persistent; usually they are cautious and judicious observers, ra-
tional beings, willing to admit defeat while at the same time trying
to overcome it. They are responsible, diligent, and methodical be-
ings who in most cases prove to be effective in their goal-oriented
behavior. All these traits, says Lantis, indicate that the Eskimo
himself has a ''good orientation to reality." Yet, on the ego level of
functioning the Eskimo personality, judging from the myths, is not
quite what at first glance it seems to be. The readiness of the people
in the stories to accede to others' desires and the tendency to be sub-
missive suggest a restricted ego. Particularly does ego restriction re-
veal itself in the way the individual in myths is unable to be aggres-
sive when he has to further his competitive ambition or satisfy
some other desire. Toward some interpersonal problems the char-
acters maintain a laissez-faire attitude; they are afraid of impinging
on others and therefore restrict their own area of assertive activity.
Close examination of the stories makes it clear that the characters
obtain objectives not solely by their own efforts but also through
magic. When a defense is needed against a feeling of inferiority or
against real ineffectiveness in a tough situation, the people in the
stories submit to supernatural power. In psychological terms, this
suggests that the feeling of inadequacy that the Eskimo experi-
ences in some situations motivates him to objectify his wishes and
to rely on relatively passive forms of coping. Such a readiness to in-
hibit vigorous self-assertion may be acquired early in life, Lantis
suggests, explaining that her evidence for this hunch comes not
from the myths but from observation of child rearing among the
Nunivak people. Submissiveness and only the gentlest signs of physi-
cal assertion suffice to bring the child satisfying rewards.

We have looked briefly at the id and ego, and now come to ma-
terial from myths bearing on the superego level of the Eskimo per-
sonality. A strong superego is evident in phenomena such as repres-
sion, subconscious compulsion, and other defenses that appear in
mythology. Furthermore, restraint on a person's physical drives is
made into an acceptable positive value. Hostility is often expressed
deviously, that is, by magical means, rather than through direct
aggression. More clues to superego functioning come from examin-
ing the many emotional threats that confront the characters. One,
especially, is significant: being bitten or eaten. Lantis finds an ex-
planation for this anxiety in the guilt and fear of retaliation that

NORTH AMERICA 121

Eskimo probably feel for killing and eating the soul-bearing animals
on which their life depends. Lantis reasons cogently in order to sup-
port this interpretation:

. . . these people who are among the world's most effective hunters, that is, among
the greatest human predators against animals, feel continuous guilt for this very
effectiveness and so must enter into the myriad small rituals, must observe the
tabus, load themselves down with amulets, rush to confess what seem trivial
offenses, practice the magic, in order to reduce their anxiety. . . . The hunter
must have sensed his own deep hostility against these creatures that so often
eluded and frustrated him.

The myths reveal a large stock of defenses that presumably also
operate in Eskimo personality, including wish fulfillment, avoid-
ance, denial of reality, projection, rejection, displacement, undoing,
and others. Yet, in her final assessment, Lantis finds this personality
not to be a morbid one. Destructive forces in the myths are after
all combated successfully. The death of a protagonist is rare and so,
too, are unhappy endings. The myths show "an objective and ef-
fective people, much too busy meeting the world to think about the
emotional conflicts within themselves."

Lantis reports a brief analysis of thirty-two Rorschach records
from Nunivak Eskimo men and women that at many points cor-
roborates interpretations derived from the myths. Subjects who
took the Rorschach are shown to be of "high average" intelligence
and given to careful, meticulous observation, almost to the point of
compulsiveness. They reveal high energy, persistence, and extro-
version. There is a real tendency to conform but no direct evidence
of submissiveness. The subjects are preoccupied with sex but with-
out conflict or guilt (preoccupation seems to be concentrated in
the Rorschach records of adolescents) . The test records reveal signs
of frustrated aggression, dependence, and oral aggression, for ex-
ample, revealed by biting and eating) . Repression, too, is shown to
be a fairly common defense. Lantis's work, unusual for the inten-
sive exploration which she devotes to a relatively neglected source
of data is also noteworthy because it is the only full-scale appraisal
we have of Eskimo social personality.^

Assessment

Practically all culture and personality research in North Amer-
ica (and, for that matter, in Latin America as well) has been done

^For relevant materials on other Eskimo see Honigmann and Honigmann 1953 and 1959 and
Ferguson i960. For quite a different use of folktalks in culture and personality research see Child,
Storm, and VerofF 1958.

122 PSYCHOLOGICAL AXTHROPOLOGY

by antkropologkts from the United States working in their own
back yard- They have experimented with a variety of frameworks,
methcxis, and techniques, including the use of autobiography, depth
interviewing, psychoanalytical formulations, projective tests, and
the construction of statistical modal types. Anthropology' in gen-
eral has always encouraged methodological innovation and experi-
mentatioiL Innovation in culture and personality research has been
motivated by the desire to do better work. Research workers have
aimed to secure more objective data, penetrate "deeper" after elu-
sive material, and by-pa^ the superficial for the presumably richer
level of unrevealed conscious or unconscious thought. In general,
anthix^ologists have only exceptionally trusted themselves to make
the kind of sweeping interpretations that psychiatrists (especially
those analytically oriented) make with such confidence. Increas-
ingly, anthropologists doing culture and personaHty research have
come to resemble the clinical psychologists, w^ho, when they advise
a psychiatrist, rely closely on their scores and are often dif&dent,
cautious, and embarrassed as zit =; rhe subjective tenor of their
diagnosis goes. It is as if their role as interpreters of j>er5onaHty
conflicts with valu^ they acquired while apprenticing in the ex-
perimental laboratory. Anthropologists studying personahties have
also rardy been subjective in the manner of men like De Madariaga
or Maurois ^rho put great reliance on their intuitive skills and sensi-
tivity.

Thirty years of field work gave time to zry many approaches, but
they have scarcely been sufficient (considering the available man-
powo") to investigate more than a small fraction of the indigenous
New World population. A few culture areas are well represented
in culture and personality Kterature but for many our knowledge
is spotty jtidffd The Southwest has been weU studied, but all tribes
have not received the same amount of attention (KJuckhohn 1954:
689) .People like the Xavaho and Hopi have been repeatedly visited.
Ihey are our best laboratori« for future problem-oriented re-
search. Considerably less thoroughly studied in the Southwest are
groups like the Papago and Apache. California, the Great Basin,
Plateau, and North Pacific Coast have been sampled out only ex-
ceptkmally by more than one field worker. No matter how reliable
his methods may be, no man can go very far in one short season.
Quite a bit of work has been done on the Plains; enough for Glad-
w^in (1957) to suggest that the cultural unity of the area may not
be accompanied by much homogeneity' of basic p>ersonaht}'. He ad-

NORTH AMERICA 123

mits that he has compared only two typical tribes, the Comanche
and Cheyenne, and is aware that for the second of these, very limited
personality data are available. Ethnohistorical data pertaining to
New York State Iroquois Indians have been intensively utilized
for research — more perhaps than the surviving Iroquois themselves.
Several anthropologists have recently been studying personality
among the North Carolina Cherokee and we should soon know how
that community fits into the continental picture. (For a synthesis
that does not, however, incorporate all available material see Gulick
i960: Ch. 8-9.) The Seminole represent a continuing, viable cul-
tural enclave, although one that is hard to work with. In the far
North the situation is striking: a number of excellent Algonkian
studies (mostly of Ojibwa-Chippewa communities) , one detailed
Athapaskan monograph, and, apart from Lantis's work, little con-
cerning the popular Eskimo! For Latin America the total picture
is far more spotty.

Just as culture areas have been spottily covered and with vary-
ing degrees of intensity so methodology has been divergent from
one group to another. If we are really to compare the Navaho, Hopi,
and Ojibwa, don't we have to do among the Hopi and Ojibwa what
has been done among the Navaho and apply to the Navaho some
of the questions asked in the other groups? Against this suggestion
runs the preference to approach each new piece of work with a
fresh mind (Mead and Wolfenstein 1955:5) . The whole issue may
revolve around personal inclination. Why not restudy the Berens
River Ojibwa using the life-history or Kardiner's psychogenetic ap-
proach? How about a thorough study of the Kwakiutl using Rors-
chachs? This brings up the value of revisits, preferably by different
anthropologists, to communities that were studied some time ago.
Sixteen years had passed since the Kaska Indians were studied. It
would be appropriate to discover what has happened on the covert
and overt levels of Kaska personality and in Kaska culture. Indica-
tions are that tremendous theoretical advances will come in anthro-
pology when research workers who possess different methods, or
at any rate a healthy skepticism concerning some of their pred-
ecessors findings, systematically re-examine the dozens of in-
tensively studied communities of the world.

Having complained about spotty coverage in North America,
let us admit that we know enough to begin to develop wider gen-
eralizations and comparisons (cf. Kluckhohn 1954:693). A num-
ber of reports, for example, suggest quite convincingly that a high

124 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

degree of psychological homogeneity characterizes the American
Indian. Recently a portion of the available data was assembled in an
admittedly undocumented form by George D. and Louise S. Spind-
ler ( 1957) . The psychological features which they discovered to be
most widely exhibited among Indians are: "nondemonstrative emo-
tionality and reserve" accompanied by a high degree of control over
in-group aggression; autonomy of the individual; ability to stoi-
cally endure deprivation and frustration; high value on bravery; "a
generalized fear of the world as dangerous" a proclivity for practi-
cal joking; "attention to the concrete realities of the present" (in
Rorschach argot, the large D approach) , and dependence on super-
natural power that one strives purposefully to obtain. The picture
of homogeneity is even more clear cut if we limit ourselves to north-
ern forest people, Algonkians and Athapaskans. Emotional re-
straint, for example, appears to be a highly reliable characterization
of these Indians. Other common traits include a high value placed
on deference in interpersonal relationships, personal resourceful-
ness, and individualism. People do not attempt to tell others what
to do. Authoritarian attitudes and leadership behavior are sup-
pressed.

Another line of constructive synthesis for which we are ready is
to relate particular personality syndromes to technology, social
structure, and other segments of culture. Hallowell and I have sug-
gested a relationship between the relatively atomistic social systems
of northern hunters and their personality. He also perceives con-
sistency between the inhibition of overt aggression and use of
sorcery. Laura Thompson (1948) relates Indian world-views to
bases of subsistence. In the hunting world-view, man conceives of
himself as a helpless supplicant for power on which he depends for
success. It comes to him from a universal power pool through dis-
parate nonhuman entities, chiefly animals, whom he obtains as per-
sonal guardians. This world-view persists even among agricultural-
ists in North America but there it is altered. Where people develop
a more systematic control of the food supply, they no longer con-
ceive of themselves as helpless supplicants of power which derives
from disparate power sources. They become power entities in their
own right and the power source also becomes more clearly struc-
tured.

Assessment of culture and personality research in any area of the
world can scarcely fail to note the plethora of theoretical problems
which have been generated by culture and personality research (cf.

NORTH AMERICA 125

Inkeles and Levinson 1954). The discussion which follows in part
reflects thinking that developed while work was being done with
North American personality materials, but it also applies to work
done in other areas of the world.

For example, there is the question of how child rearing leads to
the formation of adult personality configurations. Not that any-
body doubts the learned nature of personality or would any longer
ignore the significance of the later years for socialization. But what
is learned in early childhood? Before the child can verbalize, how
can we know what cognitive and emotional learning occurs? How
does early, basic learning continue to influence later learning and
direct the individual's world and self views? (The theory of cog-
nitive dissonance, while it doesn't say wholly new things, speaks
systematically and might fruitfully be applied to the process of
personality development.) The accumulated materials on person-
ality from North American Indians and other areas of the world
are sufficient for at least beginning to develop an anthropologically
satisfactory theory of socialization.

How certain core areas of personality are able to persist despite
change in other areas of culture is a theoretical problem directly
instigated by research conducted with North American Indians.
To what extent is such persistence bound up with socialization,
language, or mode of ecological adaptation? The solution to the
problem may well lie in an imaginative theory such as Friedl's
(1956) designed for the Chippewa (Ojibwa). Incessant change
was characteristic of the aboriginal culture. It has continued with
culture contact and supports the persistence of personality.

In noting possibilities for research in North American culture
and personality — people to be visited or revistied and generaliza-
tions to be drawn — we must also assess whether the flow of man-
power is adequate for this research. Anthropology in this country
does not want for serious graduate students and creative minds. But
are they turning to problems of culture and personality in propor-
tion to their growing number? I have noted diminishing enthusi-
asm for culture and personality research since the thirties and
forties.*' In the balance of this paper, I shall examine some reasons

I

° The editor of the American Anthropologist (Vol. 6i, p. 498) reports that 47 manuscripts
falling into the category of culture and personality were submitted (not all were published)
between 1955 and 1958 or 10 per cent of the total (498). Social organization was in top
position (10 1 manuscripts, 20 per cent) and then came ethnology — ethnography, method-theory,
and acculturation with 82, 8t, and 57 articles each (the percentages are 17, 16 and 11 re-
spectively). The criteria used in classification are not given. In a survey that I recently did

126 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

for this withdrawal of interest and also attempt to resolve some of
the methodological problems that may be discouraging students
from entering this field.

Part of the reason for the lack of support of culture and per-
sonality research is given in these words of Nadel (1957:189) :

The advance of any science is punctuated as much by the disappearance of old
problems as by the emergence of new ones. This is little better than a truism if
we have in mind problems disappearing and discussions or controversies ceasing
because the issues in question have been resolved. But often it is not a question of
solution; rather it is a question of changes of viewpoint and interest. The old
problems are abandoned because they no longer seem important; the controversies
cease because all that can be said has been said; and if certain questions still re-
main unanswered, they are yet shelved in spite of it, or perhaps because of it —
because one realizes that they are unanswerable and should be replaced by other,
more profitable, ones.

The change of interest came when new problems opened up in
adjacent areas of the discipline, particularly with regard to social
structure and linguistics. These new problems attracted graduate
students faced with choosing thesis topics as well as full-fledged
professionals. But this explanation makes us want to know what
caused culture and personality to lose appeal. Why couldn't it meet
competition?

Several things succeeded in promoting dissatisfaction with cul-
ture and personality. Instead of proving a challenge, the barrage of
criticism released in the forties and early fifties proved to be a deter-
rent. Why did it have a deterring reaction? The answer lies in the
growing climate of empiricism and operationalism, the high evalu-
ation of objectivity, and the stress put on objective reliability. The
positivist conception of science which had long captivated anthro-
pology and had become the dominant intellectual force in American
academic life was incompatible with certain aspects of the new ap-
proach (cf. Kroeber 1915, 1935, 1936) . Foundation support could
best be commanded by establishing that one's problems were amen-
able to treatment by procedures generally accepted to be scientific.
The notion that anthropology is a humanity as well as a social sci-
ence has been lost (Honigmann 1959b) . If, as is generally assumed,
scientific method is a unitary thing, then anthropology must con-
form as closely as possible to the methods used in those disciplines
that were indisputably in the scientific tradition as currently con-
fer a biennial review, I came across many papers that took a psychological view of cultural
phenomena (Honigmann 1959a). But many of those papers hardly represent what I would call
culture and personality research and are not by anthropologists.

NORTH AMERICA 127

ceived. To the extent that culture and personaUty could not be re-
directed along new lines, it lost ground.

Recently I listened to a discussion concerning two variant inter-
pretations of the same data from an American Indian community.
The anthropologists agreed on the facts, but they disagreed when
it came to ascertaining their psychological meaning for the Indians.
For one thing, the researchers probably did not really know the
people very well and hence were handicapped for interpreting
their data. They also lacked a sufficiently powerful theory in which
they believed enough to apply it to their facts. But more pertinent
is the question they faced of proving any one interpretation to be
objectively more true than the other. How could any reconciliation
between interpretations be verified empirically? This is an unhappy
state of affairs for men to contemplate who wish to model them-
selves after campus colleagues who follow more rigorous methods.
(Note that this particular difficulty would not have arisen had the
psychologically minded ethnologists retained faith in one theory, say
psychoanalysis. Their deductions would have been guided by psy-
choanalytical principles. Logical reasoning would have brought
back someone who went beyond the basic postulates of the theory.
The fact that the insights obtained by psychoanalytical formula-
tions could not be checked operationally would also not have been
unduly distressing. But, very likely, back in the twenties and
thirties it was these very characteristics of psychoanalytical psy-
chology that made anthropologists decide against following Freud
exclusively!)

One might properly argue that somebody who really wishes to
study personality as it develops and functions in one set of cultural
conditions or another doesn't care what his work is called — whether
science, history, or art. Furthermore, according to some philoso-
phers, no hard and fast line separates science from other modes of
understanding (Polanyi 1958). Everybody agrees that experimen-
tation is not the essence of science. Nor is the central criterion even
prediction — what can the paleontologist predict? The field worker
in anthropology is mainly concerned with communicating his un-
derstanding of the way of life he researches. His work, then, should
be appraised by how meaningful is the understanding which it offers
and what it contributes to the wider understanding of man. I have
long thought that novels are among the most perceptive means of
gaining insight into ways of life that a skillful or sensitive writer
authentically grasps.

128 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Rival interpretations of personality by men who really know
their people might receive the same kind of attention that is ac-
corded to rival views of events in history. The final resolution of
the dispute would have to wait until fresh data are accumulated,
new field work is undertaken, or a better theory comes to hand. I
am convinced that we need more perceptive studies of persons whose
behavior is standardized in different fashions. To obtain such in-
formation, we need sensitive students willing to immerse themselves
thoroughly in exotic ways of life and, by whatever means recom-
mend themselves, come to know the covert and overt sides of the
people they study. The care, thoroughness, authenticity, level of
interpretation, and the underlying degree of understanding which
such studies will achieve will greatly vary from one case to another,
but they should not be judged by standards foreign to the problem
in hand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aberlf, D. F.

1954 Comments on Southwestern studies of culture and personality, by
Clyde Kluckhohn. American Anthropologist 56:697-700.

Albert, E. M.

1956 The classification of values: a method and illustration. American
Anthropologist 58:221-248.

Barnouw, V.

1950 Acculturation and personality among the Wisconsin Chippewa. Mem-
oirs of the American Anthropological Association No. 72.
Barry, H., Ill, I. L. Child, and M. K. Bacon

1959 Relation of child training to subsistence economy. American Anthro-
pologist 61:5 1—63.

Benedict, R.

1928 Psychological types in the cultures of the southwest. Proceedings of the

International Congress of Americanists 23:572-581.
1932 Configurations of culture in North America. American Anthropologist

34:1-27.
1934 Patterns of culture. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.

Bennett, J.

1946 The interpretation of Pueblo culture: a question of values. Southwest-
ern Journal of Anthropology 2:361-374.

BiLLiG, O., J. GiLLiN, and W. Davidson

1947-48 Aspects of personality and culture in a Guatemalan community: ethno-
logical and Rorschach approaches. Journal of PersonaUty 16:153-187,
326-368.

NORTH AMERICA 129

Burt, Cyril

1957 The impact of psychology upon education. In The yearbook of educa-
tion 1957. London, Evans Brothers Ltd.

Caudill, W. a.

1949 Psychological characteristics of acculturated Wisconsin Ojibwa chil-
dren. American Anthropologist 5 1 :409— 427.

Chapin, F. S.

1947 Experimental designs in sociological research. New York, Harper &
Bros.
Child, L L., T. Storm, and J. Veroff

1958 Achievement themes in folk tales related to sociaUzation practice. In
Motives in fantasy, action, and society, J. W. Atkinson, ed. Princeton,
D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc.

Devereux, G.

195 I Reality and dream: psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. New York, Inter-
national Universities Press.
Du Bois, C.

1944 The people of Alor. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Dunn, H. L.

1959 What high-level wellness means. Canadian Journal of Public Health
50:447-457.

Dyk, W.

1938 Son of Old Man Hat. New York, Harcourt Brace & Co.
Erikson, E. H.

1939 Observations on Sioux education. Journal of Psychology 7:101—156.
Farber, M. L.

1950 The problem of national character: a methodological analysis. Journal
of Psychology 30:307—316.

Ferguson, F.

i960 Eskimo personality in the light of nine Rorschachs from Great Whale
River Eskimo. Research Previews (Institute for Research in Social
Science, University of North Carolina) 8, No. 1:8-13.
Ford, C. S.

194 1 Smoke from their fires. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Friedl, E.

1956 Persistence in Chippewa culture and personality. American Anthro-
pologist 58:814-825.

GiLLIN, J.

1951 The culture of security in San Carlos. Middle American Research In-
stitute, Publication 16.

Gladwin, T.

1957 Personality structure in the Plains. Anthropological Quarterly 30:111—
124.

GOLDFRANK, E. S.

1943 Historic change and social character: a study of the Teton Dakota.
American Anthropologist 45:67-83.

130 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

1945 Socialization, personality, and the structure of the Pueblo society (with
particular reference to Hopi and Zuni). American Anthropologist 47:
516-539.

Goldman, I.

1950 Psychiatric interpretation of Russian history: a reply to Geoffrey Gorer.
The American Slavic and East European Review 9:151-161.

GULICK, J.

i960 Cherokees at the crossroads. Chapel Hill, Institute for Research in
Social Science, University of North Carolina.

Hallowell, a. I.

1936 Psychic stresses and cultural patterns. American Journal of Psychiatry.
92:1291—1310.

1937 Temporal orientation in western civilization and in a preliterate society.
American Anthropologist 39:647-670.

1942 Acculturation processes and personality changes as indicated by the
Rorschach technique. Rorschach Research Exchange 6:42—50.

1946 Some psychological characteristics of the northeastern Indiana. In Man
in northeastern North America, F. Johnson, ed. Papers of the Robert S.
Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, 3 .

195 1 The use of projective techniques in the study of the socio-psychological
aspects of acculturation. Journal of Projective Techniques 15:27-44.

1952 Ojibwa personality and acculturation. In Acculturation in the Amer-
icas, proceedings and selected papers of the XXIXth International Con-
gress of Americanists, Sol Tax, ed. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press.

Haring, D. G. (ed.)

1948 Personal character and cultural milieu. Syracuse, University of Syracuse
Press.

Havighurst, R. J. and B. L. Neugarten

1955 American Indian and white children: a sociopsychological investiga-
tion. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Holmberg, a. R.

1950 Nomads of the long bow. The Siriono of Eastern Boliva. Smithsonian
Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, Publication No. 10.

HONIGMANN, J.

1949 Culture and ethos of Kaska society. Yale University Publications in
Anthropology, No. 40.

1954 Culture and personality. New York, Harper & Bros.

1959a Psychocultural studies. In Biennial Review of Anthropology 1959, B.

Siegel, ed. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
1959b The world of man. New York, Harper & Bros.

HONIGMANN, J. J. and I. HONIGMANN

1959 Notes on Great Whale River ethos. Anthropologica n.s. i : ro6-i 21.

HORNEY, K.

1939 New ways in psychoanalysis. New York, "W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.
1945 Our inner conflicts. New York, "W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

NORTH AMERICA 131

Inkfxes, a. and D. J. Levinson

1954 National character: the study of modal personality and sociocultural
systems. In Handbook of social psychology, Gardner Lindzey, ed. Two
volumes. Cambridge, Mass., Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Joseph, A., R. B. Spicer, and J. Chesky

1949 The desert people: a study of the Papago Indians of southern Arizona.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Kaplan, B.

1954 A study of Rorschach responses in four cultures. Papers of the Peabody
Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 42, No. 2.
Kardiner, a.

1939 The individual and his society. New York, Columbia University Press.
1945 The psychological frontiers of society. New York, Columbia University
Press.

Kluback, W.

1956 William Dilthey's philosophy of history. New York, Columbia Univer-
sity Press.

Kluckhohn, C.

1944 The influence of psychiatry on anthropology in America during the
last 100 years. In One hundred years of American psychiatry, J. K. Hall,
G. Zilboorg, H. A. Bunker, eds. New York, Columbia University Press.

1945 The personal document In anthropological science. In The use of per-
sonal documents In history, anthropology and sociology, L. Gottschalk,
C. Kkickhohn, and R. Angell, eds. Social Science Research Council
Bulletin 53.

195 1 A comparative study of values in five cultures, hi Navaho veterans: a
study of changing values, by E. Z. Vogt. Papers of the Peabody Museum
of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 41, No. i.

1954 Southwestern studies of culture and personality. American Anthro-
pologist 56:685—697.

Kluckhohn, C. and D. Leighton

1946 The Navaho. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Kluckhohn, C. and H. A. Murray (eds.)

1948 Personality in nature, society, and culture. New York, Henry A. Knopf.

Kluckhohn, F.

1950 Dominant and substitute profiles of cultural orientations. Social Forces
28:376-393.

Kroeber, a. L.

19 1 5 Eighteen professions. American Anthropologist 17:283-288.

1935 History and science in anthropology. American Anthropologist 37:
539-569.

1936 So-called social science. Journal of Social Philosophy 1:317-340.

Landes, R.

1937 The personality of the Ojibwa. Character and Personality 6:51-60.
1938a The abnormal among the Ojibwa Indians. Journal of Abnormal and

Social Psychology 33:14-33.

132 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

1938b The Ojibwa woman. Columbia University Publications in Anthro-
pology, No. 31.
Lantis, M.

1953 Nunivak Eskimo personality as revealed in the mythology. Anthro-
pological papers of the University of Alaska 2:109-174.
1959 Alaskan Eskimo cultural values. Polar Notes 1:35-48.
Leighton, A. H. and D. C. Leighton

1949 Gregorio, The hand-trembler: a psychobiological personality study of a
Navaho Indian. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archae-
ology and Ethnology, Vol. 40, No. i.

Leighton, D. C. and C. Kluckhohn

1947 Children of the people. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Lewis, Oscar

195 1 Life in a Mexican village: Tepoztlan restudied. Urbana, University of

Illinois Press.
1959 Five families: Mexican case studies in the culture of poverty. New
York, Basic Books, Inc.

Li An-Che

1937 Zuni: some observations and queries. American Anthropologist 39:
62-76.
LiNDESMiTH, A. R. and A. L. Strauss

1950 Critique of culture-personality writings. American Sociological Review
15:587-600.

Macgregor, G.

1946 Warriors without weapons. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Maslow, a. H.

1950 Self -actualizing people: a study of psychological health. Personality
Symposium 1:11—34.
Mead, M.

1928 Coming of age in Samoa. New York, William Morrow & Co.

1956 New lives for old. New York, William Morrow & Co.

1959 An anthropologist at work: writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston, Hough-
ton Mifflin,
Mead, M. and M. Wolfenstein (eds.)

1955 Childhood in contemporary cultures. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press.
Meggers, Betty J.

1946 Recent trends in American ethnology. American Anthropologist 48:
176-214.
Nadel, S. F.

1937 The typological approach to culture. Character and Personality 5:267-
284.

1957 Malinowski on magic and religion. In Man and culture, Raymond Firth,
ed. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Northrop, F. S. C.

1946 The meeting of east and west. New York, The Macmillan Co.

NORTH AMERICA 13 3

Orlansky, H.

1949 Infant care and personality. Psychological Bulletin 46:1—48.
PoLANYi, Michael

1958 Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, a. R.

1930—31 The social organization of Australian tribes. Oceania 1:34—63, 206—246,
322-341, 426-456.

Radin, p.

1920 The autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. University of California
Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 16:381—473.

ROHEIM, G.

1950 Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York, International Univer-
sities Press.

Sapir, E.

1924 Culture, genuine and spurious. American Journal of Sociology 29:

401-429.
1932 Cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Journal of Abnormal and

Social Psychology 27:229—242.

Simmons, L. (ed.)

1942 Sun Chief, the autobiography of a Hopi Indian. New Haven, Yale
University Press.
Spengler, O.

1926 The decline of the west. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Spindler, G. D.

1952 Personality and peyotism in Menomini Indian acculturation. Psychiatry

15:15 I— 160.
1955 Sociocultural and psychological processes in Menomini acculturation.
University of California Publications in Culture and Society, No. 5.

Spindler, G. D. and L. S. Spindler

1957 American Indian personality types and their sociocultural roots. Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 311: 147—157.

Spiro, Melford and R. G. D'Andrade

1958 A cross-cultural study of some supernatural beliefs. American Anthro-
pologist 60:456—466.

Thompson, L.

1948 Attitudes and acculturation. American Anthropologist 50:200—215.
1950 Culture in crisis. New York, Harper & Bros.

195 I Personality and government. Mexico, D. F., Ediciones del Instituto In-
digenista Interamericano.

Thompson, L. and A. Joseph

1944 The Hopi way. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Tschopik, H., Jr.

195 I The Aymara of Chucuito, Peru. i. Magic. Anthropological Papers of
the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 44, pt. 2.

134 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Underwood, F. and I. Honigmann

1947 A comparison of socialization and personality in two simple societies.
American Anthropologist 49:557—577.
VOGET, F. W.

1956 The American Indian in transition: reformation and accommodation.
American Anthropologist 58:249-263.
VOGT, E. 2.

195 1 Navaho veterans: a study of changing values. Papers of the Peabody
Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 41, No. i.

Wallace, A. F. C.

1952 The modal personality structure of the Tuscarora Indians, as revealed
by the Rorschach test. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 150.

1955 Stress, personality change, and cultural creativity. Paper read at meeting
of the American Anthropological Association, Nov. 17, 1955. Mimeo-
graphed.

1956 Revitalization movements: some theoretical considerations for their
comparative study. American Anthropologist 58:264-281.

1959 The institutionaUzation of cathartic and control strategies in Iroquois
rehgious psychotherapy. In Culture and mental health, M. K. Opler, ed.
New York, The Macmillan Co.
Whiting, J. W. M. and I. L. Child

1953 Child training and personality: a cross-cultural study. New Haven,
Yale University Press.

i

chapter 5

OCEANIA

THOMAS GLADWIN

National Institute of Meiital Health

Introduction

Much of Oceania is comprised of islands, islands which are charac-
teristically fairly small, tropical, and separated from adjacent lands
by open ocean, sometimes by vast stretches of ocean. Obvious ex-
ceptions to this generalization are the great land mass of Australia
and the large islands of New Guinea and New Zealand. The pre-
ponderance of smallish tropical islands has inevitably created both
limitations and challenges to the pursuit of anthropological studies
in the area.

The most severe limitation is set by the thinness of the archaeologi-
cal record, at least as it has been revealed thus far. In part at least
this must be ascribed to the high rates of oxidation and biotic decay
characteristic of warm climates, heavy rainfall, and proximity to
the sea. Even artifacts tough enough to survive such conditions are
likely to find the ground washed away beneath them. Although
some recent archaeological work has been more encouraging,
Oceania is far from having the solid foundation of prehistory found
elsewhere in the world. Added to this is a short and very fragmen-
tary historical record. The result is a focus primarily on the here
and now, on the present characteristics of populations and cultures
rather than on their antecedents.

Granting an inadequate or nonexistent developmental perspec-
tive, the islands of the Pacific frequently provide the challenge of a
nearly ideal research setting. The physical anthropologist can find
a relatively stable, isolated, and homogeneous breeding population
on which to base his studies. Cultural homogeneity within an island
can bring similar clarity to the study of social structure and cul-
tural dynamics. Furthermore, the small size and isolation of many

135

136 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

island communities permit the detailed description of the totality of
a finite population. Within a setting of this sort it is often possible
to define and examine all of the interpersonal and intergroup rela-
tionships which determine the relevant social environment of an in-
dividual.

Finally, if one disregards the large land masses of New Zealand,
Australia, and New Guinea, the ecology and basic economy of the
smaller islands of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia have many
common, almost uniform, attributes. They are tropical, with abun-
dant rainfall at least part of the year, and are favored with trade
winds. In all three areas there are islands which are clustered to-
gether, and some which are widely scattered and isolated. There are
flat, sandy coral islands on atolls ("low" islands) and steeper,
usually larger, volcanic ("high") islands. On all of them the soil is
relatively poor, favoring principal reliance on root and tree crops,
and discouraging domestication of animals for meat. This leaves the
ocean as a primary source of protein. Metal is generally lacking.
This is only a partial list, which could be extended to include tech-
nology, health conditions, transportation, etc. On this common
ecological base one finds a wide range of social and political organi-
zations, value systems, and personality types. A special opportunity
thus exists for comparisons between one group and another with a
number of variables fairly well controlled.

A particularly fruitful comparison might be made with respect
to the response of these various island peoples to foreign, especially
European, contact. The circumstances of this contact were again
rather uniform. After the early explorers came traders and mis-
sionaries, and in many areas whaling ships from New England seek-
ing provisions and release from shipboard life. The traders were fol-
lowed by more stable commercial arrangements, especially the
exploitation of coconut and other crops through foreign-operated
plantations, or through resident traders. Despite the relative simi-
larity of this experience, the response to it appears to have been
markedly different. Here the differences can be mentioned in only
a general and impressionistic way.

The Micronesians, with few exceptions, retained their core cul-
ture— especially their social organization, values, and economy —
while adopting a wide array of superficial technological changes. In
Polynesia the changes were more sweeping, often devastating. This
was especially true on the larger island groups such as Hawaii, Ta-
hiti, or the Marquesas. Even on the smaller atolls, foreigners — mis-

OCEANIA 137

sionaries, traders, or administrators — were granted more leadership,
and therefore more opportunity to effect pervasive changes in val-
ues, in political structure, and in other ways. In Melanesia there
was frequently hostility, suspicion, and bloodshed, with minimal
acceptance of foreign leadership except when imposed by force.
Yet Melanesia has also experienced the sweeping fantasy of embrac-
ing foreign culture, or at least material culture, in the cargo cults.
These are bizarre outbursts in which a whole population may, for
example, destroy its possessions and await a ship full of foreign
goods — a ship which of course never comes.

Even though these characterizations are obviously overgeneral-
ized, it is clear that there were striking differences in response. There
were of course special factors. Polynesian girls looked especially
attractive to American men. Melanesia was a source of slave labor
for "blackbirders." And so on. But these factors do not obscure the
fact that the people themselves responded differently. Personality
differences must have played a major role. Conversely, the psycho-
logical impact of these changes must have varied widely. Oceania is
therefore an unusually inviting area in which to make systematic,
comparative studies of culture change, including its psychological
dimensions. Culture change, however, is only one of many ways in
which the special character of this area lends itself to research, and
particularly to research in culture and personality.

In evaluating the work that has been done to date, we must bear
these conditions in mind. It is thus particularly legitimate to ask
what real contributions to our understanding of personality (as
well as of culture) have emerged from Oceania. After reviewing
what has been done, I will return to this question in the assessment.

The review of the literature which follows will be concerned with
noting the landmarks. It is not in any sense an encyclopaedic inven-
tory of all work done thus far. Nor does the supporting bibliog-
raphy pretend to exhaust the literature.^ In particular, I will not
dwell upon those studies which, while developing data potentially
useful for the elucidation of personality dynamics, have not been
developed in this way either by the authors or by others. The mono-
graph of the Berndts ( 195 1 ) on sexual behavior in Western Arn-

^I have been greatly aided by a quite complete bibliography through 1954 prepared by the
University of Hawaii Pacific Islands Studies Committee (Vinacke ei al. 1955). To the serious
student of the area this three-part bibliography can be invaluable. Taylor's (195 1) Pacific
bibliography is a standard reference; at the present writing an expanded and updated edition is in
preparation. The Journal de la Societe des Oceanisfes, published by the Musce de I'Homme in
Paris, provides an annual bibliographic review of Oceania.

13 8 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

hem Land or Warner's Black Civilization (1937) would be cases
in point.

Geographically and culturally I include work done in Australia,
New Guinea, and the broad expanses of Melanesia, Polynesia, and
Micronesia. Among these, Micronesia is a late entrant. During the
formative years of culture and personality research, Micronesia was
under the exclusive political control of Japan. The few Japanese
anthropologists who worked in these islands were seemingly not
interested in this new field of study, so the first culture and per-
sonality studies began in Micronesia only after the Second World
War.

Obviously, inclusion in this survey is based on the locus of field
work, not on the nationality of the researcher. With the exception
of Ernest Beaglehole of Victoria University and his students, and
possibly of Stanley Porteus of the University of Hawaii, none of the
researchers whom I discuss are residents of the area under consider-
ation. Reo Fortune is a New Zealander, but no longer lives there.

Chronological Review and Evaluation

Oceania can claim a twenty-year beat on the rest of the world.
It was the locus of the first systematic field work among non-Euro-
pean peoples designed to enrich the interpretation of ethnology by
the insights of psychology. This comprised one of the explicitly
stated aims of A. C. Haddon in organizing the Cambridge Anthro-
pological Expedition to the Torres Straits. The published report
(Myers and McDougall 1903) deals almost entirely with the sen-
sory modalities and would not now be included within the purvey
of culture and personality as the field has evolved. But its undeniable
historical significance rests on the fact that Haddon sought, as
collaborators for Rivers (who was himself trained in psychophysi-
ology) and Seligman, two psychologists who were felt to be com-
petent in the most fruitful procedures of the scientific psychology
of the day. However, at the time the Torres Straits Expedition was
in the field in 1898, Sigmund Freud was at work on the manuscript
of The Interpretation of Dreams. It is an historical fact, but not
necessarily a stroke of undiluted good fortune, that the study of
culture and personality has come to depend almost exclusively upon
the line of inquiry being initiated sixty years ago by Freud rather
than that envisioned by Haddon.

Certainly considerable credit for determining this trend is due to
Geza Roheim, the most orthodox and loyal of Freudian psycho-

OCEANIA 139

analysts to concern himself with non-European personality. As
early as 1925 he published a book entitled Atisfralian Toteinisvi:
a Vsycho-analyticd Study in Anthropology. Some years earlier, in
191 3, Freud had completed his first major work on religion, Totem
and Taboo. This drew heavily upon the secondhand ethnographic
data assembled by Frazer, Robertson Smith, and others, especially
as these pertained to Australia. Among other things, Freud assumed
that Oedipal conflicts were shared by all peoples. These conflicts
had their beginnings in primitive family groups wherein at inter-
vals the sons banded together to kill and sacrifically eat their father.
The tabooed totem animal survives as a substitute for the father.
In the literature of the day both totemism and primitiveness were
emphasized as characteristic of the Australian aborigines, hence
Roheim's early interest in Australia. After publishing the book
noted above, which was based on published accounts, Roheim
set out to see for himself. He undertook field studies in several parts
of the world (Roheim, 1932) , but spent the longest time with the
Aranda of Central Australia. He explored at first hand the symbolic
residue of the primal feast and the conflicts arising from living in a
primitive horde dominated by an older male. Roheim deserves credit
for being willing to test his beliefs under rugged field conditions, not
a fashionable pastime in his day. Furthermore, because Malinowski
had denied the existence of Oedipal conflicts in matrilineal societies
(see below) , Roheim also went to matrilineal Normanby Island near
Malinowski's Trobriands, gathering evidence to refute Malinowski
{cf. Roheim 1950). For all his enthusiasm, Roheim's work is no
longer cited with any frequency by anthropologists. He was willing
to go so far in attributing symbolic and historical significance to
cultural acts that many anthropologists find it difficult to take his
work seriously, and therefore tend to dismiss his conclusions (e.g.,
Lessa 1956) . But the lack of continuing attention to Roheim's pub-
lished writings is deceptive. His early work was widely read and
initiated or expanded an interest in psychoanalysis in many of the
influential pioneers in the field of culture and personality. Among
others, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Clyde Kluckhohn have
acknowledged Roheim's important impact on their thinking.
Roheim's contribution to the field, then, is paradoxical: practically
no one accepts his conclusions, but their stimulating effect was
nevertheless very great.

Roheim also undoubtedly provided part of the impetus for the
writing of the first monograph which undertook systematically to

140 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

examine a hypothesis of personahty dynamics in the Hght of sohd
ethnographic data, and in accordance with acceptable anthropo-
logical standards of interpretation. This was Bronislaw Malinow-
ski's Sex and Repression in Savage Society ( 1927) . Malinowski drew
upon his extensive data from the Trobriand Islands to re-examine
some aspects of Totem and Taboo. As noted above, he rejected the
universality of the father-son Oedipal conflict, essentially on the
ground that, in the Trobriands at least, discipline is in the hands of
the mother's brother and not the father. He also discussed Freud's
more anthropologically acceptable development of the psychologi-
cal and social dynamics which support exogamy and the incest ta-
boo. Roheim was undoubtedly justified in criticizing Malinowski
for an incomplete understanding of Freud's writings. Malinowski
was unfortunately the first of many anthropologists who have over
the years criticized psychoanalytic theory on the basis of an inade-
quate and watered-down understanding of its implications (r/. La
Barre 1958) . But Malinowski's excursion into psychoanalytic the-
ory nonetheless established a precedent for anthropologists. It was,
in effect, the first anthropologically "respectable" substantive study
in culture and personality.

Malinowski's encyclopaedic and highly literate ethnographic
accounts of the Trobriander Islanders (1922, 1929, 1935) have also
made important contributions to culture and personality through
their use by others in developing new lines of analysis. As we shall
note later, Kardiner started with these materials (as summarized by
Du Bois) in developing his particular approach (Kardiner 1939) .
More recently Dorothy Lee (1950) made a major contribution to
cognitive theory and psycholinguistics in her paper on "Lineal and
Nonlineal Codifications of Reality," based entirely on Malinowski's
published accounts of the Trobriands.

Meanwhile, Margaret Mead had gone to Samoa and in 1928 pub-
lished on the basis of this field work the first of a series of studies
of personality development and integration in Oceania. This was
followed by a comparable monograph on Manus in 1930, and then
in 1935 by a book describing and comparing personality in three
contrasting New Guinea cultures — Arapesh, Mundugumor, and
Tchambuli (the three monographs appeared together in Mead
T 9 3 9 ) . Accompanying her books on personality, in most cases, were
solid ethnographic monographs in the best anthropological tradi-
tion. Concurrently, the impact of Mead's approach was clearly evi-
dent in Reo Fortune's study of Dobu (1932). Bateson's (1958)

OCEANIA 141

book centered upon the naven ceremonies of the latmul, first pub-
Kshed in 1936, marked the beginning of a long collaboration with
Margaret Mead. Especially to be noted is the large-scale 1936-39
team study of Bali (especially Bateson and Mead 1942, and Mead
and Macgregor 195 1 ; a full bibliography is to be found in Mead and
Wolfenstein 1955:95-98). The many publications resulting from
the Balinese research reflect a deliberate attempt to develop more
effective techniques and more rigorous methodologies in support of
the lines of inquiry established in Margaret Mead's earlier work.
Aspects of this research which can only be mentioned here, but
which deserve careful examination, range from systematic exploi-
tation of photographic techniques, through detailed studies of mu-
sic, dance, ritual, and drama, to theoretical analysis of social
equilibrium (Bateson 1949) . Finally, there is the account of Manus
upon her return there in 1953 (Mead 1954b, 1956) when she found
and described an extraordinarily successful cultural transformation
and reintegration. This transformation, as analysed by Theodore
Schwartz (Mead and Schwartz i960), comprises a valuable addi-
tion to the literature on messianic movements; they found a com-
plex interplay between a long-term transformation movement and
a short-term cargo-type cult. These publications, of course, com-
prise only a small fraction of the contributions of Margaret Mead
and her colleagues, and are concerned only with work in the Pacific
area. But they perhaps define the substantive core of her work and
methodological influence. The point of view reflected throughout
her research is effectively (and often charmingly) synthesized in
Male and Female (1949).

A more systematic statement of Mead's methodological premises
is to be found in her retrospective evaluation of the national charac-
ter studies undertaken during World War II (Mead 1953) . Mar-
garet Mead was one of the leaders in this challenging attempt to
construct, at a distance, a basis for predicting the behavior of peoples
of foreign nations (Mead and Metraux 1953). Anthropologists
have always been notably reluctant to make predictions, and now
they were asked to do so by extrapolation from a few informants
and such documentary materials as could be collected. Mead based
her approach upon the conception of the individual in his culture
developed throughout her work and Bateson's in the Pacific: "Any
member of a group, provided that his position is properly specified,
is a perfect sample of the group-wide pattern on which he is acting
as an informant." (Mead 1953:648) The discussion, and sometimes

142 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

controversy, surrounding this methodological approach served to
make explicit many of the assumptions hitherto lying below the
surface of stated culture and personality theory.

Since it would obviously be impossible to summarize separately
even the few works listed above, it is useful to attempt a general
evaluation of her work to provide a basis for comparison with that
of others. Special aspects of some of these studies will be considered
later in this chapter.

In evaluating Margaret Mead's work, one fact scarcely needs
underlining: she is a pioneer. From the outset she did field work in
Oceania explicitly directed toward the understanding of the varie-
ties of human personality and the mode of their development (cf.
Mead 1959). She returned to write monographs of major and lasting
value years before any other anthropologist (excepting her own
colleagues) undertook a comparable task. True, Malinowski's field
work was done during the first World War, and Linton was in the
Marquesas in 1920-22. But the psychological implications of their
data were only elucidated as afterthoughts — useful and intelligent,
but still afterthoughts — many years subsequent to leaving the field. ^

A striking example of Mead's pioneering receives too little atten-
tion, especially in view of the current surge of interest among social
scientists in the work of Piaget. A primary purpose of Mead's 1928-
29 field work in Manus (Mead 1932) was to examine the assump-
tions of Piaget (and of Levy-Bruhl) that the less "logical" (by
European standards) thought of children was a function of their
immaturity, and that the thought processes of primitive people
were analogous to those of children in our society. Using a variety
of ingenious psychological measures, she found that Manus children
actually analysed situations in a far more matter-of-fact ("logi-
cal") fashion than characterized the animistic reasoning of their

^ Margaret Mead is also an effective and dedicated crusader in the cause of bringing anthro-
pological insights to bear on the problems of our society. She has translated and focused
anthropological material upon education, mental health, child development, technical assist-
ance, and a variety of other fields. There are scores of journals in other professional and popular
fields to which she has been the first anthropological contributor. Furthermore, her contribution
has frequently had a clearly discernable effect on the thinking in that profession. Bridging the
gap between anthropology and a variety of other fields of endeavor often requires a daring leap,
a leap which some anthropologists feel frequently ends with an agonizing wrench. Without
laboring this point, I will only suggest that when Margaret Mead is, for example, talking to
educators she is concerned with improving and enriching our schools, not with meeting the
canons of anthropological rigor. Her contributions to the anthropological literature provide a
quite ample basis for judgment of her work as an anthropologist, and I will confine myself to
these. But I offer my personal cheers to a person willing to balance research with an equal
commitment to translating the insights so derived into the language and problems of any ac-
tivity concerned with helping mankind.

OCEANIA 143

elders. She offered several possible explanations and then arrived at
the well documented conclusion that, Piaget and Levy-Bruhl to the
contrary, "Animistic thought cannot be explained in terms of in-
tellectual immaturity."

Mead's work in culture and personality rests upon the same con-
ceptual underpinnings of psychodynamics which are common to
other workers in the field. Her interest in the possibilities of using
this body of theory in anthropological research was first stimulated
in the early 1920's by the writings of contemporary psychoanalysts.
As her own theoretical position was developing she worked inten-
sively, among others, with Erik Erikson, Lawrence K. Frank, Kurt
Lewin, John Dollard, and Edward Sapir. Her approach is perhaps
most differentiated by the biological and social matrix within which
she sees these forces operating. She is concerned with the biological
endowment and biological changes which shape a person's being,
with the total social environment which surrounds the growing
child and the adult, with how the child perceives and interprets this
environment, with how the environment is interpreted, explicitly
and implicitly, to the child, and with those figures in the social en-
vironment who are the agents of interpretation and learning. The
structure of a particular society not only channels all relationships
and activities within it, but also determines the manner in which an
individual lives and learns his life. In this approach she hews more
closely than many to a view of socialization and personality devel-
opment as a process of enculturation, of the gradual learning of the
integrated totality of attitudes and feelings and behaviors which
comprise the culture. Inherent in this is a concern with the process
and nature of learning, and with the consistency between the pat-
terns of experience in a variety of learning situations (Mead 1953 ) .
Related also to this is the intriguing methodological exercise of Mead
and Macgregor ( 195 1 ) in their photographic analysis of the learn-
ing by Balinese children of a single facet of behavior, patterns of
motor activity. In addition to its methodological emphasis, this
monograph examines the psychoanalytic concept of body zones.
Analytic theory posits successive concern of the individual with
the oral, anal, and genital zones. Mead and Macgregor accept this
formulation for our culture. The Balinese, however, have a greater
focus on the total body, and in particular on the visual and tactile
stimulus of the skin. This question is thus raised of how other cul-
tures shape the interpretation by each individual of his own bio-
logically given body.

144 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

In this monograph Mead also succinctly characterizes her ap-
proach to the study of socialization: "Cultural analysis of the child-
rearing process consists in an attempt to identify those sequences
in child-other behavior which carry the greatest communication
weight and so are crucial for the development of each culturally
regular character structure" (Mead and Macgregor 1951:27).
Communication is a two-way process, involving interaction in both
directions. Mead believes the interactive nature of socialization rep-
resents one of the major new concepts which anthropology brought
to the study of personality:

From the cultural anthropologist has come the recognition that cultural forms
emerge from other cultural forms. Stated genetically, this means that parents and
children are a continuously interactive system, not a one-way system in which the
child (impelled upward by a set of specific drives) simply meets a series of ob-
stacles (in the form of institutions) that, if it is sufficiently mutilated by them,
it will then proceed to alter. (Mead and Metraux 1953:39)

Mead's view of socialization studies, her own as well as others', is
well summarized in her chapter in the Manual of Child Psychology
(Mead 1954a) .

Inherent also in Mead's approach is the premise that learning is
continuous. A person who is growing old, for example, changes in
behavior not only because of the physiological changes taking place
within him, but also because he learns to behave in the way the cul-
ture expects old people to behave. She shares the common focus on
childhood as the time in which the major dimensions of personality
are established, but her scheme equally permits substantial changes
in these constellations through the years which follow.

Mead's analytic and descriptive procedure has sometimes been
referred to as "configurational," thereby implicitly identifying her
work with that of Ruth Benedict. Benedict and Mead were close
collaborators, and Benedict often followed an approach very close
to that of Mead, as in her notable paper on "Continuities and Dis-
continuities in Cultural Conditioning" (Benedict 1938) . But Mead
is not typically concerned with delineating the broad themes of a
culture as exemplified in Benedict's P^/Zer//^ 0/ CzJ/7/r^ (1934) , the
epitome of configurationalism. Mead does point up the consistency
in feeling tone and attitude from one nexus of interpersonal be-
havior to another, where such consistency is discernable, but she
makes no assumption that a common theme must necessarily be
sought in all important arenas of action in a culture. Benedict's ap-
proach is global and open-ended. Mead, on the other hand, con-

OCEANIA 145

stantly reverts back to the social system and structure, and to the
biological determinants of behavior.

The distinctive significance of Margaret Mead's work, outside of
its pioneering nature and the substantive contributions to knowl-
edge it represents, can best be considered after reviewing the ap-
proaches developed by later workers in the culture and personality
field.

Another "first" in the study of personality falls in the still largely
neglected area of intelligence and cognition. In 1929 Stanley D.
Porteus, a clinical psychologist trained in Australia but with most
of his professional career in the United States, undertook field work
with the Arunta in Central Australia, and more limited work in
Northwest Australia (Porteus 193 i). He administered, primarily
to children, a variety of intelligence and performance tests, prin-
cipal among these being his own Maze Test. This test, as its name im-
plies, consists of a series of mazes on paper which the subject is asked
to trace. Porteus later did comparable work among the Bushmen
of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa (Porteus 1937), and also
utilized the test extensively in obtaining comparative data among
the various ethnic groups available to him at the University of
Hawaii. Of all the tests of mental ability thus far generally available
for use in cross-cultural settings, there is some reason to feel that
the Porteus Maze is the "fairest" in the sense that it appears to be the
least strange and confusing to non-Europeans (r/. Masland, Sara-
son, and Gladwin 1958:271-72) .

As a result of this work Porteus was able to formulate a formida-
ble list of cautions to be observed by anyone attempting cross-
cultural intelligence measurement, cautions which, despite later
elaboration by Klineberg and others, were more often than not
ignored in the years to follow. He also devoted considerable thought
to the nature of mental ability and its measurement. He concluded
that any test designed to measure the kinds of mental ability valued
in our culture would fail to tap those intellectual resources which
would be useful to a person in another culture where the approach
to thinking and problem solving might take different directions.
This applies as much to the Maze as to any other test. However, he
also made an important but usually overlooked distinction with
respect to the purposes of measurement: if one is concerned with
making comparisons between the essential intelligence of two
groups in an absolute sense, a test built around the concepts of think-
ing taught in one culture cannot be used validly in another. But if

146 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

one is interested in identifying those persons in another culture with
the greatest potential for being trained to think our way, as for ex-
ample in recruiting for schooling, a test devised for our culture can
be valid. Furthermore, in the latter context, it becomes crucial to
minimize the degree of strangeness which the test and the testing
situation evoke among people who are unfamiliar both with the ma-
terials used and with the whole idea of a test. The Porteus Maze per-
haps best meets this latter criterion. It would appear useful for
anthropologists interested in cognitive development to explore
whether this is really so, and if it is to develop further the poten-
tialities of this approach. Thus far, however, the Maze has received
only passing attention from anthropologists.

As noted earlier, two monographs appeared in the early 1930's
which reflected Margaret Mead's influence, but which were also of
major importance in their own right. One was Reo Fortune's Sor-
cerers of Dobu ( 1932) . Ddbu is a Melanesian island near Malinow-
ski's Trobriands. The society is so riven with hostility and suspicion
that Ruth Benedict labeled it "paranoid." Fortune was trained as a
psychologist and strongly influenced by Freud and W. H. R. Rivers,
especially the latter's Conflict: and Dream ( 1923 ) . Before going to
Dobu, Fortune himself had published a book on dream interpreta-
tion. The Mind in Sleep ( 1927) . In spite of this background, For-
tune did not systematically address himself to personality as such,
although he did pay consistent attention to psychologically relevant
aspects of Dobuan culture. His psychodynamic orientation, how-
ever, made his work highly appropriate for use by Ruth Benedict in
counterpoint to Zuni and Kwakiutl in Patterns of Ctdture. It is, in
fact, in the latter context that Dobu is probably most widely known.

The other monograph is Gregory Bateson's Naven, recently re-
published with additional theoretical discussion (1958). Bateson
did not attempt a full descriptive ethnography, concentrating in-
stead on exploring the implications of several ceremonies, especially
the naven ceremony, among the latmul of New Guinea. His analysis
of these ceremonies led to the formulation of two important new
constructs. One of these, eidos, will be discussed later in this chapter.
The other is schizmogeuesis. Schizmogenesis describes those forces
in society which are centrifugal, that is, which increase the social
distance between individuals or groups. Schizmogenesis can be
complementary, as in dominance-submission relationships, or sym-
metrical, as in rivalry. The centrifugal effect of schizmogenesis de-
rives both from social dynamics and from personality, and both

OCEANIA 147

these factors are culturally determined. Marriage in latmul, for
example, is socially defined as a dominance-submission relationship
(complementary schizmogenesis) . It also brings together two peo-
ple with culturally defined different male and female personalities.
Yet marriages persist (sometimes) in spite of the forces which tend
to drive the couple apart. However, whereas in latmul schizmogenic
forces are strong enough to make any equilibrium precarious, a
comparable analysis of Bah (Bateson 1949) revealed that stabilizing
forces are so effective that schizmogenic sequences can never get
started. Bateson therefore became interested in these counterforces
which keep centrifugal tendencies from going to the extreme of
destroying all social relationships. This led him to seek controlling
stabilizing mechanisms which would return the social system to
balance. In collaboration with a number of persons in various fields
he turned to theories of mechanics, physics, and mathematics con-
cerned with feedback and other mechanisms responsible for main-
taining systems in a steady state of dynamic equilibrium. This field
of inquiry is now referred to as cybernetics. Collaboration with per-
sons in fields so exotic to anthropology seems to have created a lack
of communication between Bateson's thinking and that of all but
a handful of anthropologists. If this is true, it is a matter we should
view with alarm. Anthropologists who are content merely to feed
their cultural data into equations provided for them ready-made by
personality psychologists can remain union members in good stand-
ing, but why should a person who reaches out to develop radically
new equations of human behavior move beyond the pale of anthro-
pological discourse?

In the later 1930's Ernest Beaglehole began a series of field re-
searches in Oceania which he and his students at Victoria Univer-
sity are continuing to the present. Although trained in his native
New Zealand and in London primarily as a psychologist, Beaglehole
studied with Sapir and others at Yale in 193 1-34 and became a well-
qualified anthropologist. He has consistently provided general cul-
tural data quite as full as that adduced by other anthropologists
working in culture and personality. His first field work was accom-
plished prior to his return to the Pacific, with the Hopi of Second
Mesa (Beaglehole and Beaglehole 1935). In 1936 he returned to the
Pacific, first to the University of Hawaii and then to Wellington.
He initiated a series of ethnographic and culture and personality
studies in Polynesian societies, including Pukapuka (Beaglehole and
Beaglehole 1938, 1941), native Hawaiians (Beaglehole 1939),

148 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Tonga (Beaglehole 1940, 1941), Maori in New Zealand (Beaglehole
and Beaglehole 1946), and Rarotonga and Aitutaki (Beaglehole
1957) . In addition he has published a number of important theo-
retical papers in culture and personality. He has directed a group of
his students in a large-scale interdisciplinary study of personality
development in Rakau, a Maori community in somewhat different
circumstances than Kowhai, the New Zealand community studied
by the Beagleholes themselves. The Rakau study is notable for its
extensive experimentation with various methodological approaches
to the use of projective tests (Beaglehole and Ritchie 1958) . Five
monographs, in addition to several short papers, have appeared on
the Rakau research thus far: James E. Ritchie 1956, Mulligan 1957,
Jane Ritchie 1957, Earle 1958, and Williams i960.

Beaglehole's contribution to culture and personality in Polynesia
would be notable alone for the sheer quantity of solid, insightful re-
search he has contributed to the literature. He has, in addition, made
a number of clarifying theoretical observations, especially his 1944
paper on "Character Structure." Here he considered the cultural
directives governing interpersonal behavior, and their relationship
to individual personality and behavior deviation, observing that
when a person

... is acting according to the major directives he is really acting according to
a personal organization or structure of his own needs, emotions and thoughts
which is in congruence with the emphases of the major directives themselves. In
other words the person has developed a character structure in response to the
specific pressures of his own culture. When a person acts idiographically, he is de-
termined by a personal variant on this character structure, that is, by the specific
drives of unique personality. A person's integrations can be predicted when it is
known that his personality corresponds rather exactly to the character structure
of the group. One is often at a loss to predict the course of a person's integrations
when how different or how alike his personality is to this character structure is
not known, (p. 148)

This position is in many respects similar to that of Margaret Mead;
in each case attention is directed to the shaping of personality by the
totality of expectations and pressures exerted on and communicated
to a person by other persons sharing the same culture. Explanatory
concepts must then emphasize the conditions under which be-
haviors, attitudes, and feelings are learned by living with others who
already share such attributes. This is in contrast to explanations
which lay stress on individual emotional reactions to a succession of
experiences shared with others in childhood.

Beaglehole has also gone considerably deeper than most psychol-

OCEANIA 149

ogists or anthropologists into questions of cognitive structure raised
by the administration of intelHgence and other tests to non-Euro-
pean people. The following discussion of his findings on Aitutaki
bears on this.

In the cross-cultural measurement of intellectual capacity the psychologists'
skill and techniques do not yet appear to be adequate to measure differences in
quantitative amounts of latent intelligence. But test results are still valuable in
so far as they can be used to indicate the existence of cross-cultural qualitative
differences in intellectual or cognitive organization. Two aspects of Aitutaki cog-
nitive organization seem to be suggested by the present results. The first concerns
the fact that the culture itself does not place value on problem-solving. In its
technological aspect Aitutaki culture is extremely simple. Results are achieved
by the simple application of rules traditionally inherited. This is not to say that
judgment is not required of the successful fisherman or cultivator, but the num-
ber of variables within his control are so few that complicated judgments are
hardly ever required. Success in farming and fishing or even in many aspects of
social life is more likely to be achieved by the application of rules learned by rote,
rather than by the use of principles applied by reason. Cognitive organization,
therefore, is likely to be rather simple in structure and largely formed by exper-
ience derived through the rote learning of repeated lessons. (1957:221)

The second characteristic aspect of Aitutaki thinking is the fact that it func-
tions mainly at a perceptual, rarely at an abstract level, and at a perceptual level
which may be significantly different from the perceptual level thinking of the
Western European. . . . The way perceptual relations are noticed will be a func-
tion of a given culture. How the relations, once noticed, will be abstracted and
generalized about will also depend on the interests and training available in the
culture concerned. The children of Aitutaki have plenty of experience of coloured
objects or variously shaped objects, but their culture teaches them to be interested
mainly in the objects and not in their abstracted shapes, colours and patterns.
Therefore the quality of their thinking will reflect this perceptual orientation,
and imaginative thinking either of a controlled or a free fantasy type will be rare.
This quality of Aitutaki thought again receives confirmation from the limited
use of imagination in Rorschach records. (1957:22 2-2 23)

We shall return to the discussion of cognitive process and problem
solving in the final portion of this chapter. For the present it will
suffice to note that whereas Porteus and others went no farther than
to note factors in the tests which interfere with the performance of
non-Europeans, Beaglehole's discussion goes beyond this to consider
the differences in learning and thinking which actually create dif-
ferences in performance. He is also concerned with how these are
related to the demands of the culture. I would myself raise a further
question, whether the concept of "learning rules by rote" does not
itself imply more European-type verbalization of the learning proc-
ess than in fact obtains. At very least, the descriptive label "rote
learning" is almost certainly an oversimplification.

150 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

In 1939 a book was published which had a large share in crystal-
lizing anthropological thought on the relationship between per-
sonality and culture, and setting the pattern of research for much
of the present generation of students of the field. This was Abram
Kardiner's The Individual and His Society. Ralph Linton was a col-
laborator in Kardiner's seminar at Columbia University at the time
this and subsequent books developed (e.g., Kardiner et al 1945, Du
Bois 1944, West 1945) . He contributed ethnological reports based
on his own earlier field work in the Marquesas in Polynesia, as well
as in Madagascar. The high point of this undertaking was the study
of the village of Atimelang on Alor, an island in eastern Indonesia,
by Cora DuBois (1944). This was the first anthropological field
work explicitly designed to employ an array of personality assess-
ment techniques of psychologists in a non-European culture. These
included the Rorschach, the Porteus Maze, word associations, chil-
dren's drawings, autobiographies, and systematic observation of be-
havior sequences. Most of these techniques had been used singly by
earlier investigators, but their coordinated use was a distinct mile-
stone. The methodological groundwork for the Kardiner-Linton
collaboration was laid in Kardiner's earlier work, including seminars
participated in by Ruth Benedict and Ruth Bunzel. Since prelimi-
nary exploration of the method was worked out with Malinowski's
Trobriand material, and the first full-scale analysis utilized Linton's
Marquesan data, this collaboration can legitimately be claimed as
Oceanic in origin. However, its impact was sufficiently great that
it could not in any event be ignored in any review of the field.

Although clearly psychoanalytic in his orientation, Kardiner rec-
ognized cultural reality and cultural imperatives. Briefly, his analy-
sis began logically with primary institutions, the cultural systems
devoted to meeting essential needs. Adaptation and socialization in
accordance with the dictates of the primary institutions requires the
control of natural impulses. This control leads to frustration, and
then to reactions to frustration, especially the formation of aggres-
sive tendencies. The anxieties so created give rise to secondary insti-
tutions, which are projections of anxiety in a variety of forms. The
working out of anxiety is examined primarily at the level of the ego
and of the superego in people, and through the analysis of projective
systems in culture.

This thumbnail summary obviously does not do justice to Kardi-
ner's conceptual scheme of analysis, but it is sufficient to make clear
the difference in emphasis in his approach from that adopted by

OCEANIA 151

Mead, or by Beaglehole. Both Mead and Beaglehole treat personality
development in the broader framework of the learning of culture
and its appropriate behaviors. Mead adds to this constitutional tem-
perament and the effect of biological changes in maturation. Kardi-
ner, in contrast, accounts for the same phenomena primarily in
terms of psychological response to emotionally important experi-
ences. In Kardiner's scheme the observable congruence in adult per-
sonality necessarily requires the assumption that each individual
who shares a culturally determined socialization experience will
respond to it in substantially the same fashion as his fellows. Similar
anxieties in a large number of people will then give rise to projective
systems which serve to comfort them all. In the final section of this
chapter we will return to an examination of this extremely crucial
assumption.

Without raising questions for the present regarding the useful-
ness of either mode of analysis, the difference between Kardiner's
approach on the one hand, and the emphasis partially shared by
Mead and Beaglehole on the other, can perhaps be exemplified by
parallel examples. Each deals with a culture in which older children
have extensive responsibility for the care of their younger siblings
during the day. The cultural behavior, and the reason for its exist-
ence, are highly comparable in both instances, but the significance
seen in it differs sharply.

First, Kardiner's discussion of Alor {Kzr diner et al. 1945, p. 155) :

In late childhood . . . both sexes are prematurely inducted into the role of taking
care of their younger siblings. The performance of this role is undoubtedly subject
to much variation. In general, however, a child who is robbed of the care essential
for growth and development will not bestow such care upon a younger claimant
without resentment. The result is that the older child, who is now the mother
surrogate, is no more dependable than the mother herself. So the situation for the
younger child is not greatly ameliorated by this institution. On the other hand,
the older sibling is likely to be given attributes which were prevented expression
toward the mother by the strong ambivalence to her. This attitude is furthermore
facilitated by both older and younger sibling having a common claim. This is a
factor which in some would tend to ameliorate the situations of sibling rivalry
and render the hatred toward the parent still greater. In others it might terminate
in intensified sibling rivalry and hatred.

Contrast this with the view of James Ritchie, a student of Beagle-
hole, of essentially the same behavior in Rakau (Ritchie 1956:47) :

The Maori child is typing himself against an older sibling's concept of the
adult world. His perceptions of adult behavior and adult roles are being strained
through the perceptions of his older sib. The latter will only be approximately

152 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

varying in their degree of conformity according to the age, sex, intelUgence and
experience variables of the older child. In this transmission of percepts from a
child's view of the world, the value structure is thrown into sharp relief. The
limited comprehension of the older child requires that the values he sees around
him be used in modifying the behaviour of younger children; he cannot there-
fore make do with a tentative approximation but must resolve his percepts into
a formal structure from which he is able to direct and instruct younger children.
Originality departs. The value-structure sets hard, prematurely, and the child
enters onto a plateau in value-learning. The organized model with which he has
been presented will do for all situations right up to the time he assumes direct
adult behaviour and even then a rigid conformity based on the simplicity and
absolutism of the middle years will be a ready source of certainty in conflicting
or incipiently dangerous social situations.

Although Beaglehole's students, and indeed Beaglehole himself, are
not always consistent in viewing personality as learned rather than
as shaped by emotional response, they do represent a minority who
are carrying forward and developing this approach. As the citation
from Ritchie indicates, they are especially concerned with when,
and from whom, a person learns his culture, his attitudes, and his
ways of behaving.

However, it is the work of Kardiner and his associates which one
finds most commonly cited as methodological models for subsequent
monographs in culture and personality. This is somewhat paradoxi-
cal, because practically no one has been able to make effective use
of his central concept of primary and secondary institutions. Ref-
erence is made instead to some techniques he has employed — espe-
cially the use of projective tests and life histories. This is perhaps the
key to the paradox. Kardiner's books (1939, 1945) and DuBois'
The People of Alor (1944) were available at the time, shortly after
the war, when clinical psychologists in large numbers became inter-
ested in cultural differences. Undoubtedly Kardiner's work spurred
this trend, but its real impetus derived from the participation of
psychologists in wartime intelligence analysis and psychological
warfare. When psychologists then began to collaborate with and
train anthropologists they found Kardiner's tools were the ones
with which they were themselves familiar. Kardiner was not the
first to use any of these tools, but he brought them together in a
persuasive and effective manner.

The psychologists were also comfortable in accepting Kardiner's
assumption of the primacy in personality development of the in-
dividual's intrapsychic integration of emotional experience. Yet
while citing Kardiner to legitimize their focus on emotional deter-

OCEANIA 153

minants of behavior, the psychologists and their anthropological col-
leagues disregarded the one solid tie to culture in Kardiner's scheme
— his concept of primary and secondary institutions. The latter
concept may or may not be useful. But the net effect has been an
uncritical acceptance of both the theory and the tools of clinical
psychology in culture and personality studies, an acceptance more
wholehearted even than Kardiner's (cf. Hsu 1952, 1955).

A final landmark can be identified with the late 1930's, John
W. M. Whiting's Becoming a Kwoma (1941). This arose from a
ferment of interest at Yale in the anthropological implications of
the theories of learning and behavior developed by Clark Hull and
his students {cf. Miller and Dollard 1941) , largely on the basis of
learning experiments with rats. Whiting wrote a standard ethnog-
raphy of the Kwoma, a mountain tribe in the Sepik River area of
New Guinea, with considerable attention devoted to personality
development. He then reanalysed his material in terms of drive, cue,
response, and reward as an exercise in the application of Hull's the-
ory of learning to a set of concrete ethnographic data. A brief exam-
ple will suffice to illustrate the mode of analysis:

In adolescence a boy learns to carry on secret love affairs with adolescent
girls. The drives are sex, sex appetite, and anxiety (sex impells him to seek girls,
sex appetite leads him to choose a girl culturally defined as attractive, and anxiety
impells him to do so secretly) ; the response is the complex of behavior which
leads to and includes sexual intercourse in the bush; the cues are the sight of an
attractive girl, verbal permission from her, the environmental scene which has
both public and secluded spots, etc.; the reward is sexual orgasm, satisfaction of
sex appetite, and anxiety reduction, (pp. 176-177)

Whiting's application of Hull's concepts to the Kwoma was so
literal that it was almost a tour de force. The exercise has therefore
not been repeated by others. But it was an instructive undertaking.
It undoubtedly contributed to the explicit and scrupulous approach
to theory which has since been characteristic of Whiting and his
students. It also served to refine and make more effective the use
of Hull's theory in culture and personality studies.

During the early 1 940's much of Oceania became a theater of war.
Field work necessarily ceased, and most anthropologists were in any
event otherwise engaged. Monographs based on earlier field work
were published during this period, but there was a break in the
continuity of research effort. After the close of World War II,
several people who had worked in Oceania earlier returned to the
field; their work has been discussed above. But a new and more

154 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

numerous generation of anthropologists also came into the area,
among them quite a few interested in culture and personality. Their
work differed in two important respects from that of their prede-
cessors. One was a shift in locale. The majority of new field work
was undertaken in Micronesia. Not only was this an area formerly
almost entirely closed to anthropologists, it was also comprised pri-
marily of the small insular communities characterized in the intro-
duction to this chapter as ideal for some types of research. Many
correspondingly small island societies in Polynesia had of course been
studied in the past, but their cultural transfiguration through for-
eign contact was generally much greater than in Micronesia. Fur-
thermore, a good deal of money became available for field work in
Micronesia, and this had the not surprising effect of tipping the
scales in favor of doing research in this area.

The other difference is more subtle, and hopefully will prove tran-
sitory. This is a sharp reduction in the amount of methodological
pioneering displayed by students of culture and personality in post-
war Oceania. The account thus far has been highlighted by a series
of "firsts," of often rather daring developments of new methods or
new theories which have had a widespread impact on the field. Any
field of study tends to crystallize as it matures, but culture and per-
sonality theory has certainly not yet fully stabilized. New ap-
proaches— the use of projective tests or photographic analysis, for
example — have since the war had their primary development else-
where and then been applied later with variations in Oceania. The
remainder of this account will therefore be more brief and selective
than that which has preceded, confined essentially to major mono-
graphic contributions. Virtually all of these, excepting those already
discussed which stem from the continuing activity of persons al-
ready in the field in the 193 o's, are based on work in Micronesia.

In particular, the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian An-
thropology (CIMA) , sponsored by the Pacific Science Board of the
National Research Council, put a large number of anthropologists
and related scientists into the field in 1947. Among these were four
persons primarily interested in studying culture and personality:
Joseph and Murray on Saipan, Spiro on Ifaluk, and the present
writer on Truk. In addition Lessa, on Ulithi, had a strong secondary
interest in the field.

Alice Joseph and Veronica Murray ( 195 1 ) undertook to see how
much useful information could be derived from a relatively short
study of Chamorro and Carolinian children (and a few adults) on

OCEANIA 155

Saipan. Although both are physicians, Joseph in particular was al-
ready well known to anthropologists for her work with the Hopi.
In this study they placed primary reliance on projective and per-
formance tests administered to one hundred children of each of the
two ethnic groups. The Bender-Gestalt test was interpreted by its
author, Lauretta Bender. The Rorschach, Arthur Point Perform-
ance Scale II, and the Porteus Maze were treated exclusively by the
authors, using conventional scoring and interpretive procedures.
This study did not, therefore, make any new contributions to meth-
odology. Nor can it be said to have validated a field procedure for
economical personality delineation. Numerous subsequent studies
in which ethnographic and projective interpretations have been
compared for cross-validation show the clear danger of accepting
projective test results at face value. In fact, the authors' own find-
ings tend to confirm this danger. They conclude their discussion
of the Rorschach results with the prediction that "either large scale
antisocial behavior with unconscious self-destructive aims or death-
like apathy might be expected from the younger generation."
(p. 202) Bender found that the normal Saipanese Gestalt patterns
corresponded to those found in confusional states elsewhere, and
speculated whether "environmental influences can, in a people with
strong primitive tendencies, produce a state of intellectual perplex-
ity and disorientation which will manifest itself in a disturbance of
Gestalt function similar to that produced by toxic influences."
(p. 142) As of this writing the children so delineated now range in
age from 18 to 30 years and thus far show no external evidence of
crippling psychopathology. Actually, it is quite plausible to con-
clude that differences in perceptual orientation and in style of cog-
nitive thinking were responsible for almost the entirety of the
response patterns the authors found so bizarre. This is not the ap-
propriate place in which to examine the manner in which these
differences can produce such distortion in the particular tests used.
But one would certainly feel more comfortable had the authors
addressed themselves to this possibility rather than accepting at face
value conclusions based on interpretive criteria developed with
European and American subjects.

Melford Spiro's study of Ifaluk was undertaken in conjunction
with the late Edwin Burrows. A number of projective and attitudi-
nal measures were used, coupled with a full ethnography and psy-
chological interpretations of individual and group behavior.
Unfortunately, although Spiro has published a number of important

156 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

theoretical papers based on this work (e.g., 1951, 1959, i960), only
the ethnographic account has been published in full (Burrows and
Spiro 1957) . It is therefore not possible to review the culture and
personality study here.

It should be noted that both Spiro (1959) and Joseph and Mur-
ray in their book contributed substantially to the accounts available
in the literature of psychotic personalities on non-European cul-
tures. Spiro presented three detailed case studies, and Joseph and
Murray ten short summaries, plus brief coverage of disorders of
other kinds.

The Truk study undertaken by myself and Seymour Sarason, a
clinical psychologist (Gladwin and Sarason 1953), was also in-
tended to develop a relatively quick method of personality assess-
ment, aided in this case by the presence of other anthropologists on
the team who covered areas not directly relevant to personality de-
velopment. The method was an evolution of that used by Du Bois
( 1944) on Alor. Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Tests were
used in conjunction with life histories and some dreams of 23 in-
dividuals selected to include both "average" and deviant persons.
These data were combined with a standard ethnography, "Blind"
interpretations of the Rorschachs and TAT's were undertaken by
Sarason, using a clinical mode of interpretation rather than placing
reliance, as is more customary in such studies, on scoring categories
and frequencies. It was felt that a clinical interpretation, while ad-
mittedly more subjective, permitted fuller exploitation of the ma-
terial produced by the subjects. This procedure also made possible
explicit examination of the ways in which culturally determined
perceptual modes affected the response pattern in all subjects, a fac-
tor which is obscured in interpretations based upon the scoring of
responses. The interpretations in this study appeared to have con-
siderable face validity. The methodology used here was perhaps more
rigorous and self-conscious than that usually found in culture and
personality studies, at least those which attempt to collate a variety
of sorts of data. But essentially very little in this monograph is really
new methodologically or theoretically. More recently, I have re-
analysed some of my data in an attempt to define the cognitive
structure of Trukese thinking (Gladwin i960).

William Lessa undertook on Ulithi an even more abbreviated
method than those described above (Lessa and Spiegelman 1954).
He administered the Thematic Apperception Test to 99 persons
well distributed by age and sex, and scored the resulting stories in

OCEANIA 157

accordance with procedures developed by William E. Henry. His
psychologist collaborator, Marvin Spiegelman, then interpreted the
results solely on the basis of the comparative frequencies of different
responses in the various age and sex groups. This was the first time
the TAT had been used in this way, and Lessa found a quite satisfy-
ing congruence between Spiegelman's conclusions and those based
on the ethnographic data. This congruence held throughout a wide
range of behaviors, including general motivational structure, han-
dling of aggression, attitudes toward sex, food anxieties, etc.
This does not necessarily mean that the TAT can be assumed to yield
valid personality measures when used as a basis for quantitative in-
terpretation in a culture other than Ulithi. However, an accumula-
tion of similar evidence might encourage those anthropologists who
are still interested in using projective tests to shift their emphasis
away from the Rorschach. Interpretation of the Rorschach in any
setting necessarily requires more inference than the TAT because
the Rorschach presents a less structured stimulus. Rorschach inter-
pretation rests on a larger series of assumptions about unconscious
psychological processes derived from clinical experience In our own
culture than does the TAT. Its cross-cultural application is there-
fore inherently more hazardous — although by no means necessarily
invalid If the instrument is used with due caution.

With these few Micronesian studies by newcomers to the field,
our review can be considered completed. Increasingly, of course,
persons primarily Interested in other ethnological specialties none-
theless Include psychological constructs In their observations and
hypotheses, but this Is true of anthropology as a whole and need not
be detailed for Oceania. We may therefore turn to an assessment of
the work here reviewed within the broader perspective of the field
of culture and personality as a whole.

Assessment

Oceania, as noted at the outset of this chapter, has held out an al-
most unparalleled opportunity and challenge for students of culture
and personality. We have seen the challenge well met. Much pio-
neering field work has taken advantage of the unusual research
settings afforded by island populations, and the data so derived have
Inspired a number of bold but cogent new theoretical modes of In-
terpretation. It would probably be justifiable to claim some of these
new concepts as genuine anthropological contributions, in the sense
that they could only have arisen from the necessity for explaining

158 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

differences between cultures. Margaret Mead's exploration of the
interrelationships between personality and social structure and
maturational levels might be an example. The examination by Bea-
glehole, Ritchie, et al., of the mechanisms of transmission of the
psychological aspects of culture from one generation to the next is
another. We might also cite the development by Porteus of the Maze
Test for cross-cultural use, and Bateson's concept of schizmogenesis.
Each of these approaches I would judge has the potential of making
really new contributions to personality theory.

However, few if any of them are to be found in the main stream
of culture and personality theory as it is taught and used today. The
field has come to place almost exclusive reliance upon theory and
psychodynamic concepts derived from clinical psychiatry and psy-
chology. The clinician undertakes to cope with and modify the emo-
tional disturbances he finds in his patients, and he can understand
the source and nature of these disturbances most readily by recourse
to explanatory concepts derived from psychoanalysis. Years of
research and clinical experience have modified, enriched, and elabo-
rated this theoretical system since it was first set forth by Freud. The
psychiatrist or psychologist finds here a handy and effective set of
tools. Although he is urged to tinker with the system and perhaps
improve a little upon it, he sees no reason to question its basic
premises.

It is not surprising that anthropologists, seeing psychology un-
animous in its support of a coherent and rather glittering body of
theory, should accept from psychology the promise that this is the
way to describe and account for personality and its development.
However, the brief historical review just completed shows clearly
that the relative unanimity on this score among anthropologists is
of rather recent origin. I have suggested that the crystallizing event
was the publication of Abram Kardiner's first book based on his
collaboration with Ralph Linton. Whether or not others would
agree upon this landmark, I believe few would disagree that psycho-
analytic theory (as it is interpreted by clinical psychologists) now
dominates the thinking of anthropologists in culture and personal-
ity {cf. Kluckhohn 1944:590). It would therefore seem most ap-
propriate in this assessment to take a second look at some of the
earlier divergent views which arose from field work in Oceania,
to see whether we have perhaps not been overly hasty in brushing
them aside in our rush to leap upon the Freudian bandwagon.

The most thoroughly documented and elaborated position is that

OCEANIA 159

of Margaret Mead, in many respects seconded as we have seen by
Ernest Beaglehole. Mead does not, of course, reject the concepts of
current personahty theory. In fact, she draws heavily upon them
and has ever since her earhest work, done at a time when most an-
thropologists were scarcely aware of the existence of a man named
Sigmund Freud. However, analytic theory has two aspects. First,
it is a conceptual scheme for the description of the emotional struc-
ture of personality, of the forces within the individual which shape
his behavior. But beyond this it also embraces a developmental
scheme which undertakes to account for the formation, primarily
in early childhood experience and on an emotional basis, of the psy-
chological forces it has described. In psychiatry these two compon-
ents of theory are thoroughly intertwined, to such a degree that the
formal diagnostic criteria for most disorders require both behavioral
and etiological determinations. However, Mead has in effect drawn
upon the descriptive concepts while at the same time placing very
minor reliance upon the developmental theory.

Although Mead's difference is quite fundamental, and consistent
throughout her work, it has probably received so little explicit at-
tention largely because she has been content to be quietly selective
rather than to attack the Freudian developmental premises. She has
elaborated her own position while coexisting peacefully with the
clinicians, being satisfied to show them the importance of cultural
differences without attempting to force them to alter their basic
theory. In her early work in Samoa and the New Guinea area she
demonstrated the great differences in adult personality which result
from growing up and living in different kinds of social environ-
ments. Although she noted the stresses and strains of socialization in
various types of life experience, she tended not to evaluate the im-
portance of such crises or conflicts in terms of the significance at-
tributed to them by a predetermined theoretical system. Rather she
examined their consistency and congruence with other experiences
which preceded, followed, and surrounded the situation under con-
sideration. As has already been pointed out, this approach views
personality as a system of thinking, feeling, and behaving which is
learned through continuing experience. In her view, people learn to
conform to the norms not merely to avoid punishment or gain re-
wards, but also because in this way life becomes more predictable
and meaningful.

The learning process is central to Mead's scheme, and by learning
she means not merely the factors which may stimulate and affect

160 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the permanence of learning, but also the context and content of
learning. Learning for Mead is therefore a more inclusive and de-
scriptive concept than it is in the learning theory derived from Hull,
but by the same token less subject to experimental manipulation
and verification. In her scheme, the learning which culminates in
adult personality is the end product of an infinity of small experi-
ences shared with other people. The process is consequently much
more difficult to capture and define than one which is postulated
as a response to a more limited array of emotionally charged critical
situations or relationships. In her early work Mead was content to
describe the social environment and the manner in which it was
interpreted by the individual and by the persons about him, leaving
unexamined the detailed process whereby this cultural transmission
took place. In Bali she tried to actually document the process, largely
through photography, and in one study already referred to (Mead
and Macgregor 1951), she undertook to spell out all the nuances
of learning of one component of behavior.

I have risked redundancy in restating here the development of
Margaret Mead's theoretical position in order to underscore the con-
sistency of its development, and its completeness. She has not only
a point of view, but also a research method consistent with her point
of view. Furthermore, this is a point of view which is essentially an-
thropological. Personality, to Mead, is part of the cultural heritage
to be passed on from one generation to the next. It is learned by each
generation in much the same way as is canoe building, speaking,
or social etiquette. Because it is learned, and because it is learned
through living the culture, it necessarily develops, with variations,
in essentially similar form from one person to the next. No two in-
dividuals in a given society are identical in the way they build a
canoe or in the way they feel toward their mothers, but within each
society everyone does these things, and many others, in a fashion
sufficiently uniform and distinctive to be characteristic of the cul-
ture they share. If people did not learn to behave with this essential
uniformity, anthropologists would not be warranted in speaking
of culture and cultural differences. Mead in effect sees no reason why
anthropologists should then not consider personality simply as an-
other component of culture, to be studied as far as possible in the
same way.

Let us now examine briefly the contrasting but currently more
popular view, that represented by the personality theory of the clini-
cal students of human behavior. This approach, as befits one tailored

OCEANIA 161

in the first instance to the needs of individual patients, stresses the
integration of the personahty within the individual. This integra-
tion is developed through adaptive response to experience as it is
emotionally perceived and interpreted by the individual. People
learn to behave and feel in certain ways because this will defend
them from anxiety or other distressing psychological experiences,
or will bring them love and reward. With this view is associated a
conviction that the experiences of early childhood are more crucial
and lasting in their impact than later ones. However, it should be
noted that this emphasis on early experience is in no way theoreti-
cally required by the primary focus on emotional integration {cf.
Hsu 1952).

Studies in culture and personality which use this scheme account
for the similarities of adult personality found in a given society by
the culturally determined similarities in (early) socialization ex-
perience. As stated, this does not differ from Mead's scheme. The
difference lies in the fact that in the psychoanalytic framework the
intervening operative variable is emotional integration within each
developing individual. Thus, for example, in a society in which
adults characteristically reveal strong anxieties about food in excess
of the actual danger of going hungry, and where the nursing of ba-
bies is inconsistent or otherwise frustrating, analytic theory might
lead to explanations of adult anxieties in terms of unfulfilled oral
needs (despite the lack of thumb sucking observed in several such
societies) . In contrast Mead would probably also say that if young
children see strong capable adults worried about food, they are most
likely to learn to worry also. She would look at the social structure,
perhaps finding that the mutual responsibilities of kin groups are
so arranged that food which is objectively obtainable at all times is
in fact frequently hard to get. And she would look at the biological
rhythms and nutritional needs of the people to inquire whether
these created special conditions or problems. Similarly, the com-
monly felt fear of heights in our culture can be attributed either, on
the one hand, to a symbolic fear of loss of support by a loved person,
or, on the other, to the fact that mothers in our society usually show
a panic reaction when they find their children climbing trees, build-
ings, etc., and thus teach the child to be frightened of falling. There
may even be inherited differences in different population groups
with respect to perception and balance, as these affect reactions to
height.

With this outline of the differences between the available meth-

162 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

odological strategies before us, how can we assess their respective
vahdity and utihty? No definitive evaluation is possible, and what
follows must necessarily represent only my own opinion.

The research objective of culture and personality studies employ-
ing conventional analytic personality theory is essentially to test
the validity of the concepts subsumed under that theory in a variety
of cultural contests. A plausible explanation of some aspect of per-
sonality development in another culture serves to buttress the va-
lidity of the particular explanatory formulation derived from our
own culture. If our explanation does not "fit" the other culture, the
original concept must be discarded or reinterpreted. Anthropology
becomes the handmaiden of psychology, testing a secondhand the-
ory without any real opportunity to lead the way to new and differ-
ent understandings of personality development.^

Irrespective of the productivity of using analytic theory in cul-
ture and personality research, the more serious question of validity
must be examined. In the first place, it should be noted that the
interpretative substance of a monograph written in this vein is not
the exposition of an observed ongoing process such as anthropolo-
gists usually favor. Rather it is a series of post hoc explanations of
developmental processes, working back from adult personality. The
plausibility of such interpretations can be attributed equally to their
inherent validity or to the ingenuity of the explainer. Post hoc inter-
pretations are of course appropriate to the theory used because
psychoanalytic case studies, upon which the theory has largely been
built, are usually of adults and therefore retrospective. However,
insofar as this theory is clinically validated, its validation rests upon
a successful therapeutic outcome. Such an outcome is likely to de-
pend as much or more upon the skill of the therapist than upon the
accuracy of the theory. A developmental history which will serve
well in therapy will not necessarily serve science.

If we look at these same clinical tools in the hands of those psychi-
atrists who have elected to work with children, the picture becomes
quite different. It must be remembered that, as used in culture and
personality studies, analytic theory posits that similar early life ex-
periences are integrated similarly by a large number of people to
produce a distinctive adult personality common to all of them. Yet
no responsible child psychiatrist, even when faced with a young

* For what interest it may have, it might be mentioned that some years ago I discussed
precisely this same research approach and arrived at an opposite and much more enthusiastic
conclusion (Gladwin and Sarason 1953:21-22).

I

I

OCEANIA 163

patient who has experienced several clearly traumatic years, will
use his clinical concepts to predict this child's adult personality with
nearly the precision which is taken for granted in accounting for
culturally determined basic personality structure. The child psy-
chiatrist may feel safe in saying the child will probably always be
maladjusted. But he would consider it foolhardy in any one case, to
say nothing of hundreds, to state in just what form the child's
anxieties will become crystallized, how his defense mechanisms and
projective systems will be structured, what sorts of behaviors this
will lead him to adopt in a variety of adult situations, and so on. In
other words, the same body of clinically derived theory which per-
mits psychiatrists to make post hoc explanations for therapeutic
purposes becomes unthinkable, even in a clinical context, as a basis
for the very sort of prediction of outcomes of childhood experience
which are essential to their valid use in culture and personality
studies.

Therefore the comparison between, on the one hand, Margaret
Mead's view of personality as simply an aspect of culture and biol-
ogy, and on the other, the more analytically oriented view of most
workers in the field today, leads, in my opinion, to a discouraging
view of the latter. Stated in extremes, we have surrendered our an-
thropological birthright to the clinicians, and received in return a
methodology which is both limited in productivity and suspect in
validity. Obviously, the situation is not that bleak. If nothing else,
the work done thus far has provided a thorough exploration of one
approach, and has unquestionably served to enrich the theory it has
borrowed. Increasingly, however, not only anthropologists, but also
psychologists and sociologists, are wondering where all this work
leads.

If the answer is to be hopeful, it is my conviction that anthropol-
ogists must be prepared to make a commitment to their own theory
of culture as full as their present commitment to the psychologists'
theory of personality. As Hsu (1955) has observed, the predictable
similarity in behavior between members of any single society has
been noted by travelers ever since Herodotus. This striking phe-
nomenon obviously cannot be accounted for solely by the psycho-
dynamics of development within each individual in that society. It
is a cultural phenomenon, and anthropologists must view it as such.
It is of the same order as similarities in house types or agricultural
methods. This, of course, does not mean that psychological theory
should be discarded. One cannot speak of houses without attention

164 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

to architectural principles, or of agriculture without considering
the chemistry of soils and nutrition. What is needed is real collabora-
tion, not one-sided borrowing, in the relationship between anthro-
pology and psychology.

One other aspect or component of personality remains to be con-
sidered: cognitive process, or the style of thinking and problem solv-
ing which characterizes a culture. Cognitive development has been
almost entirely overshadowed in culture and personality research
by the emphasis on emotional development. This is doubtless in part
because of a heavy reliance on analytic theory in which cognition
plays a very small role. But it is also because psychology does not
itself have an agreed upon body of cognitive theory. Anthropology
has edged into this field of inquiry largely through linguistics. Ex-
plicit attention to cultural differences in logical process as such is
rare in anthropology. Surprisingly, almost all of this work has been
based on data from Oceania, and has been cited above (Bateson
1942, 1958; Beaglehole 1957; Gladwin i960; Lee 1950; Porteus
1931, 1937; see also Margaret Mead's [1932] analysis of Manus
animism) .

In 1936, in the first edition of Naven, Bateson emphasized the
distinctness and importance of cognitive processes. He character-
ized the usual grist for the culture and personality mill as ethos, "the
expression of a culturally standardized system of the organization
of the instincts and emotions of . . . individuals" (1958:118). Com-
plementary to ethos is eidos, "a standardization [and expression in
cultural behavior] of the cognitive aspects of the personality of
individuals" (p. 220) . Eidos embraces such matters as the nature
of memory, the perception and structuring of external reality, the
possibility of a positive valuation of intellectuality (e.g, expert
knowledge of genealogy or folklore) , and preferred strategies in
problem solving. Subsequently, he carried eidos one step farther,
evolving the concept of deutero-learning, or learning how to learn,
referring to the context or intellectual tools of learning (Bateson
1942). In neither instance did Bateson carry through with a full
review of his ethnographic material to demonstrate the potentiali-
ties of an analysis in these terms. His concepts, however, are impor-
tant in that they point to culturally determined differences in the
basic intellectual tools available to persons reared in different so-
cieties. When one remembers that Naven first appeared over 25
years ago, it is hard to understand why so few have been moved to
pick up this line of inquiry.

OCEANIA 165

The significance of Bateson's insight, and also the fact that it
could come only to an anthropologist trying to account for ob-
served cultural differences, is apparent if one looks at the efforts of
psychologists to grapple with the nature and development of in-
tellect. The often brilliant studies of such psychologists as Bartlett,
Bruner, Guilford, Hebb, Piaget, and others, have one characteristic
in common: they make the assumption that real intelligence con-
sists in the ability to integrate information in symbolic and rela-
tional terms, and thus subsume large amounts of data through
abstract generalizing principles. This assumption is entirely reason-
able for persons working within our culture. Virtually all our ma-
jor intellectual achievements are predicated upon just this mode of
abstract thinking.

However, as anthropologists we must raise the question whether
it is not culturally parochial to view abstract thinking as the only,
or even the best, form of intelligence. Here we may refer to Beagle-
hole's conclusion, cited earlier, that the Aitutaki do not think ab-
stractly, and in fact do not value problem -solving ability in the
terms we know it, that is, in terms of conscious rational processes.
Yet they and their forebears have developed a complex and adaptive
technology. To mention another example, Sarason and I found the
Trukese to have a highly concrete nonabstract style of thinking.*
Yet the Trukese also not only have a very useful technology, but can
be demonstrated in their highly evolved techniques of interisland
navigation to be accomplishing entirely in their heads some truly
extraordinary feats of data reduction and problem solving (Glad-
win i960) . The Trukese navigator is clearly not equipped to em-
brace the logical systems analysed and studied, for example, by
Piaget, but it is hard to say that he is not being distinctly intelligent.

Piaget, of course, and the other psychologists mentioned are not
studying the totality of intelligence, but only intelligence-in-our-
culture.^ Or, to be more correct, they are studying intelligence-as-
valued-by-middle-class-intellectuals-in-our-culture. The latter
phrasing points up the problem more sharply. Even if he had avail-
able a detailed analysis of Trukese thinking it is doubtful that Piaget
would or should change his research approach. It is in the evaluation

* The distinction between concrete and abstract thinking refers, of course, to differences in
emphasis in basic problem-solving strategy. It is doubtful that any thought process could be
totally concrete or totally abstract,

^ For views of Piaget, Margaret Mead, and others on this issue, see World Health Organization
(1957)-

166 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

of the full range, rather than the upper reaches, of intelligence that
a cross-cultural perspective can have the greatest impact.

Psychologists essentially concern themselves with only one cri-
terion of fully developed intelligence — abstract symbolic manipu-
lation of information. They therefore tend to measure — and indeed
define — intelligence in terms of tests which at each higher age level
require more ability in abstraction. It is disturbingly suggested by
work in our own culture, and often obvious when the tests are tried
out in other cultures, that some people are ill equipped to cope with
our intelligence tests even though they can meet the mental prob-
lems posed by their culture and environment with assurance and
success. Furthermore, identifiable groups of people (e.g., lower-class
Italians in the U.S.) have characteristic sorts of difficulties with tests
(cf. Masland, Sarason, and Gladwin 1958, chap. 14) . Psychologists
have been troubled by this situation, and have attempted to develop
a variety of culturally fair tests. Best known are the Davis-Eells
Games, and the Cattell Culture-Free Test. However, what they have
generally done is to make the content revolve about familiar situa-
tions and reduce or eliminate the explicit verbal skills required,
while leaving essentially intact the kind of reasoning ability required
for effective performance.

Meanwhile, anthropologists have done little to help them other
than to insist piously that all groups and classes of men, regardless
of cultural origin, must have equal intellectual potentialities.
Anthropologists have contributed very little toward giving psy-
chologists an understanding of the meaning of intelligence-in-our-
culture as against intelligence-in-another-culture. With respect to
emotional factors, personality and culture studies have assuredly
given psychologists a valuable perspective. As a consequence, psy-
chologists feel comfortable in looking for rather fundamental dif-
ferences in personality development in the various subcultures of
our society. Quite aside from the theoretical importance of cogni-
tive theory, it is high time anthropology lent a similar helping hand
to psychologists in the study of thinking and intelligence. Psychol-
ogy is in the troubled position of lacking the theoretical and practi-
cal tools to disprove the racial inferiority its own tests are constantly
being cited to "prove." It appears that only a wide cross-cultural
perspective can provide a foundation of knowledge upon which to
develop such tools.

Summing up, it seems fair to say that the challenge of unusual
research opportunities offered by Oceania has indeed proved stimu-

OCEANIA 167

lating. As was noted, practically the entirety of explicit anthropol-
ogical contributions to the study of cognitive process has stemmed
from this area. Two major approaches to a genuinely anthropologi-
cal— i.e, cultural — theory of personality development have been
developed by Mead and by Beaglehole and their colleagues. Yet there
seems at present to be a slackening in leadership in Oceania. Hope-
fully this is illusory, or at least temporary. The challenging oppor-
tunities remain. The relationship between personality and culture
change, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is only one of several lines
of inquiry which have scarcely been exploited at all, but which can
fruitfully be pursued in the Pacific area.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bateson, Gregory

1942 Social planning and the concept of "deutero-learning." Conference on
Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Second Symposium. New York,
Harper & Bros.
1949 Bah: the value system of a steady state. In, Social structure: studies pre-
sented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Meyer Fortes, ed. 35-53. Oxford,
Clarendon Press.
1958 Naven. id ed. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead

1942 Balinese character: a photographic analysis. Special Publications of the
New York Academy of Sciences II.
Beaglehole, Ernest

1939 Some modern Hawaiians. University of Hawaii Research Publica-
tions 19.

1940 Psychic stress in a Tongan village. Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific
Science Congress. Berkeley, University of California Press 4:43-52.

1 94 1 Pangai village in Tonga. Memoirs of the Polynesian Society 18.

1944 Character structure: its role in the analysis of interpersonal relations.

Psychiatry 7:145—162.
1957 Social change in the South Pacific: Rarotonga and Aitutaki. New York,

Macmillan.
Beaglehole, Ernest and Pearl

1935 Hopi of the Second Mesa. Memoirs of the American Anthropological

Association 44:1-67.
1938 Ethnology of Pukapuka. Bulletins of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum

150:1—420.
1 94 1 Personality development in Pukapukan children. In Language, culture,

and personality. Leslie Spier, A. Irving Hallowell, and Stanley S.

Newman, eds., pp. 282—298. Menasha, Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.
1946 Some modern Maoris. New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Wellington, "Whitcombe and Tombs.

168 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Beaglehole, Ernest and James E. Ritchie

1958 The Rakau Maori studies. Journal of the Polynesian Society 67: 132-154.
Benedict, Ruth

1934 Patterns of culture. New York, Houghton Mifflin.

1938 Continuities and discontinuities in cultural conditioning. Psychiatry
1:161—167.

Berndt, R. M. and Catherine H.

195 I Sexual behavior in Western Arnhem Land. Viking Fund Publications
in Anthropology No. 16. New York, Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, Inc.

Burrows, Edwin G. and Melford E. Spiro

1957 An atoll culture: ethnography of Ifaluk in the Central Carolines. 2d ed.
Behavior Science Monographs. New Haven, Human Relations Area
Files.

Du Bois, Cora

1944 The people of Alor: a social psychological study of an East Indian
island. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Earle, Margaret Jane

1958 Rakau children: from six to thirteen years. Wellington, Victoria Uni-
versity of Wellington Publications in Psychology 11. (Monographs on
Maori Social Life and Personality 4.)

Fortune, Reo F.

1927 The mind in sleep. London, Kegan Paul.

1932 Sorcerors of Dobu: the social anthropology of the Dobu islanders of the
Western Pacific. New York, Dutton.
Gladwin, Thomas

i960 The need: better ways of teaching children to think. In Freeing Capac-
ity to Learn: papers and reports from the Fourth ASCD Research
Institute, pp. 23—39. Washington, National Education Association.
Gladwin, Thomas and Seymour B. Sarason

1953 Truk: man in paradise. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology No.
20. New York, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-
search, Inc.

Hsu, Francis L. K.

1952 Anthropology or psychiatry: a definition of objectives and their im-
plications. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8:227-250.
1955 An anthropologist's view of the future of personality studies. Psychi-
atric Research Reports 2:155—168.

Joseph, Alice and Veronica F. Murray

195 I Chamorros and Carolinians of Saipan, personality studies. Cambridge,
Harvard University Press.

Kardiner, Abram

1939 The individual and his society: the psychodynamics of primitive social
organization. New York, Columbia University Press.

Kardiner, Abram, et al.

1945 The psychological frontiers of society. New York, Columbia Uni-
versity Press.

OCEANIA 169

Kluckhohn, Clyde

1944 The influence of psychiatry on anthropology in America during the
past one hundred years. In One hundred years of American psychiatry,
pp. 589—617. New York, Columbia University Press.
La Barre, Weston

1958 The influence of Freud on anthropology. American Imago 15:275-328.
Lee, Dorothy M.

1950 Lineal and nonlineal codifications of reality. Psychosomatic Medicine
12:89-97.
Lessa, William A.

1956 Oedipus-type tales in Oceania. Journal of American Folklore 69:63—73.
Lessa, William A. and Marvin Spiegelman

1954 Ulithian personality as seen through ethnological materials and the-
matic test analysis. University of California Publications in Culture
and Society 2:243—301.

Malinowski, Bronislaw

1922 Argonants of the Western Pacific, an account of native enterprise and

adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London,

Routledge.
1927 Sex and repression in savage society. London, Kegan Paul.
1929 The sexual life of savages in North-Western Melanesia. New York,

Halcyon.
1935 Coral gardens and their magic, a study of the methods of tilling the soil

and of agricultural rites in the Trobriand Islands. New York, American

Book, 2 vols.

Masland, Richard L., Seymour B. Sarason and Thomas Gladwin

1958 Mental subnormality: biological, psychological, and cultural factors.
New York, Basic Books.

Mead, Margaret

1932 An investigation of the thought of primitive children, with special
reference to animism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
62:173—190.

1937 Cooperation and competition among primitive peoples. New York,
McGraw-Hill.

1939 From the South Seas: studies of adolescence and sex in primitive so-
cieties. New York, Morrow. (Comprises reprints of Coming of age
in Samoa, 1928; Growing up in New Guinea, 1930; Sex and tempera-
ment in three primitive societies, 1935.)

1949 Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world. New York,
Morrow.

1953 National character. In Anthropology today, A. L. Kroeber, ed., pp.
642—667. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

1954a Research on primitive children. In Manual of child psychology. Leonard
Carmichael, ed., 2d ed., pp. 735-80. New York, Wiley.

1954b Cultural continuities and personality transformation. Journal of Social
Issues, Supplement Series No. 8. Kurt Lewin Memorial Award Issue.

1956 New lives for old, cultural transformation: Manus 1928-1953. New
York, Morrow.

170 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

1959 Reply to Kardiner. Science 130:1728, 1732.
Mead, Margaret and Frances Cooke Macgregor

195 1 Growth and culture: a photographic study of Balinese childhood. New
York, Putman's.
Mead, Margaret and Rhoda Metraux

1953 The study of culture at a distance. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press.
Mead, Margaret and Theodore Schwartz

i960 The cult as a condensed social process. In Group Processes: Transactions
of the Fifth Conference, Oct. 12, 13, 14 and 15, 1958, Princeton, N.J.
Bertram Schaffner, ed.. New York, Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation,
85-187.
Mead, Margaret and Martha Wolfenstein, eds.

1955 Childhood in contemporary cultures. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press.

Miller, Neal E. and John Dollard

1 94 1 Social learning and imitation. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Mulligan, D. G.

1957 Maori adolescence in Rakau. Wellington, Victoria University College
Publications in Psychology 9. (Monographs on Maori Social Life and
Personality 2.)
Myers, Charles J. and W. McDougall

1903 Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits
II, Physiology and Psychology. Part 2. Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
PORTEUS, S. D.

193 I The psychology of a primitive people: a study of the Australian Ab-
origine. New York, Longmans, Green.
1937 Primitive intelligence and environment. New York, Macmillan.

Ritchie, James E.

1956 Basic personality in Rakau. Wellington, Victoria University College
PubUcations in Psychology 8. (Monographs on Maori Social Life and
Personality i.)

Ritchie, Jane

1957 Childhood in Rakau: the first five years of life. Wellington, Victoria
University College Publications in Psychology 10. (Monographs on
Maori Social Life and Personality 3.)

Rivers, W. H. R.

1923 Conflict and dream. New York, Harcourt, Brace.

Roheim, Geza

1925 Australian totemism: a psycho-analytical study in anthropology.

London, Allen and Unwin.
1932 The psychoanalysis of primitive cultural types. International Journal

of Psychoanalysis 13:1—224.
1950 Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York, International Universities

Press.

OCEANIA 171

Spiro, Melford E.

195 1 Culture and personality: the natural history of a false dichotomy. Psy-
chiatry 14:19—46.
1959 Cultural heritage, personal tensions, and mental illness in a South Sea
culture, bt Culture and mental health, Marvin K. Opler, ed., pp. 141-
171. New York, Macmillan.
1961 Social systems, personality, and functional analysis. In Studying person-
ality cross-culturally, Bert Kaplan, ed.
Taylor, C. R. H.

195 1 A Pacific bibliography. Wellington, N. Z., The Polynesian Society.
ViNACKE, W. Edgar, et al.

1955 Bibliography of sources on personality and culture of the Pacific region.
Honolulu, University of Hawaii (mimeographed).
West, James

1945 Plain ville, U.S.A. New York, Columbia University Press.
Whiting, John W. M.

194 1 Becoming a Kwoma: teaching and learning in a New Guinea tribe. New
Haven, Yale University Press.
Williams, John Smith

i960 Maori achievement motivation. Wellington, Victoria University of
Wellington Publications in Psychology 13. (Monographs on Maori So-
cial Life and Personality 5.)
World Health Organization

1957 Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting, Study Group on Psychobiological
Development of the Child, Sept. 20—26, 1956, Geneva. Mimeographed.
(To be published by Tavistock Press.)

Chapter 6

NATIONAL CHARACTER AND
MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS^

ALEX INKELES
Harvard University

The method of analysis which yields studies in "culture and per-
sonality" when applied to "primitive" peoples has its analogue
among studies of large-scale societies in a varied assortment of in-
vestigations on what is called national character. If, under this head-
ing, we allow impressionistic, introspective, and loosely evaluative
works to qualify, then for the United States alone — from De Toc-
queville to Brogan and Gorer — the articles and books depicting the
American character will be numbered in the hundreds (Commager
1947). Were we to extend our coverage to the major nations of
Europe and Asia, the number of relevant studies would be in the
thousands. To review even the most important of these would strain
the limits of our allotted space even while permitting only the driest
catalogue of their contents. Yet if we were to insist on the more rig-
orous standards of empirical social science, and were to consider
only more systematic investigations based on representative samples
and utilizing standard psychological tests, then not more than two
or three studies in the relevant literature could qualify. There is a
third alternative. By selecting a specific problem focus we may si-
multaneously escape the boundlessness of a general review and the
confining restrictions forced on us through the adoption of a rigor-
ous methodological canon. A topic suitable to our purpose, one of
interest and importance, is the relation of national character to the
political systems found in modern national states, and more spe-
cifically, to the establishment and maintenance of democracy. Be-

* Revised and expanded version of a paper read at the Fourth World Congress of Sociology,
Stresa-Milan, 1959. The aid of the Social Science Research Council is gratefully acknowledged,
as well as the support of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. Professors S. N. Eisenstadt
and Daniel J. Levinson were kind enough to offer numerous excellent suggestions.

172

f

I

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 173

fore we examine this relationship, we must clarify the meaning of
our concepts.

WHAT IS NATIONAL CHARACTER AND
HOW CAN IT BE MEASURED?

Problems of Definition

The confusion about the term national character is pervasive and
enduring. Yet arguing about what a concept should mean can be
utterly sterile. What is important is that we designate some empirical
phenomenon which has concrete reference, which can be effectively
distinguished from other phenomena, and which can conceivably
be investigated by standard replicable, reliable, and valid methods.
For purposes of this discussion I will adopt the definition of national
character presented in the Handbook of Social-Psychology (Inkeles
and Levinson 1954) which, I believe, is now widely accepted: "Na-
tional character refers to relatively enduring personality charac-
teristics and patterns that are modal among the adult members of
a society."

The other meanings given to national character, and related
terms such as people's character, folk character, national (or "ra-
cial" or popular) psychology, are almost as numerous as the roster
of political essayists from Plato to Pareto and from Pareto to Potter.
Some treat national character as simply "the sum total" of all the
values, institutions, cultural traditions, ways of acting, and history
of a people. However useful this idea may be for popular discourse,
it is sadly lacking for purposes of scientific analysis, since the failure
to differentiate the elements of the phenomenon makes an impos-
sible task of measurement, obfuscates issues of cause and effect, and
precludes systematic study of the relations between elements. With
most other definitions we have no quarrel, so long as those using the
different terms are appropriately aware that each has a special and
restricted meaning, and that no one of these concepts exhaustively
describes the phenomenon under investigation. The following main
types of definition may be discerned (cf. Herz 1944, and Kline-
berg 1944) :

National Character as Institutional Pattern. In this approach,
most common among political scientists, the national character is
epitomized by the dominant, or typical and representative, institu-
tions, particularly those concerned with politics and economics.
The choice between dominant as against typical or representative

V

174 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

institutions as the basis for characterizing a nation is a difl&cult one,
and has led to much confusion in those studies in which the dis-
tinction was not precisely made or rigorously adhered to. Outstand-
ing examples of the genre are to be found among numerous studies
of the American character, such as those by Andre Siegfried (1927)
orD. W. Brogan (1933, 1944).

National Character as Cultiire Theme. Broadly similar to the
preceding approach, this genre gives prime emphasis not to political
and economic institutions but to the family, friendship, the local
community, and to values, attitudes, philosophy of life, religion and
the like. Themes are often selected as cutting across or as infusing
these and other social realms. Most common among anthropologists,
this approach is also typical for many historians, political scientists,
and essayists who speak in terms of spirit or folkgeist, world out-
look, life-ways, and similar themes. Perhaps the best known of the
more or less modern efforts of this type would be de Madariaga's
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards (1929) , and the most impres-
sive of the recent statements, Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum'
and the Sword ( 1946) .

National Character as Action. In this approach stress is placed
on behavior and its consequences, with special reference to political
and economic action. In this view both formal institutional patterns
and informal cultural norms, in and of themselves, are not regarded
as very reliable guides to a nation's "character." Those adopting this
approach stress particularly the history of peoples or societies, and
on this basis may characterize them as warlike or peaceful, enter-
prising or backward, trustworthy or deceptive, pragmatic and
industrious, or idealistic and impractical. Germany is a case often
discussed in this context. Many have emphasized the contrast be-
tween Germany's outstanding institutional creations and cultural
achievements on the one hand, and on the other its historic role in
Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Hearnshaw's Ger-
many the Aggressor Throughout the Ages (1940) may serve as an
example. This mode of analysis should not be confused with a more
sophisticated type in which national character is recognized to be a
property of persons, and is treated as an independent variable con-
tributing to an explanation of some form of political action con-
sidered as a dependent variable. An outstanding example is Gabriel
Almond's (1950) use of materials on the American character to ex-
plain certain persistent tendencies in the conduct of foreign policy
by the United States.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 175

National Character as Racial Psychology. The identification
of national character with the allegedly "inborn" and presumably
biological characteristics (generally defined as superior or inferior)
of a group is one of the oldest and most common approaches, and in
modern social science the one most severely criticized if not actively
abhorred (cf. Benedict 1945) . A typical illustration, by no means
the most extreme, may be found in Jaensch's (1938) study, pub-
lished under Hitler, in which he asserted that the French were usu-
ally erratic and unreliable, the Germans consistent and stable.

The belief in racial psychology is by no means restricted to racist
theoreticians. As tolerant and democratic a man as Andre Siegfried
(195 1), for example, attributes one of the two main qualities he
finds in the French mind — its being "extremely practical and mat-
ter of fact" — to a Celtic heritage which he says is found wherever
"Celtic blood prevails," including places as widely separated as
northern Spain and the west of the British Isles. And Brickner's
( 1943 ) analysis of the German character as one essentially paranoid
struck many students of the problem as verging on racism in psy-
chology, even though it certainly did not suggest that the allegedly
typical paranoid behavior was biological in origin. Although the
pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite direction, there
is today general agreement that the biologically given properties
of what are in any event extraordinarily mixed national populations
are not a significant influence in shaping the institutions, culture,
or behavior of those national populations. Yet the altogether proper
discrediting of racial psychology has perhaps had the unfortunate
unintended effect of discouraging serious scientific research on a
basic question of social science.

In most of the better known general essays on national character,
such as those by Sforza (1942) on Italy, Siegfried (1930) on
France, and Ortega y Gasset (1937) on Spain, more than one of
these definitions or approaches will be used simultaneously and gen-
erally without any special note being taken of this fact. Typically,
no distinction is made between character as something already
formed and acting, and those forces such as climate and geography,
history, biology, or child rearing which may be designated as the
causes or consequences of the observed national character. If prog-
ress is to be made in the field, we need to make our investigations
more systematic. There is no one line of development which can do
full justice to the complexities of the problem. We feel, however,
that great advantages inhere in the concentration on modal adult

176 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

personality characteristics as a central problem in national charac-
ter study. We therefore pose the question: whether produced by
common heritage, common upbringing, the sharing of common
culture, the exposure to common institutional pressures, or other
causes, are there in fact any clearly demonstrated important diflfer-
ences in the psychological characteristics of the populations who
make up modern national states? The question is more difficult to
answer with confidence than many imagine it to be.

The Problem of Measurement

No matter how we conceive of national character, a scientific
approach to it must face the problem of its assessment — or to use a
less evasive word, its measurement. This subject generates as much
confusion and malaise as does the issue of definition. The different
approaches to national character based on institutional structure,
and on national action or behavior, involve virtually no common
understanding, standard techniques, regular procedures, or canons
of reliability and validity. The situation is only slightly less variable
in the racial psychology and the culture-pattern approaches. Each
study proceeds almost entirely independently of all others, utilizes
unique perspectives, draws on distinctive materials, follows idiosyn-
cratic rules of evidence, and observes only its own standards of re-
liability and validity. The result is, if not intellectual chaos or
anarchy, at least a great buzzing, blooming confusion which defies
representation. Under the circumstances, a systematic comparative
perspective is almost impossible.

It is argued by some, not without cogency, that institutional ar-
rangements are so varied, culture patterns so unique, national psy-
chologies so distinctive, that no common or standard language can
hope to encompass this infinite diversity. Under these circum-
stances, it is said, we cannot do justice to the unique character of any
people unless we develop a special battery of concepts and a new
glossary of terms to describe them. This claim may be somewhat
exaggerated. In any event it suggests that systematic analysis of
national character as a field of scientific investigation is blocked.
The same basic difficulty does not, at least in equal degree, attend
efforts to deal with national character as modal personality patterns.
There is good reason to believe that the range of variation in human
personality, however great, can be adequately encompassed by a
conceptual scheme, with a sufficiently limited set of terms to make
for manageable research designs without sacrifice of essential rich-

»

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 177

ness or variety. We also maintain that, despite the many methodo-
logical and conceptual problems involved, this scheme and its meas-
uring instruments can be developed so as to permit reliable and valid
applications across national lines.

Harold Lasswell once claimed it would be an exaggeration to say
that in two thousand years of studying politics we had made no ad-
vances whatsoever beyond Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps an exaggera-
tion, but not a great one. At least so it seems when we recognize
that the genius of political analysis has gone mainly into the inven-
tion of new terms for old ideas which were never made operational,
never tested, and therefore never developed. For how else is one to
choose between Plato's theory of the desiring, spirited, and reason-
ing parts, Pareto's "residues of combination" and "residues of per-
sistence of aggregates," Spranger's six types of men, or Thomas and
Znaniecki's Philistine, Bohemian, and Creative Man. These ap-
proaches must meet the criticism, as Spranger acknowledged, that
they "abandon the concrete ground of experience and reduce
psychology to mere speculation" ( 1928 :xi) .

As Harold Lasswell went on to say, however, our chief contem-
porary advantage over Plato and Aristotle lies "in the invention and
adaptation of procedures by which specific individuals and groups,
operating in specific historic and cultural settings, can be under-
stood. ... In a word, the modern approach is toward the building
of scientific knowledge by perfecting the instrumentalities of in-
quiry" (1951:468-469). For the first time in the history of the
study of politics we actually have within our grasp the means for
systematic study of such conceptions as those developed by Plato,
Pareto, and Spranger. I refer, of course, to the great strides made
in this century in our understanding of personality dynamics and
in the means for personality testing, measurement, and assessment.
However, the concepts of Plato and others must first be clarified.
They must be made operational, that is, transformed into possible
research procedures of testing and measurement.

In some cases this has already been attempted, and it has been
found possible and useful to devise formal measures of these classic
typologies. Spranger's types, for example, were an important in-
fluence in shaping the widely used Allport- Vernon Scale of Values.
In the process the old concepts may be found wanting. For exam-
ple, Lurie's (1937) factor analysis to ascertain which generalized
attitude clusters, if any, conform to Spranger's types, located sev-
eral fitting Spranger's definition fairly closely — the theoretical, the

178 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

religious, the social, and the economic-political. Several others, how-
ever, could not be empirically distinguished. As we test and perhaps
discard some of these "classic" concepts, they will be replaced by
others which are proving important in our study of personality and
have obvious relevance to politics, such as: the needs for power, af-
filiation, and achievement; the authoritarian and ethnocentric syn-
drome; dominance drives; alienation and anomie; dogmatism and
rigidity; tough- and tender-mindedness. It is in the nature of sci-
ence and the inevitable path of its advance that concepts are re-
placed as empirical research advances. If for sentimental reasons we
are unable to abandon the old familiar concepts, we may do our-
selves honor as classicists, but we disqualify ourselves as scientists.

POLITICAL SYSTEMS AS OBJECTS OF STUDY

The definition and classification of political systems is a more
familiar and less ambiguous task, although it too has its vicissitudes.
The sturdy old distinctions among political forms such as democ-
racy, oligarchy, and tyranny which come down from Plato and
Aristotle still serve us well today, although some may prefer a more
contemporary classification, such as that proposed by Gabriel
Almond (1956) who identifies the Anglo-American, the Con-
tinental European, the pre- or partially industrial, and the totali-
tarian political systems. Whatever scheme we might choose, we
would probably not have great difficulty in agreeing on the defining
characteristics of each type and could probably attain fair agree-
ment in classifying particular societies.

Such classifications are, however, deceptively easy, and for many
purposes they may be misleading. We generally accept the Greek
city-state as the epitome of the democratic political system, but we
should not forget that internally it rested squarely on a large slave
class, and in external affairs was characterized by almost continuous
intercity warfare motivated by nothing more noble than the desire
for power and gain. Tsarist Russia was perhaps the most absolute
autocracy in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet
the village 7nir was a self-governing community observing some of
the purest principles of egalitarian democracy. Germany was an
outstanding example of relatively absolute monarchy before World
War I, although intellectually and spiritually one of the freest na-
tions in Europe. The Weimar Republic which followed represented
the embodiment of the most advanced democratic principles, but it
was succeeded by one of the blackest of totalitarian regimes — which

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 179

again is followed by a West German Republic which seems one of
the stablest and most genuine of Europe's democracies. The rule of
Ataturk in Turkey was a dictatorship, yet he used his dictatorial
powers to foster democratic institutions against the resistance of
the traditional religious oligarchy and the peasant masses. Soviet
Russia under Stalin had what was nominally the most democratic
constitution in the world, while in fact it closely approximated a
regime of absolute totalitarian terror.

The obvious point is that we must differentiate the components
of political systems just as we must distinguish the diverse elements
in, and the different bearers of, national character. As a minimum
we must make a distinction between: the relatively enduring and
the more fleeting or transitional features of a nation's political sys-
tem (cf. Lipset i960 on stable and unstable democracies) ; the
formal, exoteric system from the informal, esoteric, operational
patterns (cf. Leites 195 1 on the Politburo) ; the politics of central
government from that which characterizes vital institutions such
as the local community, the church, trade union, or family (cf.
Michels 1949 on the iron law of oligarchy) ; the principles embodied
in constitutions and other venerated documents and those com-
monly held by the populace (cf. Stouffer 1955 on civil liberties in
the United States) ; the political orientation of the elite as against
that of the rank and file of the population (cf. Stouffer 1955 and
Mills 1956 on the power elite).

Only if we recognize both politics and national character as
highly differentiated systems of variables can we hope to do any
justice to the complex phenomena we are studying. Unfortunately
many, indeed most, studies which seek to relate character to politi-
cal systems fail to make these necessary distinctions. They treat
political systems as undifferentiated and more or less unchanging
units rather than as complex variables. ^

REVIEW OF SYSTEMATIC EMPIRICAL STUDIES

Despite the efflorescence of the field of culture and personality
during the last three decades,^ and a parallel growth of interest in

The point at which a new field of exploration begins can as a rule be designated only on
an essentially arbitrary basis. Most authorities acknowledge Franz Boas as the father of this move-
ment (see especially Boas 19 lo), and many date its formal beginning with the publication in 1934 of
Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were, of course, students in
the seminars on Individual and Society which Boas gave at Columbia in the late twenties. Boas
himself gave great credit to Theodore Waitz, of whose Anthropolgie der Naiurvolker he said
"[this] great work is an inquiry into whether there are any fundamental differences between the
mental make-up of mankind the world over, racially as well as socially."

180 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the empirical study of modern political systems, we can point to
very few systematic empirical studies of the relations between per-
sonality patterns, or psychological factors in general, and the rise,
functioning, and change of political systems. As usual the history of
intellectual disciplines reveals much of the story. Modern studies
of the relations between personality and sociocultural systems have
been developed almost exclusively by cultural anthropologists. Per-
haps because most nonliterate (or primitive) people rarely have a
formal or specialized political organization, all but a few cultural
anthropologists have shown little interest in political structure. In
this respect, at least, the students of personality and culture have
followed the dominant pattern in their discipline. Benedict's book
on Japan (1946) and Hsu's comparison of the Chinese and Ameri-
can culture ( 1953 ) each give a chapter or more to politics and gov-
ernment, and Mead (1957) devoted an entire book to Soviet atti-
tudes toward authority, particularly political authority. But these
are outstanding exceptions. The early editions of the two standard
and massive American collections of articles on culture and person-
ality do not contain a single item which deals directly with the rela-
tion of personality patterns to the political system.^ Similarly, the
standard anthropological textbook in the field contains a chapter
on psychiatric disorders and one on "personality in class, caste, re-
gion, and occupation," but none on politics.^ Linton's (1945) lit-
tle classic on The Cultural Background of Personality makes no
mention of government or politics. The same may be said of the
works of Abram Kardiner (1939, 1945) which have done so much
to shape the field. Geoffrey Gorer's study of the English character
has chapters on "friends and neighbors," on "people and homes,"
on "religion," and on "marriage," but none on those political in-

° Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray (1953); Douglas Haring (1948). The former did
contain an article on personality under the Nazis, but rather than having a political focus it
was designed only to show that personality remained unchanged despite changes in the indi-
vidual's political security. The latter had an article on the armaments race, but only as illus-
trating a type of mechanism in interpersonal relations. Later editions gave somewhat, but not
much more, attention to the political process. The later edition of the Kluckhohn, Murray (and
Schneider) volume (1956) included a new article by R. Bauer, "Psychology of the Soviet
Middle Elite." In addition, the third edition of the Haring volume (1956) included materials
on the role of character in postwar Japanese sociopolitical development and one by Gorer
which, while not explicitly dealing with political structure, discussed the role of the police in
the apparent modification of the English character in modern times.

'John Honigmann (1954). The index does call attention, under the heading "political re-
lations," to two pages which discuss the evidence that organizational atomism in a community
is related to the degree of ingroup sorcery, and two pages on the relations of family patterns
to political structure.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 181

stitutions and attitudes about parliaments, elections, local govern-
ment, civil liberties, and personal rights which most people regard
as the truly distinctive political features of English society/

These comments are, of course, not meant to ignore the substan-
tial contribution of the British anthropologists to our understand-
ing of primitive political systems, but in this case the hiatus is com-
plementary to that found in the culture and personality studies.
In their exceptionally fine work on African political systems Fortes,
Evans-Pritchard, and their associates (1940) say virtually nothing
about the characterological qualities which may be important to
the development and maintenance of stable political orders in these
important underdeveloped regions.

Unfortunately the situation is not markedly changed when we
consider the work of political scientists, to whom one might ap-
propriately assign greater responsibility for this line of work.
Although Plato and Aristotle both stressed the role of character in
shaping political forms and processes, the person tends periodically
to disappear from political theory. Early in this century Graham
Wallas made a plea for a return to the study of human nature in
politics. He deplored the books by American university professors
as useless, because the writers "dealt with abstract men, formed on
assumptions of which they were unaware and which they had never
tested either by experience or by study" (1908 : 10) . Very little was
done to take up the challenge. More than two decades later Charles
E. Merriam (1925) was still pleading the same needs, but in a more
focused and hopeful manner with emphasis on personality, meas-
urement, large-scale statistical studies, and correlational analysis
of the relations between political conduct and psychological char-
acteristics of the political man. In the same year Henry Moore
(1925) published a pioneering study of psychological factors as-
sociated with holding radical and conservative political opinions.
Moore's analysis, utilizing tests for resistance to majority opinion
and of readiness to break old habits, anticipated much of the recent
research on personality and politics. Unfortunately it failed to be-
come the start of an active research tradition in psychology.

Merriam's role in fostering the application of psychology to
politics is comparable to that played by Franz Boas in the develop-
ment of culture and personality studies. It was under Merriam's

* Gorer's (1955) book does contain a chapter on "law and order," but it deals exclusively
with two questions: the popular image of the police and the attitude toward "fiddling," a
term used to describe minor infractions of the rationing regulations.

182 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

influence that Harold Lasswell wrote what was probably the first
modern, systematic, and broad application of psychology to con-
temporary politics. In Tsycho pathology and Politics (1930) Lass-
well broke new ground in going beyond the usual hypothetical
classification of political types to develop the detailed study of life
histories. Guided by psychoanalytic theory, he showed quite ex-
plictly and empirically the connection between personality traits
and the choice and style of political roles such as the agitator, the
propagandist, and the administrator. In the same volume he
sketched one of the first systematic schemes for describing per-
sonality in politically relevant terms. Although he worked mainly
with the individual case study, Lasswell was not unaware of the im-
plications of this mode of analysis for the study of political pat-
terns characteristic of classes and national populations. "What mat-
ters to the student of culture," he said, "is not the subjective
similarities of the species but the subjective differences among the
members of the same and similar cultures" (1930:261). He did not,
however, follow through to undertake the systematic research this
statement implied.

A decade elapsed before the next really major event in the field
occurred with the publication of Erich Fromm's Escape from Free-
dom (1941). Fromm took the step that Lasswell had anticipated
but failed to make himself. He held that the typical character types
prevalent at any given time were different, that these differences
varied systematically with changes in the socioeconomic system, and
that character types could serve either as a cement holding the sys-
tem together or as an explosive tearing it apart, depending on the
degree to which a given character type fit the demands of the sys-
tem and found satisfaction in it. He traced this interaction through
the history of medieval Europe and the Reformation, sought to ex-
plain the appeal of Hitler by the widespread prevalence of the au-
thoritarian character in Germany, and sketched some of the forces
in democratic society — such as the sense of aloneness, the loss of
individuality and spontaneity — which he saw as inducing an
"escape from freedom."

Fromm's theory has been extraordinarily stimulating to all con-
cerned with the study of personality and politics. We should appre-
ciate his theoretical sophistication, his clinical intuition, and his
clear recognition of the most vital problems. His use of historical
documents and contemporary sources, such as political speeches
and party platforms, represented a commendable improvement

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 183

over the efforts of those who were content to rely more or less ex-
clusively on their clinical experience with psychoanalytic patients.
Nevertheless, many students of the problem would insist that
Fromm's analysis did not present more than suggestive hypotheses.
It was yet to be demonstrated by objectively verified testing based
on adequate samples that the modal personality types in different
socioeconomic systems were significantly different from each other,
or that within any nation the form and content of political action
varied according to the personality traits typical for any group.

Considering that the conflict of political principles played so
central a role among the issues in World War II, it is rather striking
that the series of books on national character which anthropologists
contributed to the war effort gave such incidental, indeed almost
casual, treatment to the relations between national character and
democratic government. There are important limitations on the
justice with which this characterization can be applied in one or
another case, yet it fairly well fits the work of Gorer on Japan
(1943) , Russia (1950), and the United States (1948) , Mead on the
United States (1942), and Benedict on Japan (1946). Insofar as
they did deal with governments, they did not with any rigor specify
the personality traits of politically active adults which might con-
duce them to support democratic or autocratic government. In-
stead, their method was to highlight the analogy between the po-
litical system and other features of the culture, most notably the
family. Thus Gorer notes the characteristic division of power in
the United States as contrasted with greater centralization in Euro-
pean governments, then points to the typical American nuclear
family council, and concludes that "to a certain extent the pattern
of authority in the state is reflected in the family" ( 1948 : 44— 45) .
Similarly, Benedict notes that the Japanese father is not a martinet,
but rather exercises his authority as the representative of the larger
family. The attitude thus "learned by the child in his earliest ex-
periences with his father" is then invoked to explain why in Japa-
nese governmental affairs "the officials who head the hierarchy do
not typically exercize the actual authority" (1946:301).

These are undoubtedly important insights. Nevertheless, to con-
ceive of the family as the mirror of the state, and of the state as a
reflection of the pattern of relations in the family, establishes a
circle without any suggestion as to how change can and does come
about. In the case of the Japanese, Benedict sought to meet this
challenge by stressing the Japanese "ethic of alternatives." But

184 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

what of the Germans and Russians who presumably do not have
such an ethic? Are they doomed to perpetual authoritarian govern-
ment as the cycles of family and state patterns ever renew them-
selves?

The basic difficulty with this approach, one pervasive in the cul-
ture and personality literature, is its failure to take adequate ac-
count of the differentiation within large national populations. It
emphasizes the central tendency, the existence of which it presumes
but does not prove, and neglects the range of variation within and
around the average or typical. Once we begin to deal with distri-
butions, with variation and range, we must recognize that a second
weakness of this approach is that its descriptive language, the tech-
nical terms on which it is based, does not easily permit the precise
measurement and quantitative expression necessary to the study of
a distributive phenomenon. These deficiencies were largely reme-
died in another set of the wartime studies, particularly those by
Henry Dicks (1950) and David Levy ( 1 951) , which represent an
important landmark in the development of our understanding of
how personality relates to political action.

Dr. Dicks' work was in the main line of culture and personality
studies in that it considered personality in psychoanalytic terms and
was based on a general model of the German personality drawn from
a variety of cultural sources. In his case, however, what is generally
the conclusion of many studies was only the starting point. He went
beyond previous studies in three important respects: (i) the per-
sonality of each subject was explicitly scored on clearly specified
andcarefully defined variables; (2) the political orientation of each
person was also carefully measured in concrete terms; and (3) the
personality measures and the indices of political orientation were
systematically related to each other by standard statistical pro-
cedures. All this was done with clinical sensitivity, with use of gen-
eral theory, and without loss of contact with the more traditional
but impressionistic description of the German national character.

Dicks worked with a sample of 138 German soldiers taken as
prisoners of war between 1942 and 1944. On the basis of politically
focused interviews each man was classified on a five-point scale
running from "fanatical, wholehearted Nazi" to "active, convinced
anti-Nazi." In addition, on the basis of nominally free but in fact
highly focused psychiatrically oriented interviews, each man was
rated on 1 5 different psychosociological variables ranging from de-
gree of religiosity to presence or absence of schizoid features. Re-

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 185

lationships attaining a high degree of statistical significance (at the
.01 level or better) were obtained between Nazism and six of the
fifteen psychosocial variables. For example, those high on the scale
of Naziism showed a marked taboo against tenderness, were more
sadistic or antisocial, and were much more likely to engage in pro-
jection.

It is important to recognize that Dicks did not prove these or
any other characteristics to be generally present in German na-
tionals. He proved only that Nazis and near-Nazis were different
from non-Nazi Germans in a number of important respects. This
is not to say that Dicks did not attempt a general characterization
of the German personality. He could hardly have undertaken his
study without some such hypothetical model which, he assumed, the
Nazi "embodied in more exaggerated or concentrated form." The
typical German he described as having "an ambivalent, compulsive
character structure with the emphasis on submissive dominant con-
formity, a strong counter-cathexis of the virtues of duty, of 'con-
trol' by the self, especially buttressed by re-projected 'external'
super-ego symbols." Even though such individuals might be highly
•susceptible to the propaganda themes and the style of leadership
offered by the Nazis, it is also apparent that this character type
could freely support any one of a number of different sociopolitical
orders. Dr. Dicks' study is of particular value, therefore, in keeping
before us the awareness that in any national population there is
likely to be substantial variation in modal personality patterns, even
though for any given nation this variation may cover only a narrow
part of the world-wide range. Dicks' study also suggests that the
extreme political positions are those which are most likely to be
attractive to the extremes on the personality continuum. If the ex-
tremists seize power, the resulting political forms may or may not
be congruent with the dominant personality tendencies in the popu-
lation at large. It seems likely that this congruence was greater in
Hitlerite Germany than in Stalinist Russia.

Inkeles, Hanfmann, and Beier (1958) administered a battery of
tests including the Rorschach, TAT, sentence-completion test, and
others to a small sample (51 cases) of refugees from Soviet Russia
who departed during and just after World War II ( cf. Dicks 1952).
On this basis they constructed a composite national character por-
trait, differentiating a main modal pattern, a variant on it, and a
residual group. The subjects were also divided into four social
classes. The authors did not, unfortunately, relate the personality

186 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

characteristics of each individual directly to his mode of political
orientation. For the group as a whole, however, they related its
adjustment to the Soviet political system to each element of the
modal personality pattern — which included a strong need for af-
filiation, marked dependency needs, emotional expressiveness and
responsiveness, and resistance to being shamed for failures in imper-
sonal performance. The authors found, for example, that the per-
sistent shortages of food, shelter, and clothing which characterized
Soviet life under Stalin, aggravated the anxieties about oral depri-
vation which were frequently manifested in the Russian character.
In general, they concluded, "there was a high degree of incongru-
ence between the central personality modes and dispositions of
many Russians and . . . the behavior of the regime." This was most
marked, however, for those who represented the basic personality
mode, and was much less true for those whose personality reflected
a substantial departure from the modal pattern common to the
mass of peasants and workers.

Postwar Developments

Research in the period after World War II has been characterized
by two important developments : ( i ) improvements in the methods
for assessing personality on a large scale and (2) the application of
such methods on a cross-national or comparative basis.

If we require that national character studies be based on syste-
matic and objective study of personality, that they represent all the
diverse elements of national populations, and that they permit
meaningful comparison with results from other studies, we are in
effect calling for a transformation of the standard methodology of
the field. Such a demand made before 1940 would have been perhaps
not visionary, but hardly reasonable as a practical matter. The post-
war period, however, has seen the development and application of
means for the assessment of personality which enable us to measure
it with relative ease, and to do so with large representative samples.
There is reason to believe that at least some of these instruments
may be effectively used cross-nationally.

The effort to measure with some precision the personality traits
of entire national groups has a longer history than many suppose.
One of the earliest ventures in the use of a standard psychological
test to assess personality trends in a significantly large population
was the Bleulers' (1935) application of the Rorschach Ink-Blot test
to Moroccans in the thirties. The Bleulers administered the Rors-
chach to an unspecified number of "simple country folk" (half

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 187

Arab, half Berber) living in the vast plains of West Morocco. Their
characterization, based on the Rorschach records as measured
against their experience with the test in Europe, is full of comments
of the following order: the Moroccan lacks the typical European
"tendency to abstractive generalization;" his extroversion emerges
mainly in "a marked enthusiasm under the influence of momentary
events . . . but he lacks the systematic, energetic, and persevering
striving after outward success."

Of course we will wonder whether we can safely generalize these
comments to other Moroccans, and how much these patterns reflect
not Moroccan culture but rather the low level of education and the
relative isolation of these people. But more important for our pur-
poses is the question of the relevance of such qualities of character
for the ability to act as a good citizen in a stable political order of a
national state. The Bleulers' description typically makes no mention
of images of authority, civic consciousness, or other traits of obvi-
ous political relevance, and we do not have the knowledge to judge
whether the lack of a tendency to abstractive generalization is con-
ducive to good democratic citizenship or not. That these defects
of the typical Rorschach analysis of group personality are relatively
persistent may be observed by comparing the Bleulers' study with
later ventures, such as the study of the Chinese by Abel and Hsu
(1949) . Indeed, the Rorschach has come into serious question as an
instrument for systematic research into group traits (Carstairs,
Payne, and Whitaker i960) .

Probably the greatest influence on our thinking and practice in
the measurement of personality dimensions relevant to politics is
exerted by the now classic study of the authoritarian personality by
the Frankfurt Institut fiir Sozialforschung (Horkheimer 1936).
Erich Fromm played a major role in this group's development of the
concept of the authoritarian personality, which Adorno (1950)
and his associates carried forward in the United States both theo-
retically and methodologically. The main fruit of the California
group's investigation was the isolation, definition, and measurement
of a particular personality type, but the conception of that type
was initially derived from ideas about the distinctive psychological
coloration of authoritarian political creeds and movements.
Although the F scale ^ has been severely criticized because it can

The letter F was used with the scale to designate "susceptibility to Fascism." This sounds
more like a specifically political than a psychological measure, although the authors intended it
mainly as a measure of personality. This use of the term Fascism for the scale unfortunately
clouded the issue by seeming to prejudge the relation between measures of personality and those
of political orientation, or worse to suggest they were perhaps one and the same thing.

188 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

distinguish right authoritarians but permits left authoritarians to
escape notice (Christie 1954) , there can be no serious question but
that the psychological syndrome thus isolated is highly correlated
with extreme right-wing political attitudes.

The semipsychiatric interview which Dicks used requires special
talent to conduct, is difficult and expensive to code or score, and
must therefore be restricted to very small samples. By contrast the
F scale has the special virtue of great simplicity as a test instrument,
something unusual in the earlier efforts to measure personality
variables of theoretical interest and proved clinical significance.
The F scale thus made possible for the first time the simultaneous
collection of data on personality and on political orientations from
a fully representative national sample. Using a modified version of
the F scale, Janowitz and Marvick found that in the United States
those whose personality tended more toward authoritarianism were
also more markedly isolationist in foreign affairs (cf. Levinson
1957) . The more authoritarian also revealed a sense of political in-
effectiveness, that is, they believed themselves powerless to influence
government action. The conclusion reached by Janowitz and Mar-
vick is particularly noteworthy: ''Personality tendencies measured
by [an] authoritarian scale served to explain political behavior at
least as well as those factors [such as age, education, and class] tra-
ditionally included in political and voting behavior studies." ( 1953 :
201; also see Lane 1955.)

In addition to the F scale, there are other personality measures
suitable for administration to large samples and relevant to political
orientations, such as Rokeach's (1956) dogmatism scale and
Eysenck's (1954) classification of the tender minded and tough
minded. In their study of American automobile workers, Arthur
Kornhauser (1956) and his associates utilized measures not only of
authoritarianism but also of life satisfaction and social alienation or
"anomie." Those characterized by anomie showed little interest in
politics, and were much less likely to vote. When they did vote, they
tended to vote contrary to the prevailing sentiment among their fel-
low workers. Among numerous important findings in this rich and
interesting study was the discovery that authoritarianism is re-
lated to political extremism ivhether of the right or left. This as-
sumption gains support from a study of political orientations in
Iran. Despite their fundamental differences in political position, the
extreme rightists and extreme leftists were more like each other in
many social and behavioral characteristics — such as "level of social

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 189

detachment" and "breadth of social horizons" — than they were
Hke the more moderate groups of the pohtical center (Ringer and
Sills 1953).

In summarizing their detailed results, Kornhauser and his asso-
ciates reach a conclusion which accords well with the requirements
of our model of the democratic personality. They say: "The prob-
lem of democracy ... is partly the problem of maintaining an
adequate proportion of members who are capable of engaging in
the market place of proposals and counter-proposals, immune from
the feeling that 'the leader knows best' and from the temptation
to condone, or to resort to, desperate measures in times of social
and political crisis" (1956:249-250) .

Perhaps the most systematic effort to relate personality to politi-
cal inclinations is to be found in the pioneering study by Herbert
McClosky (1953) in which he sought to define the personality
characteristics of those taking positions along the continuum from
conservative to liberal politics. He unfortunately defines conserva-
tism not by party affiliation, but on the basis of agreement with a
set of normative propositions drawn from the works of leading,
modern, conservative spokesmen. These statements include items
such as: you can't change human nature; no matter what people
think, a few people will always run things anway; duties are more
important than rights. Using a rich battery of personality scales
developed at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere, he finds
that the extreme conservatives are sharply differentiated from both
the "liberals" and "moderate liberals" in being more submissive,
anomic, alienated, pessimistic, guilty, hostile, rigid, paranoid obses-
sive, intolerant of human frailty, and extremely ego-defensive. It
will be immediately apparent that the personality traits of the ex-
treme conservative or "reactionary" bear a very close relation to
those of the authoritarian personality, and at every point are polar
to the qualities described below in our model of the democratic per-
sonality.

It is unfortunately characteristic of McClosky 's study, and many
others in this field, that they are not comparative. This necessarily
leaves us in doubt as to whether in other countries or environments
the same traits of personality would also be associated with the same
kinds of political orientation. For example, Dr. Dicks' (1950)
study raises at once a question as to the uniqueness of the Nazi pat-
tern and the degree to which we can generalize his findings. Since
all of Dicks' comparisons were made within the German sample,

190 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

he is quite justified in saying that in Germany certain individual
characteristics are more associated with fascist poHtical leanings
than others. But his assumption that the Nazis are only extreme
variants of a more general or typical German character cannot be
taken as proved. On the basis of his sample he could hardly estab-
lish what the average or typical German is like, if he exists at all.
In any study restricted to one sample, we may easily be led into
assuming that the response which fits our preconception of the
group is distinctive to it, when in fact that response is quite com-
mon in other populations as well. For example, we would have
much more confidence in Schaffner's (1948) finding of extreme
authoritarianism in the typical German conception of the family
had he given his sentence completion test to at least one other com-
parable national group.

This defect was remedied in a number of studies conducted after
World War II. Indeed the postwar period is outstanding for the
development of more systematic comparative research. For example,
D. V. McGranahan (1946) put a number of questions on basic
issues — such as obedience to authority under duress, and freedom
of the press even when not "for the good of the people" — to com-
parable samples of American and German boys. In the latter case
he made a distinction by political orientation between Nazis, neu-
trals, and anti-Nazis. The German youth distinctly favored obedi-
ence to authority more often than the Americans, showed less faith
in the common man, and were more admiring of people with po-
litical or military power. In general these findings fit our expecta-
tion with regard to the greater emphasis on democratic values in
American as against German society. But it is crucial to note that
within the German group, those classified as anti-Nazi were on
some questions closer to the Americans than to their Nazi-oriented
compatriots.

Of course, no simple conclusions can be drawn from one such
study standing alone. For example, when the same questions were
given by Stoodley (1957) to a more or less comparable group of
youths from the Philippines, he found that on some dimensions
they were closer to the Germans, on others, to the Americans, thus
yielding a distinctive national profile. Unfortunately, he did not
inquire into the relation of these attitudes to political orientation,
which would have enabled us to judge whether the same value
orientations which made for Nazism in Germany made for com-
parable antidemocratic leanings in the Philippines.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 191

Gillespie and Allport ( 1955 ) studied hopes for the future among
college students in several countries. Although they did not inquire
directly into political beliefs, several of the topics they dealt with
are clearly relevant to an evaluation of the strength of tendencies
toward various forms of active "citizenship." They reported the
Japanese to be outstanding in their "sense of obligation to the social
group in which they live." The Japanese were, for example, first
among all countries in saying they would seek to inculcate in their
children such qualities as good citizenship, social usefulness, and
service to society {cf. Stoetzel 1955) . On this and similar questions
Americans were near the bottom of the list. They "emphasized
their rights rather than their duties and in all presented a picture
of individuality, separation from the social context of living, and
privatization of values and personal plans" (1955:29). The New
Zealanders presented a profile quite similar to that of the Ameri-
cans, but we cannot say whether this results from their common
Anglo-Saxon heritage, the common experience of setthng a new
continent, or some combination of these and similar influences.
These findings are well in accord with the conclusions of earlier,
more impressionistic studies of American and Japanese character.
They are none the less welcome for providing firm confirmation of
these hypotheses.

Despite such promising starts there seems to be great hesitation
to undertake systematic comparative studies. The hesitation to
apply methods of personality testing cross-nationally arises not
merely from the magnitude and cost of the task, admittedly sub-
stantial, but in large part from resistance, skepticism, and outright
rejection of the possibility of reliable and valid cross-national test-
ing of opinions, values, and personality traits. We should not mini-
mize the substantial technical difficulties facing any such effort. But
the objections often offered to such attempts seem exaggerated, and
in any event the appropriate response is to accept the challenge
and attempt the necessary methodological innovation. By way of
encouragement we may note that a number of studies have shown
that certain tests can be used cross-nationally with a high degree of
reliability. In a study for UNESCO (Cantril and Buchanan 1953)
conducted in nine countries it was found that most questions had
the same meaning in all the countries studied, and that the opin-
ions related to each other in one setting were similarly correlated in
the others. For example, in each country those who believed human
nature can be changed were also more likely to believe that national

192 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

characteristics arise from the way in which people are brought up.
Indeed the same syndrome, or complex pattern of attitudes, was
represented in all countries. One group in each country, who might
be called the optimists, believed human nature perfectible, national
character pliable, world peace attainable, and world organization
desirable. The pessimists, or fatalists, believed there would always
be wars, human nature cannot be changed, and that efforts at im-
proving the international situation are bound to fail.

The UNESCO study, of course, dealt more with opinions than
with deeper lying attitudes and facets of personality, but we are not
limited to that level. In an important study of values which Charles
Morris (1956) conducted in the United States, India, and China,
he discovered that in each country the ratings of individual ques-
tions were made along the same common value dimensions and
that "there is thus revealed an underlying value structure (or value
space) which is very much the same in the culturally diverse groups
of students." In addition, the relation of the value factors to other
issues was much the same in each culturally distinct group. For
example, those individuals whose values centered on receptivity to
and sympathetic concern for others tended, in all three countries, to
dislike or reject the operative values of the political world, as meas-
ured by the Allport-Vernon scale.

Similar results are reported in the use of a personality test which
presumably taps deeper-lying strata of the personality. In a com-
parative study of teachers in seven European countries it was found
that the same items of the F scale designed to test authoritarianism
tended to cohere and form a pattern in all of the countries studied.*'
In addition, the research uncovered high consistency in the way in
which orientations toward threatening situations in both domestic
and international politics were patterned in the several countries.
But at the same time the authors offer us some sobering words of
caution regarding the difficulties facing such comparative studies.
They found "many of the relationships vary in size, direction, and
significance in different countries . . . modified by specific national
and international situational factors — by the historically given
structures of political forces, by the dominant policies, by majority-
minority relations, by the ongoing communication processes in the
mass media and in the larger organizations" (Aubert et al. 1954:
38).

'' Personal communication from Drs. D. J. Levinson and Stem Rokkan. The data were col-
lected in the study reported in Aubert, 1954.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN VOLITICAL SYSTEMS 193

TOWARD THE DELINEATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC CHARACTER

It is apparent that we have made at least a modest beginning in
studying the relation of personality patterns to the development
and maintenance of political systems. There is substantial and rather
compelling evidence of a regular and intimate connection between
personality and the mode of political participation by individuals
and groups within any one political system. In many different in-
stitutional settings and in many parts of the world, those who ad-
here to the more extreme political positions have distinctive per-
sonality traits separating them from those taking more moderate
positions in the same setting. The formal or explicit "content" of
one's political orientation — left or right, conservative or radical,
pro- or antilabor — may be determined mainly by more "extrinsic"
characteristics such as education and social class; but the form or
style of political expression — favoring force or persuasion, com-
promise or arbitrary dictation, being tolerant or narrowly preju-
diced, flexible in policy or rigidly dogmatic — is apparently largely
determined by personality. At least this seems clear with regard to
the political extremes. It is not yet certain whether the same char-
acteristics make for extremism in all national groups and institu-
tional settings, but that also seems highly likely.

Prominent among the traits which make for extremism appear
to be the following: exaggerated faith in powerful leaders and in-
sistence on absolute obedience to them; hatred of outsiders and
deviates; excessive projection of guilt and hostility; extreme cyni-
cism; a sense of powerlessness and ineffectiveness (alienation and
anqmie) ; suspicion and distrust of others; and dogmatism and
rigidity. Some of these terms have been or will be shown to be
merely alternative designations of the same phenomenon, but some
such general syndrome of authoritarianism, dogmatism, and aliena-
tion undoubtedly is the psychological root of that political extrem-
ism which makes this type actively or potentially disruptive to
democratic systems.

If political extremism is indeed an accompaniment — and even
more a product — of a certain personality syndrome, and if this syn-
drome produces the equivalent extremism in all national popula-
tions and subgroups, that fact poses a considerable challenge to
the student of national character in its relation to political systems.
At once we face this question: Are the societies which have a long
history of democracy peopled by a majority of individuals who

194 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

possess a personality conducive to democracy? Alternatively, are so-
cieties which have experienced recurrent or prolonged authori-
tarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian government inhabited by a
proportionately large number of individuals with the personality
traits we have seen to be associated with extremism? In other words,
can we move from the individual and group level, to generalize
about the relations of personality and political system at the societal
level?

Almost all the modern students of national character are con-
vinced that the answer to this question is in the affirmative. Syste-
matic empirical evidence for this faith is unfortunately lacking.
To prove the point we would be required to show that the qualities
of personality presumably supportive or less destructive of democ-
racy are more widely prevalent in stable democracies such as the
United States, England, Switzerland, or Sweden than in Germany,
Japan, Italy, or Russia. At the present time we cannot offer such
proof. We will continue to be unable to settle this question until
we undertake nation-wide studies of modal personality patterns —
such as we do of literacy or per capita income — and test their rela-
tion to the forms of political organization in various countries.
Before we undertake such studies we must have some conception of
the character types for which we are looking.

The problem of defining anything as broad as "the democratic
character" may be much like the problem of locating the Manches-
ter economists' "economic man" who Unamuno somewhere de-
scribed as "a man neither of here nor there, neither this age nor an-
other, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an
idea — that is to say, a 'no-man.' "

The danger of excessive generality in defining the democratic
character is not greater than the danger of "misplaced concrete-
ness," that is, defining the characterological requirements of atiy
democracy as identical with those of some particular people who
have a strong democratic tradition. For example, it has been true
of the great majority of commentaries on the people of the United
States, going back to its earliest days, that "practicality" and "em-
phasis on religion" have been consistently cited as American traits
(Coleman 1941 ) . Yet it would be difficult to argue that either qual-
ity is a sufficient or even a necessary requirement for effective citi-
zenship in a democracy. The same may be said of other traits fre-
quently cited as characterizing the American people, such as
valuing success and achievement, which are also strongly empha-

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 195

sized in Japanese culture, or the marked emphasis on activity
and work, which is also commonly cited as typifying the German
character.

While observing these cautions, we should not avoid postulating
certain qualities which are probably indispensable to the long-run
maintenance of a democratic political order. In holding this view
we do no more than did De Tocqueville. De Tocqueville weighed
the role of geography and climate, of religion and political institu-
tions, and finally of what he called "manners," meaning thereby
"various notions and opinions current among men . . . the mass of
those ideas which constitute their character of mind . . . the whole
moral and intellectual condition of a people." Comparing Mexico,
South America, and the United States in these terms, he concluded:
"The manners [character] of the Americans of the United States
are the real cause which renders it the only one of the American na-
tions that is able to support a democratic government ... I should
say that the physical circumstances are less efficient than the laws,
and the laws very subordinate to the manners [character] of the
people" (1947:213).

De Tocqueville's insistence that the maintenance of democracy
depends upon the primacy of certain popular values, and what we
would today call character traits, has often been reaffirmed since by
numerous authorities including men as widely separated in formal
philosophical allegiance as Sidney Hook and Jacques Maritain.'^
What specific qualities do we then require in a people as a neces-
sary condition for the maintenance of a democratic political order?
Even a casual content analysis of any sampling of opinion on the
democratic society reveals an extraordinary degree of agreement
about the values, attitudes, opinion and traits of character which are
important to its maintenance. The various formulations may be
summed up by reference to conceptions about others, about the
self, about authority, and about community and society.

Values about the Self. All authorities are agreed that demo-
cratic societies require widespread belief in what Maritain calls the
"inalienable rights of the person," and Hook "the belief that every

' Hook has said, for example, "Democracy is an affirmation of certain attitudes and values
which are more important than any particular set of institutions" (i9jo:294). Maritain argues
that "the democratic impulse burst forth in history as a temporal manifestation of the gospel"
and says directly that the democratic ideal "is the secular name for the ideal of Christianity"
(1944:65). It does not seem necessary or desirable to clutter the text in the remainder of this
section with source and page citations for each of the numerous quotations. In addition to the
cited works of Hook and Maritain the main sources are Lasswell (1951) and De Tocqueville
('947)-

196 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

individual should be regarded as possessing intrinsic worth or dig-
nity." "Where low estimates of the self are permitted to develop,"
says Harold Lasswell, "there the democratic character cannot de-
velop."

Orientation toward Others. The basic dignity not only of the
self but of all others is an essential ingredient cited by virtually
every theory on the democratic character. This particularly mani-
fests itself in the concept of equality, under which Hook includes
recognition "that equal opportunities of development should be
provided for the realization of individual talents and capacities."
To hold this view one must have a basic acceptance of other people.
In Lasswell's words: "The democratic attitude toward other hu-
man beings is warm rather than frigid, inclusive and expanding
rather than exclusive and constricting ... an underlying personal-
ity structure which is capable of 'friendship' as Aristotle put it,
and which is unalienated from humanity." Underlying these atti-
tudes is a fundamental conception of the perfectibility of man,
which De Tocqueville phrased as the belief "that a man will be
led to do what is just and good by following his own interest rightly
understood."

Orientation toward Authority. At the core of the democratic
personality lies a stress on personal autonomy and a certain distance
from, if not distrust of, powerful authority, or, to put it negatively,
an absence of the need to dominate or submit such as is found in
the authoritarian personality. As Sidney Hook phrased it: "a posi-
tive requirement of a working democracy is an intelligent distrust
of its leadership, a skepticism stubborn but not blind, of all demands
for the enlargement of power, and an emphasis upon critical
method in every phase of social life . . . Where skepticism is replaced
by uncritical enthusiasm ... a fertile soil for dictatorship has been
prepared." Almost identical language is used by Maritain. Maritain
described the democratic philosophy as one insisting on the "po-
litical rights of the people whose consent is implied by any political
regime, and whose rulers rule as vicars of the people ... it denies to
the rulers the right to consider themselves and be considered a su-
perior race and wills nevertheless that their authority be respected
on a juridical basis. It does not admit that the state is a transcendent
power incorporating within itself all authority and imposed from
above upon human life . . ." The same idea is stressed by Lasswell
who says: "the democratic character is multi-valued rather than
single valued . . . disposed to share rather than to monopolize. In

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 197

particular, little significance is attached to the exercise of power
as a scope value . . . [for] when the demand for respect is the con-
suming passion, other values are sacrificed for the sake of receiving
symbolic acknowledgments of eminence."

Attitudes toward the Community. Although overweaning au-
thority may be controlled, there is always the danger of that
tyranny of the majority which De Tocqueville early warned might
undo democracy. This realization has repeatedly led those who
sought to define the democratic character to stress the importance
of openness, ready acceptance of differences, and wilhngness to
compromise and change. De Tocqueville early anticipated this
point, as he did so many others. Stressing the belief "that every man
is born of the right of self-government, and that no one has the
right of constraining his fellow creatures to be happy," he went on
to say we must recognize "society as a body in a state of improve-
ment, [and] humanity as a changing scene in which nothing is or
ought to be permanent." Hook also speaks of the importance of
"a belief in the value of differences, variety, and uniqueness in a
democracy [where] differences of interest and achievement must
not be merely suffered, they must be encouraged." According to
Hook this requires that the ultimate commitment of a democracy
must be in some method by which value conflicts are to be resolved,
which in turn means that policies must be treated as hypotheses,
not dogmas, and customary practices as generalizations rather than
as God-given truths.

It will be apparent from this extremely brief review that there
is substantial agreement about the core personal beliefs and values
which have been frequently identified as important to the main-
tenance of a democratic order. The relevant "themes" can, of
course, be integrated into the personality at different levels. They
may reflect opinions publicly held, but not vitally important to the
person. They may represent basic attitudes or central values in the
belief system, typical "ideologies" to which the individual has deep
allegiance. Or they may be even more "deeply" embedded in the
personality at the level of character traits and modes of psycho-
dynamic functioning. Most of the outstanding writers on the demo-
cratic character do not trouble to distinguish these "levels." I have
not attempted above to sort them out, and merely note here that
most of the characterizations given above are statements at the level
of ideology. We can, however, translate or transform the classic
portrait of the democratic character to present it in the language of

198 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

clinical psychology, expressed in terms of character traits, defenses,
ways of dealing with wishes and feelings, and the like. In those
terms, the democratic character emerges at the opposite pole from
the authoritarian personality syndrome. The citizen of a democracy
should be accepting of others rather than alienated and harshly
rejecting; open to new experience, to ideas and impulses rather
than excessively timid, fearful, or extremely conventional with re-
gard to new ideas and ways of acting; able to be responsible with
constituted authority even though always watchful, rather than
blindly submissive to or hostily rejecting of all authority; tolerant
of differences and of ambiguity, rather than rigid and inflexible;
able to recognize, control, and channel his emotions, rather than
immaturely projecting hostility and other impulses on to others.
This model of the democratic personality represents only a very
rough first approximation. Although it is based on a great deal of
philosophical wisdom and historical experience, by the standards
of modern social science it rests on an extremely narrow and un-
certain base of empirical research. Indeed, it might be argued that
at the present moment there is no relevant evidence which meets
the standards set by contemporary social science research. It is
largely to the future that we must look for refinement of the model,
and for testing of its actual relevance for political systems and
popular participation in them. No doubt some elements in the
model will be discarded, others added. It may even be discovered
that some one element is critical, all the others incidental or even
irrelevant. In the present stage of our work it is important to avoid
premature closure through the exclusive concentration on one con-
ceptual scheme for analyzing personality. It is true that earlier
efforts which accepted publicly offered opinions, attitudes, and
values as guides to the individual's probable political action were
often naive and misleading. Nevertheless, an analysis couched ex-
clusively in terms of psychodynamic depth psychology, of defenses,
projective tendencies, and the like may also leave out much which
is of great significance in shaping the pattern of political Hfe. We
cannot be satisfied with a scheme of personality analysis which is
insensitive to themes such as self-centeredness or "privatism" which
Gillespie and Allport (1955) found so important in distinguishing
the students from different countries in their study. Nor can we
be content with an analysis of the "compulsive" German character
(Kecskemeti 1947) if it leads us to neglect the feelings of obligation
to self and society (McClelland 1958).

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 199

Whatever the defects of the available scheme, the use of some
explicit model is essential to focus our studies in this area. It is also
a necessary condition for the meaningful comparison of different
studies, and particularly for our efforts to cumulate the results in
ever firmer generalizations or conclusions. We must particularly
regret, therefore, that so few of the empirical investigations into the
relations of character and political systems have sought systemati-
cally to test the model of the democratic character presented above,
or, for that matter, any other explicit model.

SOME PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

With very few exceptions, the available studies of modal or group
personality unfortunately suffer from several defects which make
them poor evidence in support of any systematic proposition. As a
rule they are not designed to test any theory or validate any model.
They are usually based on very small and haphazardly selected sam-
ples, making it extremely difficult to generalize with any confidence
beyond the sample itself or the narrow circle from which it is drawn.
In addition, the analysis is usually based on the total sample, with-
out basic differentiation of the characteristics of subgroups,
whether deviant or merely variant. More serious for our purposes
is the fact that the description of personality is generally cast in
clinical or psychodynamic terms which are difficult to relate to so-
cial structure. Even in the rare cases when a study has given atten-
tion to the more politically relevant realms of personality such as
attitude toward authority, tolerance of ambiguity, acceptance of
differences, and the need for power, it generally fails to record in-
formation on the political attitudes and opinions, the party affili-
ation, or other political characteristics of the subjects. Most of these
studies, therefore, are obviously of limited usefulness to the student
of politics. Only in the last few years have we attained the first,
limited personality inventory of a representative sample of the na-
tional population of the United States — and this applies only to the
F scale, as we have already noted, and more recently to the TAT
variables of n affiliation, achievement, and power.^ There are ap-
parently no comparable results on these or any other dimensions for
any other modern nation, and it will undoubtedly be many years

^ The test was administered in connection with the national survey sponsored by the Joint
Commission on Mental Illness and Health and conducted by the Survey Research Center of the
University of Michigan. Reports on this material are in preparation by Gerald Gurin, Joseph
Veroff, and John Atkinson.

200 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

before we have such results for a number of major nations simul-
taneously.

Even when we attain good data on the distribution of personality
traits in a number of national populations, a great many questions
will remain. For example, we will need to understand better the
relation between personality dispositions in the rank and file of a
population, and their orientation to different kinds of leadership.
The decisive factor affecting the chances of preserving democracy
may not be the prevalence of one or another undemocratic per-
sonality type, but rather the relation between the typical or aver-
age personality and that of the leaders. It is highly unlikely that any
character type will be found to be invariably associated with a single
form of political system. Nevertheless, certain personality types
may indeed be more responsive to one than to another form of gov-
ernment. Their character, then, may be an important determinant
of their susceptibility to certain kinds of influence. Thus, Dicks
does not argue for the propensity toward authoritarian government
per se in the German character. The typical German character de-
lineated by Dicks was a type highly susceptible to the style of leader-
ship the Hitler movement offered and extremely vulnerable to the
kind of propaganda appeals it utilized. Much the same conclusion
is suggested by Erikson's (1950) analysis of the German character
and Hitler's appeal to it. Neither analysis should be interpreted as
suggesting that the German character, as described, could not under
any circumstances adjust to or function in any democratic politi-
cal order. McClelland's analysis (1958) of the distinctive structure
of obligations to self and society in Germany and the United States
is particularly interesting for the light it throws on this question.

Whatever the distribution of personality types, including leaders,
in any population, we will want to know what produces the types.
This enormously complex problem is one I have been obliged by
limits of space to ignore almost entirely, although it is one of the
most fundamental facing the field. The predominant opinion
among students of national character is that these types arise mainly
out of the socialization process, and that in democratic societies
the family structure is one which generates individuals adapted to
life in a democracy. The typical argument was forcefully stated
by Ralph Linton when he declared: "Nations with authoritarian
family structure inevitably seem to develop authoritarian govern-
ments, no matter what the official government forms may be. Latin
American countries with their excellent democratic constitutions

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 201

and actual dictatorships would be a case in point" (1951:146).

Linton's opinion is not uniformly held. On the basis of a thor-
ough review of a great deal of relevant empirical research, Herbert
Hyman (1959) poses a formidable challenge to this assumption
and suggests a number of other factors — particularly experiences
in adulthood — which may account for the political orientations we
observe in certain groups. Even after we secure data on the distri-
bution of personality characteristics in large populations, there will
be much work to be done in discovering what produces the propen-
sity to extremism, how it operates, and what — if anything —
changes or modifies it.

Another problem we must face is the relation between personal-
ity factors and other forces which affect the political process (cf.
Levinson 1958). To analyze political participation and political
structures through a study of personality and its statistical distri-
bution is, of course, only one of the possible avenues of approach to
the problem. Clearly, political institutions and political action can
not be comprehended exclusively or even predominantly by refer-
ence to attitudes and values. The history of a people obviously plays
a major role in shaping the basic structure of their political institu-
tions. And institutional frameworks, once established, may have an
endurance much greater than the formal allegiance to their prin-
ciples would have indicated. Indeed, once firmly established, insti-
tutions have the capacity to develop or generate support among
those whose early disposition would hardly have led them to move
spontaneously in that direction.

A recent extensive comparative study by S. M. Lipset (1959) of
the relation between a complex of factors including industrializa-
tion, urbanization, literacy, education, and wealth, reveals that they
are highly correlated not only with each other, but also with the
existence of stable democratic systems.® None of these factors cited
by Lipset is at all psychological or attitudinal, but it is interesting
to note that in seeking to understand why these factors play such
a role, Lipset had to fall back from these more ''objective" to more
subjective causes, in particular to such concepts as the "effective-
ness" and the "legitimacy" of a political system in the eyes of its
constituents. By effectiveness he means the capacity to satisfy the

*De Tocqueville made the same point: "Their ancestors gave [the people of the United States]
the love of equality and of freedom, but God himself gave them the means of remaining equal
and free by placing them on a boundless continent . . . When the people rules it must be
rendered happy or it will overthrow the state, and misery is apt to stimulate it to those ex-
cesses to which ambition rouses kings" (1947:185).

202 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

basic interests of most members of society, or of the most important
groups in it, and by legitimacy "the capacity of a pohtical system
to engender and maintain the behef that existing pohtical institu-
tions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society"
(1960:77). Surely the tolerance of ambiguity, the readiness for
compromise, the level of projectivity characteristic of a people or
important subgroups, will play a major role in shaping the "ef-
fectiveness" of the political system and even its freedom of action
to be effective. The value placed on autonomy versus control and
direction, the strength of needs for power or achievement, the wish
for dominance or subordination, the orientation toward authority
figures, will all clearly play an important part in determining
whether a particular political system is felt by people to be legiti-
mate or not.

Although further refinements are needed, it is not likely that we
will make any further unusual leaps along the line of analysis which
Lipset has so diligently pursued. By contrast, the role of psycho-
logical factors — of attitudes, values, and character traits — in in-
fluencing the political process is an almost virgin field which prom-
ises a rich harvest. To secure it we must overcome imposing but by
no means insuperable obstacles. We need to clarify our concepts,
isolating or delineating those personal characteristics which, on
theoretical grounds, seem to have the greatest relevance for the
development and functioning of the political system. We must also
refine our analysis of the political system, so that our descriptive
categories are maximally analytical and conducive to comparative
study. Our next step must be to assess systematically the distribu-
tion of these qualities in different national populations and in im-
portant subgroups of those populations. This poses one of the moist
difficult methodological problems, since the meaning of important
terms, the pattern of response to tests, and the interpretation of
those responses are highly variable as we move from country to
country. On this base we can then proceed to correlational and
causal analyses of the relations between opinions, values, and per-
sonality on the one hand, and the quality of political participation
and the stability of political structures on the other. We may thus
develop a comparative social psychology of the political process to
support and supplement our traditional study of politics.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 203

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Theodora M. and Francis L. K. Hsu

1949 Some aspects of personality of Chinese as revealed by the Rorschach
test. Rorschach Research Exchange and Journal of Projective Tech-
niques 13:285—301.

Adorno, T. W., E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson and R. N. Sanford

1950 The authoritarian personality. New York, Harper and Bros.
Almond, Gabriel A.

1950 The American people and foreign policy. New York, Harcourt Brace.
1956 Comparative political systems. The Journal of Politics 18:391-409,
AuBERT, ViLLEM, B. R. FiSHER and Stein Rokkan

1954 A comparative study of teachers' attitudes to international problems
and policies. Journal of Social Issues 10:25—39.
Bauer, Raymond A.

1953 Psychology of the Soviet middle elite. In Personality in nature, society,
and culture, Kluckhohn, Murray, and Schneider, eds. New York, Alfred
Knopf.
Benedict, Ruth

1934 Patterns of culture. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

1943 Race: science and politics (rev. ed. ). New York, Viking Press.
1946 The chrysanthemum and the sword. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
Bleuler, M. and R.

1935 Rorschach's ink-blot test and racial psychology: mental peculiarities
of Moroccans. Character and Personality 4:97—114.

Boas, Franz

1 9 10 Psychological problems in anthropology. American Journal of Psy-
chiatry 21:371—384.
Brickner, Richard M.

1943 Is Germany incurable? Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott.
Brogan, D. W.

1933 Government of the people, a study in the American political system.
New York, Harper and Bros.

1944 The American character. New York, Alfred Knopf.
Buchanan, W. and H. Cantril

1953 How nations see each other, a study in public opinion. Urbana, 111.,
University of Illinois Press.

Campbell, Angus, G. Gurin and "W. E. Miller

1954 The voter decides. Evanston, 111., Row, Peterson.
Carstairs, G. M., R. W. Payne and S. Whitaker

i960 Rorschach responses of Hindus and Bhils. Journal of Social Psychology

51 :2i7— 227.
Christie, Richard and M. Jahoda, ed.

1954 The authoritarian personality: studies in continuities in social research.

Glencoe, 111., Free Press.

204 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Coleman, Lee

1 94 1 What is American: a study of alleged American traits. Social Forces
19:492-499.

CoMMAGER, Henry Steele, ed.

1947 America in perspective, the United States through foreign eyes. New
York, Random House,

Da vies, James C.

1954 Charisma in the 1952 campaign. American Political Science Review
48:1083—1 102.
Dicks, Henry V.

1950 Personality traits and national socialist ideology, a war-time study of

German prisoners of war. Human Relations 3:11 1— 1 54.
1952 Observations on contemporary Russian behavior. Human Relations
5:111-175.
Eysenck, H. J.

1954 The psychology of politics. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fortes, Meyer and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed.

1940 African political systems. London and New York, Oxford University
Press.

Fromm, Erich

1 94 1 Escape from freedom. New York, Farrar and Rinehart.

Gillespie, James M. and Gordon W. Allport

1955 Youth's outlook on the future: a cross-national study. Garden City,
New York, Doubleday.

GoRER, Geoffrey

1943 Themes in Japanese culture. Transactions of the New York Academy
of Sciences Ser. II, 5, 106-124.

1948 The American people, a study in national character. New York, W. W.
Norton.

1955 Exploring English character. London, Cresset Press.

GoRER, Geoffrey and John Rickman

1949 The people of Great Russia, a psychological study. London, Cresset
Press.

Haring, Douglas G.

1948 Personal character and cultural milieu. Syracuse, N.Y., Syracuse Uni-
versity Press. (3ded. 1956.)

Hearnshaw, F. J. C.

1940 Germany, the aggressor throughout the ages. London, W. and R.
Chambers.

Herz, Frederick

1944 Nationality in history and politics. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Honigmann, John J.

1954 Culture and personality. New York, Harper and Bros.

Hook, Sidney

1950 Reason, social myths, and democracy. New York, Humanities Press.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 205

HORKHEIMER, Max, ed.

1936 Studien uber authoritiit und familie. Paris, Alcan.
Hsu, Francis L. K.

1953 Americans and Chinese: two ways of life. New York, Schuman.
Inkeles, Alex and D. J. Levinson

1954 National character: the study of modal personality and sociocultural
systems. In Handbook of social psychology, vol. II, G. Lindzey, ed.
Cambridge, Addison-Wesley.

Inkeles, Alex, Eugenia Hanfmann and Helen Beier

1958 Modal personality and adjustment to the Soviet socio-economic system.
Human Relations 11:1—22.

Jaensch, Erich R.

1938 Der gegentypus. Leipzig, Barth.

Janowitz, Morris and D. Marvick

1953 Authoritarianism and political behavior. Public Opinion Quarterly
17:185—201.

Kardiner, Abram

1945 The psychological frontiers of society. New York, Columbia University
Press.

Kardiner, Abram and L. Ovesey

195 I The mark of oppression: a psychosocial study of the American Negro.
New York, Norton.

Kecskemeti, Paul and Nathan Leites

1947 Some psychological hypotheses on Nazi Germany. Journal of Social
Psychology, I 1947 26:141—183; II 1948 27:91-117; III 1948 27:
241—270; IV 1948 28:141 — 164.

Klineberg, Otto

1944 A science of national character. Journal of Social Problems 19:147-162.
195 I Psychological aspects of international relations. In Personality and po-
litical crisis, Alfred H. Stanton and Stewart E. Perry, eds. Glencoe,
111., Free Press.

Kluckhohn, Clyde and Henry Murray

1953 Personality in nature, society, and culture. New York, Alfred Knopf.
(Rev. ed., with David Schneider, 1956.)

Kornhauser, Arthur, H. L. Sheppard and A. J. Mayer

1956 When labor votes, a study of auto workers. New York, University
Books.

Kornhauser, William

1959 The politics of mass society. Glencoe, 111., Free Press.

Krout, Maurice H. and Ross Stagner

1939 Personality development in radicals: a comparative study. Sociometry
2:31-46.

Lane, R. E.

1955 Political personality and electoral choice. American Political Science
Review 49:173—190.

206 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Lasswell, Harold D.

1930 Psychopathology and politics. In The political writings of Harold D.

Lasswell. Glencoe, 111., Free Press, 195 1.
195 1 Democratic character. In The political writings of Harold D. Lasswell.

Glencoe, 111., Free Press.
1959 Political constitution and character. Psychoanalysis and the Psycho-
analytic Review 46:3—18.
Leites, Nathan C.

1948 Psychocultural hypotheses about political acts. World Politics i:

102— 1 19.
195 1 The operational code of the politburo. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Lerner, Daniel

1958 The passing of traditional society; modernizing the Middle East. Glen-
coe, 111., Free Press.
Levinson, Daniel J.

1957 Authoritarian personality and foreign policy. Conflict Resolution i:

37-47-

1958 The relevance of personality for political participation. Public Opinion
Quarterly 22:3—10.

Levy, David M.

195 1 Anti-Nazis: criteria of differentiation. In Personality and political crisis,
Alfred H. Stanton and Stewart E. Perry, eds. Glencoe, 111., Free Press.
Linton, Ralph

1945 The cultural background of personality. New York, D. Appleton-

Century.
195 1 The concept of national character. In Personality and political crisis,
Alfred H. Stanton and Stewart E. Perry, eds. Glencoe, Illinois, Free
Press.
LiPSET, S. M.

1959 Some social requisites of democracy: economic development and po-
litical legitimacy. American Political Science Review 53:69—105.

i960 Pohtical man: the social bases of politics. Garden City, New York,
Doubleday.
LuRiE, "Walter A.

1937 A study of Spranger's value-types by the method of factor analysis.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 8:17-37.
Madariaga, Salvador de

1929 Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards: an essay in comparative psychology.
London, Oxford University Press.

Mannheim, Karl

1950 Freedom, power and democratic planning. New York, Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Maritain, Jacques

1944 Christianity and democracy. New York, Scribners.
McClelland, David, J. F. Sturr, R. H. Knapp and H. W. Wendt

1958 Obligations to self and society in the United States and Germany.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 56:245-255.

NATIONAL CHARACTER, MODERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS 207

McCloskey, Herbert

1953 Conservatism and personality. American Political Science Review 52:

27-45-
McGranahan, Donald V.

1946 A comparison of social attitudes among American and German youth.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41:245-257.

McGranahan, Donald V. and I. Wayne

1948 German and American traits reflected in popular drama. Human Re-
lations 1:429-455.

Mead, Margaret

1942 And keep your powder dry. New York, William Morrow.
195 1 Soviet attitudes toward authority. New York, McGraw-Hill.

Merriam, Charles E.

1925 New aspects of politics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Selec-
tions reprinted in H. Eulau, S. J. Eldersveld and M. Janowitz, PoUtical
behavior. Glencoe, 111., Free Press, 1956.

Michels, Robert

1949 Political parties. Translated by Eden and A. Paul. Glencoe, 111., Free
Press.

Mills, Charles W.

1956 The power eHte. New York, Oxford University Press.

Moore, Henry T.

1925 Innate factors in radicalism and conservatism. Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology 20:234-244.

Morris, Charles W.

1942 Paths of life; preface to a world religion. New York, Harper and Bros.

Morris, Charles W.

1956 Varieties of human value. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose

1937 Invertebrate Spain. New York, W. W. Norton.

Peak, Helen

1945 Observations on the characteristics and distribution of German Nazis.
Psychological Monographs vol. 59, no. 6, whole no. 276.

Ringer, Benjamin B. and David L. Sills

1952-53 Political extremists in Iran. Public Opinion Quarterly 16:689-701.

RoKEACH, Milton

1956 Political and religious dogmatism: an alternative to the authoritarian
personality. Psychological Monographs vol. 70, no. 18, whole no. 425.

SCHAFFNER, BERTRAM H.

1949 Father land: a study of authoritarianism in the German family. New
York, Columbia University Press.

Sforza, Carlo

1942 The real Italians: a study in European psychology. New York, Colum-
bia University Press.

208 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Siegfried, Andre

1927 America comes of age. New York, Harcourt Brace.

1930 France: a study in nationality. New Haven, Yale University Press.
195 I Approaches to an understanding of modern France. In Modern France,
Edward M. Earle, ed. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Spranger, Eduard

1928 Types of men. Tubingen, Max Neimeyer, Verlag-halle.
Stoetzel, Jean

1955 Without the chrysanthemum and the sword. New York, Columbia
University Press UNESCO.
Stoodley, Bartlett H.

1957 Normative attitudes of Filipino youth compared with German and
American youth. American Sociological Review 22:553—561.
Stouffer, Samuel A.

1955 Communism, conformity and civil liberties; a cross section of the
nation speaks its mind. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.

ToCQUEVILLE, AlEXIS DE

1947 Democracy in America. New York and London, Oxford University
Press.
Wallas, Graham

1908 Human nature in politics. London. Selections reprinted in H. Eulau,
S. J. Eldersveld, and M. Janowitz, Political behavior. Glencoe, 111., Free
Press, 1956.
Wolfenstein, M. and N. Leites

1950 Movies: a psychological study. Glencoe, 111., Free Press.

chapter 7

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND
NATIONAL CHARACTER*

FRANCIS L. K. HSU

Northwestern University

In approaching the subject of American national character, stu-
dents have experienced some unusual difficulties. What they have
done so far is either to present pictures of contradictions with little
or no attempt to reconcile the opposing elements, or to construct
models of what, in their view, ought to be, with little or no attempt
to deal with what actually occurs. In this chapter I shall try to
show that the difficulties are not insurmountable, that the contra-
dictions, though numerous, are more apparent than real, and that,
even the models of what ought to be, though different from reality,
can be meaningful once we achieve a proper perspective.

A Picture of Contradictions

After comprehensive sampling of the literature from early times
down to 1940, Lee Coleman lists the following as "American traits":
"associational activity, democracy and belief and faith in it, belief
in the equality of all as a fact and as a right, freedom of the indi-
vidual in ideal and in fact, disregard of law — direct action, local
government, practicality, prosperity and general material well-
being, Puritanism, emphasis on religion and its great influence in
national life, uniformity and conformity (Coleman 194 1 1498) .

It is clear at once that this list of traits not only fails to give cog-
nizance to such obvious facts as racial and religious prejudice, but
the different traits mutually contradict each other at several points.

* This chapter is based on a paper presented at the American Psychological Convention, 1959,
Cincinnati, Ohio, as part of a symposium under the chairmanship of Dr. Fred J. Goldstein
of Los Angeles Psychiatric Service. I am greatly indebted to Donald T. Campbell, Millard Hoyt,
Thomas Gladwin, and Melford Spire for their valuable criticism of this chapter.

209

210 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

For example, values attached to "local government" and "democ-
racy" are in direct contradiction to that of "disregard of law"
leading to "direct action." The beliefs in "equality" and in "free-
dom" are in direct contradiction to the emphasis on "uniformity
and conformity."

Cuber and Harper, writing nearly ten years later in a book en-
titled Problems of American Society: Values in Conflict, have re-
duced the total number of American values enumerated but not
done much else. Their list is as follows: "monogamous marriage,
freedom, acquisitiveness, democracy, education, monotheistic re-
ligion, freedom and science" (Cuber and Harper 1948 : 369) . Cuber
and Harper recognize that some of these values are inconsistent
with each other and with social reality. But they attempt to ex-
plain such inconsistencies as follows:

On the surface it might seem relatively easy for a society, and especially for
some one person, to discover such inconsistencies as these, evaluate the two
positions, choose one, and discard the other .... But in practice it seems not
to be so easy an undertaking. In the first place, logical inconsistency may con-
stitute social consistency — that is, a person whose values seem inconsistent when
analysed by a third party may regard himself to be quite consistent. Both values
seem to him to be quite tenable because he can point out the other persons in
the society as authority for the Tightness of each position. (Cuber and Harper
1948:372)

As we shall see later, their explanation contains the germ of truth
as to why the individual is not free to act as he sees fit, to make his
value orientation more self-consistent, but it has not gone far
enough. If every individual adheres to his inconsistent values be-
cause he can resort to "other persons in the society as authority for
the rightness of each position," then we cannot possibly explain
how values in America would ever undergo change, and how some
individuals are more affected by the inconsistencies than others,
enough for them to espouse certain "causes" and throw their weight
behind crusades for emancipation of the slaves or to bust up saloons.

Over the years the analysis of American values has remained stag-
nant at this level. Thus, in American Society Robin Williams again
gives us no more than a catalogue of American values as follows:
"achievement" and "success," "activity" and "work," "moral orien-
tation," "humanitarian mores," efficiency and practicability,
"progress," material comfort, equality, freedom, external conform-
ity, science and secular rationality, nationalism-patriotism, de-
mocracy, individual personality, racism and related group-superi-

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 211

ority themes. (The quotation marks appHed to seven of these values
areWilhams') (Wilhams 195 1 : 388-440; 1960:415-470).

Wilhams does realize, perhaps more than the other authors, that
the values are not of equal importance and that they have to be
somehow related and reconciled with each other. Accordingly, in
his conclusion on value orientation, he makes a summary classifi-
cation to emphasize some and to de-emphasize others:

a) Quasi values or gratifications: such as material comforts.

b) Instrumental interests or means values: such as wealth, power, work, and
efficiency.

c) Formal universalis tic values of western tradition: rationaUsm, impersonal
justice; universaUstic ethics, achievement, democracy, equality, freedom,
certain religious values, and values of individual personality.

d) Particularistic, segmental or localistic values: best exemplified in racist-
ethnic superiority doctrines and in certain aspects of nationalism (Wil-
liams 1951:441; 1960:468-469).

This classification accomplishes little. It is not simply a question
of differences between professed values and the actual reality. Such
differences are likely to be found in any society. More specifically
the question is one of unresolved and unaccounted for differences
between certain professed values and other professed values. We
may reconcile "efficiency" as a value with the continuous blocking
of modern improvements in the building trades as a matter of dif-
ference between theory and practice. But how do we reconcile the
"value of individual personality" with the oppressive and increasing
demand for "conformity"? The most glaring contradiction exists
between "equality," "freedom," and so forth on the one hand and
"racist-ethnic superiority doctrines and certain aspects of national-
ism" on the other. Williams tries to expunge the "ethnic superiority
doctrines and so forth" by inaccurately classifying the latter as
"particularistic, segmented or localistic values."

It is easy to see how Williams errs here. If the belief in racist-
ethnic superiority were truly segmental or localistic (by which I
think Williams means that it is particular to the South) , how can
we explain the racism that is also prevalent in the North? In fact,
it has been aptly observed, and I think with some justification, that
the only difference between the South and the North in the matter
of racial attitudes is that the South is more open and honest about
it, while the North is more covert and hypocritical about it. Of
course, this view fails to consider the fact that the law by and large
still supports racism in some Southern states, while the law is against

212 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

it in the North. Besides, practically all the broad legislative and
judiciary improvements affecting race relations have originated
from the North. These legal changes do not, however, erase the
widespread social, economic, and other forms of discrimination
which are practiced in the North as well as in the South. Further-
more, even if we say that the racist attitude is only characteristic
of the South, we must inevitably be confronted with the question:
How does the South reconcile its racist attitudes with its professed
belief in democracy? Are the North and the South two funda-
mentally separate cultures?

Some students frankly take the line of least resistence by char-
acterizing the American culture as "Schizoid" (Read Bain 1935:
266-y6) , or inherently "dualistic," that is to say, full of opposites
(Harold J. Laski 1948:738). This is the same sort of conclusion
reached by Gunnar Myrdal who, after a mammoth investigation of
the Negro-White relations, left the entire matter as An American
Dilemma (1944). Apart from presenting many factual details on
racial discrimination in this society, Myrdal said nothing more than
that there is the problem of a psychological conflict between the
democratic ideal of equality, on the one hand, and the existing in-
equalities in race relations, education, income distribution, health
benefits, and so forth, on the other. The few anthropologists who
have bothered to study American values have hardly improved on
this state of affairs. Thus, Kluckhohn expressed himself in 1941
on this subject:

While the relative unanimity over some kind of aid to Britain demonstrates
that at least in a crisis a nexus of common purposes is still effective, the diagnostic
symptom of the sickness of our society is the lack of a unifying system of canons
of choice, emotionally believed in as well as intellectually adhered to. (Kluck-
hohn 1941:175)

When Kluckhohn gave us his more intensive analysis of the
American culture six years later, we can readily understand why his
early conclusion on American values was as it was. Because his
analysis consists of another list of "orientations" and "suborienta-
tions" that are very much in the manner of Robin Williams' treat-
ment detailed above on pages 211 and 212 (Kluckhohn and
Kluckhohn 1947).

Thus, our understanding of American values is today no better
than it was several decades ago. Periodically we note the conflicts
and inconsistencies among the different elements, but we leave them
exactly where we started.

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 213

An American Blind Spot

I have taken so much time to come to this futile point because I
do not wish to be accused of setting up a nonexistent straw man and
then, with the flourish of discovery, knock him down.

The reason for this lack of progress in the scientific analysis of
value conflicts inherent in American culture is, I believe, to be
found in the fact that many Western and especially American
scholars have been too emotionally immersed in the absolute good-
ness of their own form of society, ethic, thought, and religion that
it is hard for them to question them, even in scientific analyses.
Consequently, they cannot see anything but the eventual triumph
of their cultural ideals such as freedom and equality over realities
such as racism and religious intolerance. Some frankly see the
former as the basic American values and the latter as outright devi-
ations which need not even be considered. This attitude is most
decidedly characteristic even of eminent scholars of American his-
tory such as Henry Steele Commager. In his book The American
Mind he practically dismisses the Negro and, in fact, all nonwhites
with one sentence:

Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American
knew it. Nowhere else on the globe had nature been at once so rich and so
generous, and her riches were available to all who had the enterprise to take them
and the good fortune to be white (1950:5).

I would have regarded the last sentence quoted here to be Com-
mager's satire on the prevailing attitude of the American public, if
not for the fact that, in the rest of his 443 pages, he makes no more
than a few passing references to the treatment of Negroes (in one
of which the word "Oriental" is inserted) . Furthermore, in these
references, the Negroes might well have been as important as the
wayside flowers trampled on by the horses drawing westward
wagons driven by white Americans. When Commager comes to
twentieth century America, he seems to be most exasperated
by the adverse manifestations of the American mind in the form
of crime, racial and religious bigotry, lawlessness, irreligion, loose-
ness of sex mores, conformity, class formation, and so forth. He
seems so intent upon denying them, yet cannot, that he speaks in
the following confusing vein :

All this presented to the student of the American character a most perplexing
problem. It was the business of the advertisers to know that character, and their
resources enabled them to enlist in its study the aid of the most perspicacious

214 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

sociologists and psychologists. Yet if their analysis was correct, the American
people were decadent and depraved. No other evidence supported this conclusion.
Advertisers appealed to fear, snobbery, and self-indulgence, yet no one familiar
with the American character would maintain that these were indeed its pre-
dominant motivations, and statesmen who knew the American people appealed
to higher motives, and not in vain. The problem remained a fascinating one,
for if it was clear that advertisers libeled the American character, it was equally
clear that Americans tolerated and even rewarded those who libeled them. (Com-
mager 1944:419; italics mine)

Besides its obvious one-sidedness (for example, his statement that
"the statesmen who knew the American people appealed to higher
motives, and not in vain" is about as true as another which reads,
"the statesmen who knew the American people appealed to baser
motives, and not in vain,") , Commager contradicts himself badly.
Unable to deny the reality of facts uncovered by scientists, facts
which are used profitably by advertisers, yet unable to bring him-
self to see them in their true perspective, he solved his academic
dilemma by branding the facts as "libel."

Gordon Allport commits the same error in his book The Nature
of Prejudice. In its entire 519 pages Allport theorizes about mankind
and religion, but his mankind is Western mankind (where he occa-
sionally refers to Negroes and Orientals, he is merely speaking about
to what different extents the different Western groups reject them) ,
and by religion he means Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism,
with nothing even about Eastern Orthodoxy and one sentence on
Islam. Limited by such a culture-bound framework Allport is not
unnaturally inconsistent (1954). In discussing racial prejudice,
Allport relies heavily on experimental psychology. There is a great
deal of evidence that the more prejudiced personality tends to be
one which is more in need of definiteness and more moralistic. For
example, "he is uncomfortable with differentiated categories; he
prefers them to be monopolistic" (Allport 1954:175, 398-408).
Here Allport apparently accepts the conclusion to which his evi-
dence leads him. However, in connection with religious bigotry
Allport seems to adopt a different procedure altogether. Here he
first admits that religions which claim to possess final truths are
bound to lead to conflicts, and that individuals who have no re-
ligious affiliations tend to show less prejudice than do church mem-
bers. But these are, in his words, too "distressing" to him and so de-
mands "closer inspection" (Allport 1954:451).

To the student, what Allport means by "closer inspection" turns
out to be a surprise, for Allport departs from the acceptable prin-

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 215

ciple of science by purposely attempting to negate stronger evi-
dences in favor of much flimsier facts. He admits that, quanti-
tatively, the correlation between greater church affiliation and
greater prejudice is correct, but he also insists that it is not correct
because there are "many cases" where the influence of the church
"is in the reverse dirction" (Allport 1954:451). In other words,
Allport finds the evidences too distressing because they show the
Christian churches and the Christian values in an unfavorable light.
He simply cannot tolerate the fact that the absolutist Christian
faith and the exclusive Christian church membership do lead to
greater prejudice. Under the circumstances, Allport has no alterna-
tive but to throw overboard the quantitative evidence in favor of
some qualitative statements.

Yet even so sophisticated a social scientist as Lloyd Warner is no
exception. In his book American Life, Dream and Reality he finds
the Jonesville grade school children's evaluation of one another to
be so strongly reflective of social-class values as to blind them to the
actual reality (for example, children from the top classes were
rated 22 times cleaner than those from the bottom, but in fact the
latter as a whole came to school cleaner and neater than the former) .
However, he also finds that the Jonesville high school children,
though following a similar pattern, do not make such categorical
and rigid judgments by class values. Warner's explanations of this
difference are most revealing:

Since the older children are presumably more the products of their culture
than the younger ones, there appears to be a contradiction here. . . . Actually,
the reasons for the differences in judgment help verify our hypothesis. The
children in the high school, being products of American society, have learned
to be less open and more careful about what they say and how they feel on the
tabooed subject of status. Furthermore, they have learned to use American values
of individtialism and are able to make clearer discriminations about the worth
of an individual than are the younger children. (Warner 1953:182-3; italics
mine)

The interesting thing is that Warner's second explanation here
not only contradicts the one preceding it but contradicts his entire
thesis, which is that social class values strongly influence American
behavior and ideas. It is as though this second explanation came out
by accident, perhaps a Freudian slip of his research pen, for in senti-
ments like "the worth of the individual" many Americans find
real emotional security.

What we have to see is that in the minds of a majority of our

216 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

scholars the idea of democracy and Christianity, with their respec-
tive attributes of freedom and equahty in one case and of love and
mercy in the other, are the over-all American values par excellence.
They are so consciously upheld that all explanations of American
behavior must somehow begin and end with it. Any evidence con-
trary to this mold is therefore treated as deviation or as "regional
phenomena," as "libel," as creating a "schizoid" situation, a "di-
lemma." This in my view is the blind spot to many of our Western
social scientists today. Given this blind spot, our scientists have
consistently confused what ought to be with what is. It leads many
scholars to explain the kind of American behavior they deem de-
sirable by one theory, and another kind of American behavior,
which they abhor and which contradicts the first kind, by
another and contradictory theory. Some even misuse the eclectic
approach by pleading the multiplicity of correlates or causation in
complex human affairs.

The fundamental axiom of science is to explain more and more
facts by fewer and fewer theories. Anyone can explain all charac-
teristics of a given situation with as many different theories, but
his explanation will not be of value as a piece of work of science.
It might be close to a factual description. Or it might be close to
fantasy or rationalization. The axiom of explaining more and more
facts by fewer and fewer theories is especially crucial if the facts
are obviously related, as when they occur in the same organized
society and often among and in the same individuals.

Once this is admitted it becomes obvious that, when confronted
with contradictions in the object of his inquiry, the scientist's first
duty is, instead of trying to treat them as discrete entities and ex-
plaining them with contradictory hypotheses, to explore the possi-
bility of a link between the contradictory phenomena. In doing so
the scientist is not presuming that values in any given society must
be totally consistent with each other and that all contradictions
must be resolved. It is perfectly possible that many societies, being
large and complex, have inconsistent or contradictory values. But
what our scientists so far would seem to fail or even refuse to do is
to concede even the possibility of any positive connection between
these contradictory values.

Self-Relionce, Fear of Dependency, and Insecurity

What we need to see is that the contradictory American "values"
noted by the sociologists, psychologists, and historians are but mani-

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 217

festations of one core value. Furthermore, many scholars must have
been aware of this core value in one way or another but, because of
their blind spot, have failed to recognize its importance. The Amer-
ican core value in question is self-reliance, the most persistent psy-
chological expression of which is the fear of dependence. It can be
shown that all of the "values" enumerated thus far, the mutually
contradictory ones and the mutually supportive ones, the evil ones
as well as the angelic ones, spring or are connected with self-reliance.

American self-reliance is basically the same as English individual-
ism except that the latter is the parent of the former while the
former has gone farther than the latter. However, self-reliance
possesses no basic characteristics which were not inherent in indi-
vidualism. Individualism developed in Europe as a demand for po-
litical equality. It insists that every individual has inalienable and
God-given political rights which other men cannot take away and
that every man has equal right to govern himself or choose his own
governors. Self-reliance, on the other hand, has been inseparable
in America from the individual's militant insistence on economic,
social, and political equality. The result is while a qualified indi-
vidualism, with a qualified equality, has prevailed in England and
the rest of Europe, what has been considered the inalienable right
of every American is an unlimited self-reliance and an unlimited
equality.

It is not suggested here that all Americans do in fact possess the
unlimited economic and social equality in which they firmly be-
lieve. But it is easy to observe how strongly and widely the belief
in them manifests itself. For example, the English have been able to
initiate a sort of socialism in reality, as well as in name, but Ameri-
cans, regardless of social security, farm subsidies, and other forms
of government planning, intervention, and assistance, are as firmly
as ever committed to the idea of free enterprise and deeply intol-
erant toward other social systems. Similarly, the English still tend
to respect class-based distinctions in wealth, status manners, and
language, while Americans tend to ridicule aristocratic manners or
Oxford speech, and resent status so much that Lloyd Warner, for
example, describes it as being a "tabooed" subject in discussing
Jonesville high school students. Finally, the English still consider
the crown a symbol of all that is best and hereditary, Americans
criticize the personal taste of their highest officials and at least
have the common verbal expression that everybody can be presi-
dent.

218 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

This self-reliance is also very different from self-sufficiency. Any
Chinese or European village can achieve self-sufficiency as a matter
of fact. The average self-sufficient Chinese farmer will have no feel-
ing whatever about other people who are not self-sufficient. But
American self-reliance is a militant ideal which parents inculcate in
their children and by which they judge the worth of any and all
mankind. This is the self-reliance about which Ralph Waldo Emer-
son has written so eloquently and convincingly in some immortal
pieces. This is also the self-reliance taught in today's American
schools. The following is a direct quotation from a statement of
"basic beliefs" given to the students by the social science depart-
ment of one of the nation's best high schools in 1959:

Self-reliance is, as it has always been, the key to individual freedom, and the
only real security comes from the ability and the determination to work hard,
to plan, and to save for the present and the future.^

American self-reliance is then not new. As a concept it is in fact
well known and well understood. Yet such is the power of the blind
spot that its over-all and basic importance has so far escaped our
scientific attention. How the individualism of Western Europe has
been transformed into American self-reliance is a question outside
the scope of this paper. It has been dealt with elsewhere (Hsu
1953:111-114). Suffice it to say here that under this ideal every
individual is his own master, in control of his own destiny, and will
advance and regress in society only according to his own efforts. He
may have good or bad breaks but,

Smile and the world smiles with you.
Cry and you cry alone.

It is, of course, obvious that not all Americans are self-reliant.
No ideal of any society is uniformly manifested in all its members.
But a brief comparison will make the point clearer. A man in tra-
ditional China with no self-reliance as an ideal may not have been
successful in his life. But suppose in his old age his sons are able to
provide for him generously. Such a person not only will be happy
and content about it, but is likely also to beat the drums before all
and sundry to let the world know that he has good children who
are supporting him in a style to which he has never been accus-
tomed. On the other hand, an American parent who has not been
successful in life may derive some benefit from the prosperity of

^A mimeographed sheet issued to its pupils by a school in the Greater Chicago area, 1959.

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 219

his children, but he certainly will not want anybody to know about
it. In fact, he will resent any reference to it. At the first opportunity
when it is possible for him to become independent of his children
he will do so.

Therefore, even though we may find many individuals in tra-
ditional China and elsewhere who are in fact self-sufficient, and
even though we may find individuals in America who are in fact
dependent upon others, the important thing is to realize that where
self-reliance is not an ideal, it is neither promoted nor a matter of
pride, but where it is an ideal, it is both. In American society the
fear of dependence is so great that an individual who is not self-
reliant is an object of hostility and called a misfit. "Dependent
character" is a highly derogatory term, and a person so described
is thought to be in need of psychiatric help.

However, it is obvious that no individual can be completely self-
reliant. In fact, the very foundation of the human way of life is
man's dependence upon his fellow men without which we shall have
no law, no custom, no art, no science, and not even language. It is
not meant that an individual human being cannot be trained, from
the beginning of his life, to form no relationship with any fellow
human being. But if an individual wishes to lead a human existence,
in this society or any other, he is bound to be dependent upon his
fellow human beings intellectually and technologically as well as
socially and emotionally. Individuals may have differing degrees
of needs for their fellow human beings, but no one can truly say
that he needs no one. It seems that the basic American value orienta-
tion of self-reliance, by its denial of the importance of other human
beings in ones' life, creates contradictions and therefore serious
problems, the most uniquitious of which is insecurity.

This insecurity presents itself to the individual American in a
variety of ways. Its most important ingredient is the lack of perma-
nency both in ones' ascribed relationships (such as those of the fam-
ily into which one is born) and in one's achieved relationships (such
as marital relationship for a woman and business partnership for a
man) . Its most vital demand on the individual is to motivate him in
a perpetual attempt to compete with his fellow human beings, to
belong to status-giving groups, and, as a means of achieving these
ends, to submit to the tyranny of organization and to conform to
the customs and fads of the peer group which are vital to his climb-
ing and/or status position at any given time and place. In other
words, in order to live up to their core value orientation of self-

220 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

reliance, Americans as a whole have to do much of its opposite.
Expressed in the jargon of science, there is, for example, a direct re-
lationship between self-reliance and individual freedom on the one
hand and submission to organization and conformity on the other
(Hsu i960: 15 1 ) . Exactly the same force can be seen to link:

a) Christian love with religious bigotry.

b) Emphasis on science, progress, and humanitarianism with parochialism,
group-superiority themes and racism.

c) Puritan ethics with increasing laxity in sex mores.

d) Democratic ideals of equality and freedom with totalitarian tendencies
and witch hunting.

These four pairs of contradictions are not exclusive of each other.
For example, Christian love is in sharp contrast with racism as with
religious bigotry. Similarly emphasis on science, and so forth, is as
opposed to totalitarian tendencies and witch hunting as to paro-
chialism and group superiority themes. In fact, we can contrast the
first half of any of the above pairs with the second half of any other.

Christian Love versus Christian Hate

For the purpose of this paper we shall consider some of these
contradictions in a composite whole: the American emphasis on
Christian love, and freedom, equality, and democracy on the one
hand, and racism and religious bigotry on the other. This is a con-
tradiction which has tested the energy of some of the best euphemis-
tic orators and the ingenuity of some of the most brilliant scholars.
Especially in the religious area they try to write off the religious
wars. They try to forget about the Holy Inquisitions. They try to
ignore the hundreds of thousands of witches convicted and burned
on the stake. They try to deny any connection between any of these
and the Nazi Germany slaughter of the Jews, especially the anti-
Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and racial persecution found, here
covertly and there openly, in the United States. But when some
scholars do realize that the past patterns are very much alive at pres-
ent, though the specific techniques have changed, they tend to make
harmless observations of which the following is a typical example:

Worship in common — the sharing of the symbols of religion — has united hu-
man groups in the closest ties known to man, yet religious differences have helped
to account for some of the fiercest group antagonisms. (Elizabeth K. Notting-
ham 1954:2)

Williams, who quotes the above passage, goes a little further by
suggesting two clues to the riddle as to why some worship in com-

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 221

mon has united people and some has divided them : (a) "Not all con-
flicts in the name of organized religion are actually "religious" and
(b) there may be different degrees of involved commitment actu-
ally at work in "nominal religious affiliations" (Robin M. Williams
1956:14—15). But there is no observable basis for distinction be-
tween "true" religious conflict and religious conflicts which are
only nominally religious. Are theological controversies purely re-
ligious or nominally religious? The truth is that, even if the conflict
is over nothing but liturgy, or over the question of virgin birth,
they are still fought between human beings each with personal, emo-
tional involvements in specific issues.

Williams' second clue is a more sound one. Put it differently, this
is that the more "involved commitment" actually at work in nomi-
nal religious affiliations the more religious dissension and bigotry
there will be. Since the stronger one's commitment to an object or
issue the more inflexible this commitment becomes, it is natural that
more "involved commitment" will lead to more dissension and
bigotry. Certain data quoted by Allport, referred to before, directly
support this proposition.^ It is interesting to note that Williams,
after stating this proposition, dismisses it as "extreme." Instead he
collects a conglomeration of twenty divergencies in value — orien-
tation which, he believes but does not demonstrate, are partially
the basis of religious conflicts in the United States (Williams 1956:
14-17).

It is unnecessary to probe into the reasons why Williams attaches
so little significance to his second clue. It is also beyond the scope of
this paper to detail the irrelevancy of some of his "divergencies" to
this problem on hand. We can, however, indicate how the link be-

^ "Over four hundred students were asked the question, 'To what degree has religion been an
influence in your upbringing?' Lumping together those who report that religion was a marked
or moderate factor, we find the degree of prejudice far higher than among those who report that
religion was a slight or non-existent factor in their training. Other studies reveal that indi-
viduals having no religious afiSliation show on the average less prejudice than do church mem-
bers." (Allport 1954:451)

And again, "First, it is well to be clear concerning the existence of certain natural, and
perhaps unresolvable, conflicts inherent in various aspects of religion.

"Take first the claim of certain great religions — that each has absolute and final possession
of Truth. People who adhere to different absolutes are not likely to find themselves in agreement.
The conflict is most acute when missionaries are actively engaged in proselytizing divergent sets
of absolutes. Moslem and Christian missionaries in Africa, for example, have long been at odds.
Each insists that if its creed were completely realized in practice, it would eliminate all ethnic
barriers between men. So it would. But in actuality, the absolutes of any one religion have never
yet been accepted by more than a fraction of mankind.

"Catholicism by its very nature must believe that Judaism and Protestantism are in error.
And varieties of Judaism and Protestantism feel keenly that other varieties of their own faith
are perverse in many points of belief." (Allport 1954:444—445)

222 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

tween the degree of involved commitment in nominal religious af-
filiations and the extent of dissension and bigotry is the source of the
contradiction: Christian love versus Christian hate. It is not hard
for the trained social scientist to note that religious affiliation in the
United States today has become so largely a matter of associational
affiliation that "the values that inhere in group affiliation and par-
ticipation" far and above overshadow "the specific values espoused"
by the religious body ( Williams 1956:17). The overwhelming proof
of this is to be found in well-known works such as the Lynds' on
"Middle Town" and Lloyd Warner and associates on "Yankee City"
and "Jonesville," ^ but particularly in the results of a poll of 100,000
Protestant ministers in all parts of the United States by the Chris-
tian Century magazine in 195 1, to determine the "outstanding" and
most "successful" churches. This poll showed twelve to be the
chosen ones. One of the twelve was the First Presbyterian Church
of Hollywood.

The applauded "qualities" of this church have been analyzed else-
where (Hsu 1953:273-277) . Suffice it to say here that the "success-
ful qualities" of this church seem to be that the "happiness" of the
parishioners revolves about the social and material endeavors which
rebound to their benefit alone but that the spiritual faith and the
quality of the ministers' teachings receive practically no attention.

All this is understandable once we appreciate the persistent de-
mands that the core American value of self-reliance makes on the
individual. The churches must compete and, in order to exist and to
be "successful," must satisfy the status quest of its members. To
achieve that "success," the churches not only have to conform to
the trend toward organization, but they must try to find new ways
of increasing their memberships so as to reach greater "successes."

In this psychology we can now find the common ground between
religious bigotry and racial prejudice. Western religious dissensions
have been associated with many things but their principal and per-
ennial feature has been the search for original purity in ritual and
belief. The Reformation was based on it. The entire evolution of
Protestantism from the Lutheran church to Quakerism has had it
as the central ingredient. The Holy Inquisition was instituted to
ferret out impurity in Christian thought and practice. This fervent

* Commenting on religion George C. Romans says: "We are apt to think that the choice
of a church among people brought up in the Protestant tradition is a matter of individual
conscience. No doubt it is. But it is certainly also true that the membership of churches, in
Hilltown as in Boston, tended to correlate roughly with that of certain social groups" (1950:346).

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 223

search for and jealous guard over purity expresses itself in the racial
scene as the fear of genetic mixing of races which feeds the segre-
gationist power in the North as well as in the South, no matter what
rhetoric and other logic are employed. When religious affiliations
have become largely social affiliations, this fear of impurity makes
religious and racial prejudices undistinguishable. Religion is not
the question. The point of the greatest importance is affiliation. The
neighborhoods and clubs are as exclusive as the churches and church
activities tend to be, in spite of all protestation of equality, democ-
racy, worth of the individual. Christian love, and humility.

The individual who is enjoined to be self-reliant, unlike one who
is taught to respect authority and external barriers, has no perma-
nent place in his society. Everything is subject to change without
notice. He is always anxious to look above for possible openings to
climb, but he is at the same time and constantly threatened from
below by possible upward encroachment. In his continuous effort
at status achieving and maintaining, the self-reliant man fears noth-
ing more than contamination by fellow human beings who are
deemed inferior to him. This contamination can come about in di-
verse forms: sharing the same desks at the same schools, being
dwellers of the same apartments, worshipping in the same churches,
sitting in the same clubs, or being in any situation of free and equal
contact.

In this context, as in others, individuals will vary in the extent
to which they are pressed by the fear of inferiority. Some will join
hate organizations, lynching mobs, and throw stones at Negro resi-
dences or paint swastikas on Jewish synagogues. These are violent
acts of prejudice. Others will do everything they legally or by de-
vious means can do to keep individuals of certain religious, racial, or
ethnic groups out of residential areas, certain occupations, and so-
cial fraternities. These are active nonviolent acts of prejudices. Still
others will quietly refuse to associate with members of religious, ra-
cial, or ethnic minorities and teach their children to observe this
taboo because one just does not do such things. These are passive non-
violent acts of prejudice.

Under such circumstances many, perhaps most, individuals find
it impossible to act in the same way as they have professed and been
taught. It is not that they love contradiction or that they are, ac-
cording to their critics, hypocritical. It is simply that they are op-
pressed by fears for losing satus — fears deeply rooted in a relatively
free society with a core value of self-reliance. This is also why inte-

224 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

gration of minorities, be they racial or religious, cannot reach a
satisfactory destination either along the line of total assimilation
into the majority way of life or along that of pluralism. There is
some factual indication that Jewish youngsters who are raised as
non- Jews have a much harder time to adjust to their peers in college
than those who have been raised consciously and militantly to culti-
vate their identity in Judaic tradition and church life. In other
words, their complete identity and assimilation as Americans is al-
ways subject to rejection (Samuel Teitelbaum 1953 ) .^ On the other
hand, the rationalization in support of anti-Oriental legislation was
that the Oriental standard of living was too low and that they were
incapable of assimilation to the American way of life.

A reverse proof of the hypothesis advanced in this paper is not
hard to find. We have only to look at societies where obedience to
authority and dependence relationship are encouraged and where
the individual is not subject to such pressures coming with self-
reliance and, therefore, more sure of his place in society. Individuals
in such societies tend to have much less need for competition, status
seeking, conformity, and, hence, racial and religious prejudices. For
example, religious dissentions, persecutions, and conflicts have al-
ways been prominent in the West as they have alway been rare in
the Orient. In Japan and China, the few occasions on which reli-
gious persecutions took place were invariably of short duration,
always tied to the insecurity of political rule and never involved
masses of the people except as temporary mobs (Hsu 1953:246-
248) . The case of Hindu-Moslem violence and casteism in India is
considered elsewhere (Hsu 1961) . Again, religious dissensions, per-

* This is based on two groups of answers to a questionnaire. The first group of answers was
from 230 Northwestern University students in 195 1 of whom 210 were undergraduates. A con-
densed version of the same questionnaire was sent to a random sampling of 730 undergraduates
at nine midwestern universities and colleges in 1952-53, from which 325 undergraduates re-
sponded. The results, though quantitatively inconclusive, are qualitatively suggestive. First,
students of Jewish background experience relatively little anti-Semitism at high school level when
mixed dates are frequent, but at the university level their social contacts bcome much less
diversified. Second, there is more open identification with Jewish culture and institution as the
generation of Americanization advances. That is to say, the second and third generation Ameri-
can Jews tend to be more openly Jewish than the fresh immigrants or first generation Ameri-
cans. Coupled with this, Jewish students from families of higher social statuses (such as proprietary
and professional) show more open identification than those from families of lower social statuses
(such as sales). Third, in spite of these facts, students of Jewish background do not seem to
prefer exclusive Jewish friendship and association in college. Fourth, with the term "normal adjust-
ment" meaning acceptance by Gentile students, "the conscious (but not self-conscious) and
self-identifying Jews among the students are those most integrated with their own people and
the most normally adjusted on the college or university campus" (209). These results correspond
amazingly to my personal observations but any final conclusion on the subject must, of course,
await further research.

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 225

secutions, and racial conflicts are today more intense and widespread
in Protestant-dominated societies of the West (see Chapter 14)
than in their Catholic counterparts. In this dichotomy we are con-
trasting the United States, Canada, Australia, Union of South
Africa, and so forth, as one camp and the Latin American repub-
lics, as well as Portuguese, Belgian, and French African possessions
as the other. What has happened in Protestant-dominated societies
is that, by and large, persecution in the form of bloody racial and
religious outbreaks has been consistently driven underground while
the manifestations of prejudice have become diffused, one almost
may say democratized if not for the fact that the expression smells
of sarcasm. But even in the most advanced Protestant societies racial
and religious violence is always around the corner, ready to erupt
now and then, here and there, as indicated by the recent anti-Negro
outbreaks in England and the recurrent anti-Semitic flare-ups in
Europe and the United States.^

Three Uses of Value

It will have been clear to some readers that this analysis of the
psychosocial origin of racial and religious prejudices bears some re-
semblance to that of Kurt Lewin on the problems of the Jews as a
minority group in many a western society. But it has significant dif-
ferences. According to Lewin the most basic problem of the Jews is
that of group identity. Often repudiated in the country of his birth
and upbringing, yet having no homeland which he can claim as his
own, he suffers from "additional uncertainty," thus "giving" him
"some quality of abnormality in the opinion of the surrounding
groups." He concludes that the establishment of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine (which was not yet a reality at the time of his writing)
might "affect the situation of Jews everywhere in the direction of
greater normality" (Kurt Lewin 1935:175—187).

The Jewish minority certainly shares the central problem, with
other minorities, of uncertainty of group identity. But our analysis
also shows that the degree of this uncertainty depends, in the first
place, on the basic value orientation of the host majority and, in the
second place, on that of the minority groups themselves. There is,
for example, every reason to expect the Jewish minority to have
far less of a problem of identity in Latin American countries than
in North American countries. As far as North America is con-

° The place of Mohammedanism with reference to this analysis will be considered in another
publication.

226 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cerned, the Jews, like other minority groups, will always have the
problem of identity whether or not they have a homeland. The
Latin American peoples have less of the value orientation of self-
reliance and, therefore, the individual has less psychosocial need to
reject minority groups to maintain his status in society. On the
other hand, within the United States, there is good reason to expect
the Jewish minority to have a little more of a problem of identity
than the Chinese and Japanese minorities even after the establish-
ment of Israel. This is despite the fact that the Orientals possess
much greater physical distinctiveness than the Jews as a whole from
the Caucasoid majority. For the Chinese and Japanese have stronger
ties with their families and wider kin groups than do the Jews, and
are, therefore, less self-reliant and less free but more protected from
the uncertainty of identity.

In this chapter I have not differentiated the different uses to which
the term value may be put. Charles Morris, in a book entitled Va-
rieties of Human Yalue, postulated three such uses: "Operative"
values refer to the "actual direction of preferential behavior toward
one kind of object rather than another." "Conceived" values refers
to the "preferential behavior directed by 'an anticipation or fore-
sight of the outcome' of such behavior," and "involves preference
for a symbolically indicated object." He illustrates this meaning of
value by the example of the drug addict who firmly believes that it is
better not to be a drug addict because "he anticipates the outcome
of not using drugs." "Object" values refer not to the behavior pre-
ferred in fact (operative value) or as symbolically desired (con-
ceived value) but to what is preferable if the holder of the value is
to achieve certain ends or objectives (1956:10-12) .

While it is obvious that the three usages of the term "value" are
not mutually exclusive and must influence each other, it is equally
obvious that they are not hard to distinguish. Applying this scheme
to the American scene we shall realize that self-reliance is an opera-
tive value as well as a conceived value. It expresses itself in two direc-
tions. In the positive direction it expresses itself as the emphasis on
freedom, equality in economic and political opportunities for all,
Puritan virtues. Christian love, and humanitarianism. These values
are far more conceived than operative. On the negative side self-
reliance expresses itself as the tendency toward racial prejudice,
religious bigotry, laxity in sex mores, and totalitarianism. These
values are far more operative than conceived. Values which are more
conceived than operative are of great symbolic importance, and

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 227

will be militantly defended by the people cherishing them. The less
they live up to such conceived values the more they are likely to
defend them, because their failures are associated with feelings of
guilt. Values which are more operative than conceived are of great
practical importance, and will be strenuously pursued by the people
needing them. The more they have to act according to such opera-
tive values, the less they will admit their reality, since their actions
also lead to feelings of guilt. At one extreme we shall find men who
will openly fight to guard these operative values most flagrantly.
At the other extreme we shall find men who will practice them by
devious means. Those who hold on to these operative values openly
and those who do so by subterfuge will share one common charac-
teristic: both will deny their actions are motivated by prejudice and
Christian hate. They will both insist that their actions are based
totally on other reasons. In the South one ubiquitous reason is states'
rights. In the North a widespread reason is property value or fear
of intermarriage. When the real operative values are divulged acci-
dentally, as it were, by one of those who share them, the reaction of
the rest will be resentment against the simpleton who spoke out of
turn and angry denial of everything he disclosed. These mechanisms
are repeated so often on so many occasions, including the most
recent (1959-60) Deerfield and Park Forest, Illinois, outbursts,
that they need no further illustration or elaboration.

However, the ideas of equality, freedom, and Christian love in-
evitably affect all Americans because they are values that are con-
ceived more than operative. They might even be described as the
conscience of the American society. That is why failure to live
according to them or outright opposition to them will both lead to
guilt, denial, and subterfuge. There are men and women who cham-
pion the cause of the more conceived values just as those who
desperately cling to and fight for the more operative values. The at-
titude of both sides toward their respective values tends to turn the
values they champion into object values. That is to say, the cham-
pions of equality, freedom, and Christian love can consciously use
their values as tools for their ends, just as the champions of prejudice,
bigotry, and Christian hate can also consciously use their values as
tools for their ends.

In the hands of some politicians and all demagogues the relation-
ship between these values and the objects they desire often becomes
transparently clear and undisguisedly selfish. It has been suggested
that Hitler's hate campaign against the Jews was a major secret of

228 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

his power. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the recent (1959-
60) Chicago area integration outbursts, as with similar scenes else-
where before, the opponents to integration charged their adversaries
for promoting integration as a means of wooing Negro votes. But
the link between the more conceived American values and the more
operative values is the core American value of self-reliance. The
supporters of both desire social arrangements in which their own
particular nests will be feathered in their own particular ways.

As the emphasis on democratic equality and freedom and Chris-
tian love increases with self-reliance, totalitarian racial prejudice
and bigotry and Christian hate will also increase with it. When the
individual is shorn of all permanent and reliable moorings among his
fellowmen, his only security must come from personal success, per-
sonal superiority, and personal triumph. Those who are fortunate
enough to achieve success, superiority, and triumph will, of course,
bask in the sunshine. To them democratic equality and freedom
and Christian love are extremely laudable. But success, superiority,
and triumph on the part of some must of necessity be based on the
failure, inferiority, and defeat on the part of others. For the latter,
and even for some of those who are in the process of struggling for
success, superiority, and triumph, the resentment against and fear
of failure, inferiority, and defeat must be widespread and often un-
bearable. To them totalitarian prejudice and bigotry and Christian
hate can be means to a flitting security. By pushing others down they
at least achieve the illusion of personal success, personal superiority,
and personal triumph.^

The Problem of Pessimism

If the conclusions of this analysis seem to lend themselves to pes-
simistic inferences, I wish to assure the readers that this is neither
intentional nor desired. But the rule of science is that we must con-
template whatever conclusions our evidences lead us to, whether
they are pleasant or unpleasant.

In attentuation of certain pessimistic notes in the conclusions
reached we need, however, to realize that the contribution of West-
ern self-reliance to human development has been great and that even
the chains of conformity and organization have their salutary

'Additional substantiation for this analysis is found in Carl J. Friedrick (ed.), Totali-
tarianism, which contains the results of a conference of scholars in 1953 under the auspices
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Its conclusion is that totalitarianism is a new
disease peculiar to modern culture. Modern culture here refers, of course, to Western culture.

AMERICAN CORE VALUE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 229

aspects. What gave the Western man his superiority over the rest of
the world during the last 300 years was not his religion or his ro-
manticism but his self-reliance and his competitive organization.
It was his self-reliance which led him to discard the shackles of
paternal authority, monarchical power, and medieval magic, in
favor of wider organizations such as church and state, mercantile
fleets, and industrial ventures. When the West met the East, it was
the Western man's well-organized armed might which crushed the
East. As late as 1949 one high-ranking United States official at-
tributed civil war-torn China's plight, in a Harper's magazine ar-
ticle, to the fact that the Chinese were "organizationally corrupt."
It is instructive to note that today, the two giants of the West, the
U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., are still most attractive to the rest of the world
by their skill in organization. In various parts of the world their
experts are helping peoples of other nations to organize their
educational systems, or their marketing arrangements, or their
agricultural practices, or their industrial efforts, or their military
capabilities, or their national finances.'

The purpose of this paper is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It
is to place the much-lauded American values in their proper genetic
perspective. When this is done, we find that the best of America is
directly linked with her worst, like Siamese twins. The way out of
the worst is not to deny it but to recognize it for what it is.

' The problem of why some individuals assume some aspects of the value orientation of their
society more than other aspects is outside of the scope of this chapter. That problem is treated
intensively in the works of Mering (1961), Kluckhohn and Strodbeck (1961), and others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allport, Gordon

1954 The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, Addison- Wesley Publishing Com-
pany, Inc.
Bain, Read

1935 Our schizoid culture. Sociology and Social Research 19:266—276.
Coleman, Lee

1 94 1 "What is American: a study of alleged American traits. Social Forces,
Vol. XIX, No. 4.
CoMMAGER, Henry Steele

1950 The American mind. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Cuber, John F. and Robert A. Harper

1948 Problems of American society: values in conflict. New York, Henry
Holt & Co.
Friedrick, Carl J. (ed.)

1954 Totahtarianism. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

23 0 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

HoMANS, George C.

1950 The human group. New York, Harcourt Brace & Co.
Hsu, Francis L. K.

1953 Americans and Chinese: two ways of hfe. New York, Abelard-Schuman,
Inc.

i960 Rugged individuahsm reconsidered. The Colorado Quarterly 9:143-

162.
196 1 Clan, caste and club: a comparative study of Chinese, Hindu, and
American ways of life. Princeton, N.J., Van Nostrand Co.
Kluckhohn, Clyde

1941 The way of life. Kenyon Review, Spring, pp. 160—180.
Kluckhohn, Clyde and Florence R. Kluckhohn

1947 American culture: generalized orientation and class pattern, Chapter
IX of Conflicts of power in modern culture, 1947 Symposium of Con-
ference in Science, Philosophy and Religion, New York, Harper and
Bros.

Kluckhohn, Florence and Fred Strodbeck

196 1 Variations in value-orientations. Evanston, 111., Row Peterson and Co.
Laski, Harold J.

1948 The American democracy. New York, The Viking Press.
Lewin, Kurt

1948 Psycho-sociological problems of a minority group. In Character and
Personality, Vol. Ill, 1935, 175—187. (Reprinted in Kurt Lewin: Re-
solving Social Conflicts, New York, Harper & Bros.)
Mering, Otto Von

196 1 A grammar of human values. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Morris, Charles

1956 Varieties of human value. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Myrdal, Gunnar

1944 An American dilemma. New York, Harper & Bros.
Nottingham, Elizabeth K.

1954 Religion and society. New York, Doubleday & Co.
Teitelbaum, Samuel

1953 Patterns of adjustment among Jewish students. Northwestern Uni-
versity, Ph.D., dissertation.

Warner, Lloyd

1953 American hfe: dream and reality. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Robin M.

195 1 American society, a sociological interpretation. New York, Alfred
Knopf, (i960, 2d ed.).

1956 Religion, value-orientations, and intergroup conflict. The Journal of
Social Issues 12:14—15.

INTRODUCTION TO PART II
METHODS AND TECHNIQUES

Two PROJECTIVE instruments, the Rorschach and the Thematic
Apperception Test, have practically become standard stock-in-
trade of many anthropologists. However, the popularity of projec-
tive tests in anthropological studies has waned greatly in the last few
years. All sorts of objections and doubts have been raised about their
cross-cultural validity, or their validity as an instrument of study-
ing anything other than individual differences, or, among psych-
ologists, even their validity for their original purpose of diagnosing
individual maladjustment.

Being the editor of two volumes containing Rorschach and TAT
protocols collected by anthropologists from many parts of the
world, and having intensively used the Rorschach as an instru-
ment in the anthropological field situation, Kaplan is perhaps
the most qualified psychologist to analyse the role of projective test-
ing in psychological anthropology. Kaplan considers the merits
or demerits of projective testing in psychological anthropology
from two broad aspects. The first aspect is more general and con-
cerns the efficiency of projective instruments in fathoming per-
sonality. It is understood that no projective test, by itself, pretends
to be a complete measure of personality. But there are indications
that the Rorschach or any other single projective test may add lit-
tle to the description of a personality beyond that provided by life
history materials and observation studies. On the other hand, it is
clear that, since all individuals must live as members of social groups,
the most important things are not the total psychological charac-
teristics of an individual but his functioning or "socially required"
motivational characteristics. It is the latter characteristics which
the tests, in conjunction with other sources of data, help to reveal,
and which are the primary concern of the psychological anthro-
pologist.

The other aspect of Kaplan's chapter is concerned with several
specific problems in the cross-cultural use of the Rorschach (and in
a secondary way other tests) by psychological anthropologists. For
example, the average number of Javanese responses to the Rorschach

231

232 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cards is very much larger than that of Thai responses, and so forth.
How do we interpret such differences? Another problem Kaplan
deals with is the possibly greater importance of the content of
Rorschach responses than of the formal characteristics in the tra-
ditional scoring procedures.

Wallace's chapter will surely spearhead a renewed interest among
anthropologists in the physical and biological factors in abnormal
behavior. For many decades the anthropologist, like the psychia-
trist, has tended to favor environmental rather than genetic deter-
minants; and within the environmental, to favor almost exclusively
social rather than physical determinants. Wallace spells out the phi-
losophy underlying a new organic approach to mental illness and
points the way to a possible synthesis between this and the func-
tional approach which has dominated the psychosocial tradition in
psychiatry and the social sciences. In this trail blazing effort, Wal-
lace explores one of the well-known yet most puzzling of mental
illnesses found among Polar Eskimos: Pibloktoq, sometimes trans-
lated as arctic hysteria, with two alternative hypotheses — one based
on calcium deficiency and the other on the Eskimo cultural pattern
of withdrawal when the individual's confidence in his own ability
to carry out a struggle is shaken. In the last part of his chapter Wal-
lace constructs one of the most sophisticated models of the intricate
relationships between type of organic illness, the victim and his so-
ciety's responses to the illness, and the culture of the victim and his
society.

Man's attempt at reading dreams goes back as far as any cultural
records, but his scientific understanding of the phenomenon is of
very recent origin. Have dreams influenced the development of
human thought? What do we know about universal symbolism in
dreams? What are some of the interpretations of dreams in non-
Western cultures? Are cultural differences correlated with differ-
ences in types of dreams? What is the significance of the diverse
attitudes and practices regarding dreams in different cultures?
These are questions dealt with in D'Andrade's chapter on dreams.
The foundation of modern scientific dream study remains Freudian
in theory: that dreams reveal some motivational characteristics of
the individual which are otherwise hidden, but the Freudian view
that dream language is obscure is largely giving way to the view,
based on much modern research, that the most important contents
of dreams tend to be manifest. The last part of D'Andrade's chapter
deals with the conditions affecting dream usages. Here he sum-

METHODS AND TECHNIQUES 23 3

marizes the results of his own cross-cultural study of the relation-
ship between presence or absence of the anxiety about being alone
and involvements with particular types of use of dreams.

Campbell gives us a summary, from the point of view of a social
psychologist, of two outstanding anthropological contributions to
personality psychology: cultural relativism and the human "labo-
ratory" situation. But the major purpose of Campbell's chapter is
to outline some of the important methodological issues in anthro-
pological research so far as he sees them, and to offer suggestions
regarding alternative procedures. Some anthropologists may re-
gard some of Campbell's indictments as being unfair. Some may
object to some of Campbell's methodological suggestions on the
ground that he wants us to fly before we can crawl. Others may not
share to the same extent Campbell's enthusiasm for the Whiting and
Child approach, represented in Chapter lo by D'Andrade and ex-
plained in Chapter 1 2 by Whiting himself. But there is no doubt
that Campbell has put his fingers on a number of methodological
problems which sorely need systematic attention by those psycho-
logical anthropologists who hope for greater scientific gains.

chapter 8

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF
PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES

BERT KAPLAN

University of Kansas

During the past decade a somewhat violent argument has arisen
concerning the role of projective techniques in anthropological
studies. Since the whole culture and personality area has somehow
become prominently identified with these tests, it is of some impor-
tance that the value and significance of the tests be assessed and that
an understanding of their particular role and function be achieved.
The use of projective tests in cross-cultural settings has flourished
over the past two decades, and one may estimate that there have
been as many as 1 50 studies in more than 75 societies. There appears
to be sufficient work done so that the usefulness of the tests can be
evaluated and their main difficulties and problems delineated.

Since it is my belief that the ultimate judgment about the tests
will be based on demonstrated utility or lack of it in relationship
to the purposes of research workers, I shall attempt to make these
purposes explicit, thereby specifying the theoretical and method-
ological issues that projective test studies are relevant to. My plan
is to discuss both the demonstrated values and difficulties of empiri-
cal studies in relation to each of the purposes described. I shall in
addition present my own position with respect to the kinds of per-
sonality data required in the culture and personality field and dis-
cuss the prospects of obtaining them by using projective techniques.

The Delineation of Modal Personality Processes

It is fairly clear that the great majority of cross-cultural projec-
tive test studies are concerned with describing the personality char-
acteristics that are most prevalent in particular cultural groups. The
concept of "modal" or "basic" personality as introduced by Kardi-

235

236 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ner and Linton in the late 1930's has been perhaps the most influen-
tial theoretical conception in the culture and personality field, and
there has been widespread acceptance of the notion that in each cul-
ture there exists a core of personality characteristics which are
found in most members of the group. Until relatively recently the
existence of this core of homogeneity has been regarded almost as
axiomatic, and it has seemed very natural to culture and personality
workers to begin with the idea that they should describe these typi-
cal or "modal" characteristics. That this aim prejudges an empirical
issue which has perhaps not been adequately settled, has not seemed
to trouble the scientific conscience of culture and personality work-
ers. At the present time there is beginning to be more respect for the
variability that exists within societies which has, whenever it was
studied, been found to be embarrassingly large (Inkeles and Levin-
son 1956, Kaplan 1954, Wallace 1952, Vogt 195 1, DuBois 1944),
and it even seems respectable to voice a doubt about the existence of
modal characteristics. (See Adcock and Ritchie's factor analytic
study, 1958, which found that all of the Rorschach differences be-
tween groups of white and Maori subjects could be explained by
one factor, imaginative thinking. However, these writers appear to
attribute the paucity of differences to the failure of the Rorschach
test rather than to accept the findings of the test.)

In part the prejudgment of the issue of homogeneity has arisen
from the failure to make explicit distinctions between the two main
concepts — culture and personality. The most popular and widely
accepted opinions (Spiro 195 1, Smith 1954) tended to obscure the
distinctions between these terms. Some (Kluckhohn, for example)
have asserted that culture and personality are simply abstractions
from the same behavior and have used such phrases as "culture in
personality" or "personality in culture." When modal personality
is regarded as synonymous with learned cultural behavior, there can
be no question about its existence since the very concept of culture
implies the existence of uniformities and regularities.

Projective techniques have fit the purposes of workers attempt-
ing to describe modal personality processes. The Rorschach has been
particularly easy to work with since no matter what subjects did
with the test, responses could be scored and scores averaged to get
measures of central tendency. When such averages are unaccom-
panied by measures of variability, they are worse than worthless
since they have left the worker satisfied and pleased with his errors.
Unfortunately the addition of measures of variance complicates

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 237

the situation since there is no standard criterion which will tell the
worker when his group is homogeneous enough to be characterized
vahdly by the mean or mode. It is perhaps not necessary to comment
at this late date on the dubious practice of pooling Rorschach scores
of individuals to arrive at a combined psychogram which is then
taken to represent the group modal pattern. This yields a very tidy
result but unfortunately one that very often seems to have no re-
lationship to the patterns that are found in any of the individuals
in the group. The derived pattern is a completely synthetic one, and
the fact that such patterns have been found to be related to cultural
factors is testimony to the ingenuity of research workers in being
able to find relationships between almost any variables under the
sun.

Wallace has made a serious and sophisticated attempt to deal with
the problem of deriving a modal pattern ( 1952) . In analyzing Ror-
schach records of the Tucarora group, Wallace computed the modal
score for each of 2 1 scoring variables and then set confidence limits
of 2 S.D.'s around each mode. He defined responses that fell within
these limits as members of the modal class and then asserted that
subjects whose scores fell within these limits on all 2 1 variables were
members of the modal group. He found that 37 per cent of the
Tuscarora were in this group while only 5 per cent of the Ojibwa
were. Our admiration for the ingenuity of this attempt to develop
some basis for defining modality is perhaps qualified by the arbi-
trariness of the limits that were set, and one is left with the question
of whether Wallace's modal class is too large or too small or is noth-
ing more than a statistical accident.

The existence of wide variability is not an insurmountable ob-
stacle to modal personality analysis. It is merely necessary to follow
the derivations of the modal picture with a second step which checks
back to assess the applicability of the modal picture to each of the
individuals in the group in something of the manner of Wallace's
study. While this may appear to be an unwelcome complication and
an addition to the labor of the research, it does seem fair to say that
in the absence of some such back checking, validity cannot be
claimed for one's conclusions.

Projective tests do have a particular appropriateness to the task
of drawing up modal personality pictures. In using them one ap-
proaches the task in the simplest and most direct way possible. A
series of individuals, hopefully a representative and unbiased sample
of the population to which one wishes to generalize, is studied one

23 8 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

by one by means of a standardized procedure. The question is asked:
what is this person hke? And the answer, uncontaminated, it is
hoped, by knowledge of other individuals or by the expectations
one has about the findings, is based upon concrete and more or less
standardized interpretations of specific pieces of information. The
tests allow one to reduce what is obviously a task of great complexity
and difficulty to manageable proportions. It is perhaps not too much
to say that culture-and-personality study could not proceed with-
out these or equivalent techniques. And, the availability of this
method has resulted in a plethora of research.

Nevertheless, one sometimes has the feeling that the problem has
been made deceptively simple. The first assumption, for example,
that the projective test samples adequately the personality processes
of the individual in whom one is interested is an extremely hazard-
ous one. There is ample reason to believe from intensive studies of
individuals using many techniques (Murray 1938) , or from studies
of successive administrations of a single test (Kaplan and Bergei
1956) , that the data obtained from a single test is little more than a
fragment which may on occasion have some central importance but
which at best is only part of the story of personality. A single Ror-
schach, TAT or both, even when augmented with life history ma-
terials and extensive observation studies such as in Vogt's (1949) ,
must yield an incomplete account of the person. To the extent that
the anthropologist or psychologist believes that personality is en-
capsulated in the microcosm of the test protocol, he is undoubtedly
in error and in particularly serious error because he isn't likely to be
aware of it. When the protocols are sparse and inexpressive as is
sometimes the case, it is even more foolish to believe that one has the
truth or some substantial portion of it. When the worker knows
that his sample is seriously incomplete, as most psychologists do, but
treats it as though it were not, he is equally in error.

In addition to the "sampling error" in personality study, there is
the very difficult problem of interpretation. Characteristically, pro-
jective techniques yield very interesting but somxewhat cryptic re-
sponses. These responses, whether they afe Rorschach responses or
TAT stories, are difficult to interpret even under the best conditions.
When a drastic cultural difference exists, which the interpreter be-
cause of his inadequate knowledge of the culture and language of
the subject cannot take into account, the responses are often com-
pletely uninterpretable. Unfortunately in this situation where the
interpreter has had the choice of either admitting his helplessness

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 239

or of going ahead and making the interpretation he would if the re-
sponse had been given by someone in his own culture, the latter
course has been followed. The result has been that modal personality
pictures have often had little more meaning than fairy tales.

Perhaps the most usual solution to the problem of Rorschach in-
terpretation has been to apply one of the standard systems for scor-
ing responses and for interpreting the scores, the Klopfer and Beck
systems being the main ones in use. Since these scoring systems make
it possible to score any response whatever its origin, it becomes pos-
sible, once the score has been obtained, to ignore the exotic nature
of the response and average, summarize, and interpret the scores
in the usual manner. Quite aside from the doubtful validity of ap-
plying these interpretative categories cross-culturally, it appears
that Rorschach practice has, in the past decade, been swinging
slowly away from preoccupation with scoring, toward an interest
in the content of the responses. Formerly, content analysis was
treated as an adjunct to the interpretation of the scores. Today,
however, the situation is reversed and the principal approach is
usually to an understanding of the expressive imagery of each re-
sponse; the pattern and sequence of such expressions enable the
worker to form a picture of some aspects of the emotional life of
the subject. George DeVos (1952, 1955) has been the principal
exponant of content analysis in cross-cultural work with the Ror-
schach. His system for analyzing and scoring the content of the
responses provides a welcome technique for summarizing the emo-
tional imagery of the responses in a relatively objective way, and
makes possible at least rudimentary quantative analysis of differ-
ences between groups.

It is unfortunate that one cannot have greater confidence in the
more usual scoring categories. They provide very tempting mate-
rial for numerical manipulation. The scores of persons in a particu-
lar group can be averaged, for example, and the averages for each
category can be taken as a pattern representative of the whole group.
Other techniques, such as range, the various indices of variability,
the analysis of variance, and the various correlational techniques, all
yield measures that are directly relevant to questions that culture
and personality workers are concerned with, such as degree of vari-
ability or homogeneity within groups or subgroups, differences be-
tween groups and between subgroups, the identification of factors
accounting for variability or homogeneity, the relationship between
scores in different groups, and many others. However, until it is pos-

240 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

sible to apply these techniques to rehable scores which are vaKd
measures of what they purport to measure, it seems wisest to forego
their use, especially since their spurious exactness may lead us to be
content with findings of uncertain correctness.

In the face of these difficulties which probably apply to some ex-
tent to all modal personality studies it is obvious that research to
date must be treated with great tentativeness. Whether it is better
to proceed doing the best one can with the limited capacity one has
or to retreat from tasks that are too formidable is difficult to say.
In either case, the proper attitude is one which makes very limited
claims and is explicitly aware of limitations.

My judgment thus far has probably been somewhat harsh and
has overlooked the positive values in these studies. I have suggested
that most if not all modal personality studies utilizing projective
techniques have most probably been arriving at incorrect descrip-
tions of the people they are concerned with. However, it might
equally well be suggested that they have also been correct in some
part of their descriptions. While the shotgun approach in which
some of the wildly fired shots hit their mark is not a method to
be advocated, it will yield a slow accretion of sound facts if the un-
sound ones are gradually culled out in the course of repeated studies.
But it is very likely that much more than this is achieved. Many, of
the descriptions are coherent with impressions gained otherwise, in
fact so much to the mark that anthropologists who have used pro-
jective tests have come to feel considerable confidence in them (see
Lessa and Spiegelman 1954, Gladwin and Sarason 1953, and DuBois
1944) . The tests apparently do provide descriptions which in part
at any rate satisfy the needs of anthropologists for deeper insights
into the people they are studying and further have a certain amount
of congruence with materials derived independently.

The Delineation of Cross-Cultural Differences in Personality

Closely related to the assumption that modal personality patterns
actually do exist is the belief that peoples in different cultures vary
considerably from each other in their personality characteristics.
While this belief has been so strong that most workers have not felt
it necessary to study the matter empirically, there are a few studies
which have utilized projective techniques in relation to it. Projec-
tive tests offer a particularly sound approach to this question since
they provide relatively standardized stimuli to which the reactions

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 241

of different peoples may be compared. Perhaps the study which
most directly treats the question of cross-cultural differences is my
own (Kaplan 1954) .

In this study Rorschachs from 170 young men in four cultures,
Zuni, Navaho, Spanish American, and Mormon, were compared
with respect to fourteen variables. It was found that there was sta-
tistically significant variability from culture to culture in five of
the fourteen variables. However, it was noted that within each of
the four groups the variability was very great and this coupled with
the fact that the between-group differences were smaller than ex-
pected, led to the conclusion that there is less variability among cul-
tures than was expected. It should be noted that a severe limitation
of this study is that it never went beyond the scores to consider the
psychological traits that are presumed to underlie them. A number
of other studies have done this in the context of descriptions of
cross-cultural differences. Such studies include those of Billig, Gellin
and Davidson (1947, 1948), Abel and Hsu (1949), Joseph and
Murray's comparison of Chamorro and Carolinian Rorschachs
( 195 1 ) , Strauss and Strauss' comparison of Sinhalese and American
children's Rorschachs (1956-57), and Hsu, Watrous, and Lord's
comparison of Hawaiian Chinese adolescents and Chicago White
adolescents (1961).^ Each of these studies noted some differences
between the groups they studied but also a great many variables in
which no differences were noted. Although comparative studies
have been relatively sparse, my general impression is that the pro-
jective test is a useful if not essential technique and that further ex-
plorations of this method are warranted. The difficult problem of
interpreting the significance of various differences remains with
us, but the method, by pointing out differences, can indicate many
interesting and significant problems.

During the past three years the publication in large quantities of
the original protocols of Rorschach and TAT studies in Primary
Records in Culture and Personality (Kaplan (ed.) 1956, 1957),
a Microcard publication, has made possible the conduct of large-
scale comparative studies for the first time. With the publication
of Volume III of this series in 1961, the raw data of more than 65
studies will be available and studies comparing Rorschach responses
in 20 societies will be possible. To date more than 12,000 pages of
personality materials have appeared.

Henry and Spiro (1953) made a complete survey of such studies up to 1952.

242 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The Analysis of the Role of Personality Processes in
Societal Functioning

Under this heading we consider what is perhaps one of the two
most theoretically and scientifically significant contexts in which
projective tests are used cross-culturally, the other being the influ-
ence of cultural factors on personality functioning. This problem
is subsumed by the framework of the social scientist which is con-
cerned with understanding the bases of social order and integration.
An outstanding hypothesis which has been put forward by such
eminent sociologists as Weber, Parsons, Merton, Fromm, and Ries-
man holds that the motivational processes of individuals play a key
role in societal functioning, the role having to do with the motiva-
tion of socially required performances. In this connection, Inkeles
andLevinson (1954) have urged that a distinction be made between
the actual modal personality patterns that are empirically deter-
mined to exist in members of a society and the "socially required"
personality patterns that are needed for optimal societal function-
ing. The latter consists of the core of motivations which lead indi-
viduals to perform the socially necessary jobs and act in appropriate
ways.

Until the last few years systematic distinctions between these two
concepts had not been made and in most theoretical schemes the
modal personality model did service as the socially appropriate char-
acter structure also. At the present time a number of writers includ-
ing Riesman, Parsons, Spiro, Devereux, Singer, Inkeles, and others
have suggested that the appropriate social behavior is not a function
of the total personality pattern of individuals but of particular and
specific motivational structures. Consequently the problem is to
describe these specially relevant characteristics rather than to de-
scribe personality characteristics or motivations which interfere
with social functioning. The remainder, which neither facilitate
nor interfere with society, can from the point of view of this prob-
lem be eliminated from consideration.

A second point that might be made is that, from the point
of view of society, the crucial matter is, as Parsons and Shils
(1951:158) have stated "to get the patterns (of behavior) what-
ever their functional significance to the person it does not matter

whether there are important differences among types of personality
possessing this need-disposition (to behave in the required way) as
long as it exists."

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 243

Thus it appears that it is not necessary to posit shared motiva-
tional orientations or modal personality characteristics in order to
account for social behavior. The motives of individuals may vary
considerably. The important matter is that the jobs get done.

What is the role of the empirical investigation of personality in
this theoretical problem? It is clear that it is not simply the study of
personality. Perhaps the best entering wedge is through the concept
of the conformity-deviance dimension; that is, to define the prob-
lem as having to do with the discovery of the actual motivational
bases which lead to conf ormative behavior. While from one point of
view it may not seem important to have any knowledge of what
these motivational supports are, since obviously they exist or the
society would not function at all, from another viewpoint it seems
probable that problems of culture change, inadequate role perform-
ance and of deviance, to mention only a few, all demand a knowl-
edge of what the motivations of the person are relative to the
demands that are made on him for social behavior.

In another paper (Kaplan 1957) considering what some of these
motivations might be, I have suggested that these bases do not lie
in point-for-point isomorphism with specific social requirements
and values, so that, for example, competitive behavior is supported
by motives toward competition, since these can be understood as
being primarily instrumental in nature and in a means-end relation-
ship to other motives of a more generalized nature. We have posited
instead the view that what we must look for are the generalized
dispositions which are involved in the total relationship of the per-
son to the social reality in which he acts, a reality which is to a con-
siderable extent organized in normative terms — that is, which
specifies what he should be doing and how. These generalized dis-
positions are probably of a few main types which are widely dis-
tributed. Riesman and Fromm especially have been concerned with
the nature of these generalized dispositions and term them "social
character." "Other directedness" is a perfect example of the kind
of generalized disposition we are talking about, and Riesman has
given a very rich account of the consequences that flow from a so-
ciety's general reliance upon this type of motivational orientation.
His discussion indicates that what is at stake is the very core and
basis of social integration, and the essence of social order itself.

The description of the dominant type of motivational orienta-
tion is an empirical matter, and in line with a bias toward individual
study in matters in which traits are ascribed to individuals, I believe

244 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOCy

that the most vaHd approach to this task is through the study of
individuals. Riesman's Faces in the Crowd (1952) provides this
kind of study but it is perhaps more of an illustration of his theory
than an analysis of the facts. Can projective technique studies supply
us with relevant information? My belief that it can is based on the
following theoretical analysis.

If we choose to understand personality processes as social action,
that is, as being in the realm of what the person is doing rather than
as something he has, the pattern which is established in a projective
test protocol becomes an act or series of them which bears explain-
ing. My view of action is that it is a function of a social reality which
is organized around certain normative components and a motiva-
tional orientation relative to this reality. If we regard the projective
test protocol as a personality pattern which the person establishes
for the moment through his action, the two main kinds of informa-
tion that we require to understand or explain it are the delineation
of the normative aspects of the situation which define the legitimate
expectations that are perceived by the person and the motivational
orientation which prescribes the position or stance which is taken
relative to these expectations. The first is a matter for the social
scientist since it has to do with the character of the social situation,
while the second is a problem for the psychologist whose main in-
terest is or should be in the analysis of motivation. Each response
in the projective test can be analyzed from these two points of view.
This, of course, places a very heavy burden on the test analyst and
perhaps it will appear to the reader that the task is too difficult or
impossible. The gains to the social scientist, however, are very large
since they involve nothing less than an understanding of the rela-
tionship of the actor to the phenomenal reality in which he exists.

Although there probably has been little or no interpretation of
projective techniques in this vein to date, there has been a certain
amount of work that is concerned with the relationship of modal
personality processes to the functioning of social patterns. Inkeles
and Levinson (1954) discuss the problem of "congruence" be-
tween modal personality traits and social requirements. Inkeles,
Hanf mann, and Beier (1959) are concerned especially, in studying
the Soviet social system, with determining the fit between the per-
sonality traits that were determined in an extensive personality
study utilizing projective techniques, principally the Sentence
Completion Test, and the present requirements of the Soviet system.
They suggest that there is a considerable degree of noncongruence,
almost inevitable in any rapidly changing society, that has serious

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 245

consequences for the functioning of the Soviet system. Dicks'
(1952) study of Soviet personahty, although not utihzing projec-
tive techniques, is in a similar vein. Erickson (1950) is another
writer who has been concerned with this kind of problem.

While we have discussed the problem of determining the moti-
vational characteristics that are involved in conf ormative behavior,
similar questions might be asked with respect to deviance. What
is the nature of the motivational orientation which leads to a nega-
tive relationship to the normative aspects of a situation? Again this
is an empirical matter of the greatest importance which should be
studied with projective techniques and all other available methods.
The method suggested above in relation to the problem of conform-
ity, of viewing the response or story as an action which stems from
a particular relationship of the person to the normative, can be ap-
plied in the analysis of deviance as well. In one sense a considerable
part of the problem of action lies in the necessity of making a choice
between the deviant and conformative alternatives that are present
in the situation.

Something might be said about the merits of the Rorschach and
TAT relative to this problem. For any attempt to describe and
analyze motivational processes it would appear that the TAT has
important advantages. As the test has been used by Murray and his
associates and by most other psychologists, the primary focus has
been on describing the hierarchy and patterning of motives and
their relationship to the perceived social environment. Since the
stories are ordinarily comprised primarily of actions rather than
descriptions of qualities or feelings, and psychologists have held that
motives are inferable from actions, this instrument seems especially
pertinent to the requirements of the worker in psychological an-
thropology. The Rorschach, on the other hand, ordinarily provides a
series of highly condensed and often cryptic visual images from
which motivations are only indirectly inferable. One has the im-
pression that these images pertain more to the cognitive organiza-
tion of the emotional life than to the motivational or volitional
elements. However, this is not the exclusive focus but rather one
that is relatively stronger.

Learning More about Projective Techniques Themselves through
Cross-Cultural Studies

One of the main motivations for many cross-cultural studies has
been simply to see what Rorschachs or TATs or other tests look like
in exotic societies. This has involved a mixture of wanting to see

246 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

more of what the people are hke and wanting to see what the Ror-
schachs of people who differ so much from ourselves would look
like. Thus many sets of test protocols have been presented almost as
fascinating curiosities not necessarily having any great scientific
value.

One aspect of this curiosity is practical. Clinical psychologists
are continually faced with the problem of cultural diversity in their
subjects. Class, ethnic, and regional differences are an ever-present
part of the situation in which they work. While these factors are for
the most part ignored, there is an uneasy feeling that they are sig-
nificant and something should be done about them. Feeding into
this is the uneasiness about the norms in terms of which tests are
ordinarily interpreted. Rorschach workers have fairly clear and
well-established ideas about normal performances and their inter-
pretations are generally made in relationship to these norms. Sub-
cultural differences in subjects raise a question about the general
applicability of these norms. In this situation the psychologist looks
toward the worker in psychological anthropology for guidance and
help in establishing the importance of cultural factors for his own
interpretations and for clarifying the ways in which these factors
can be taken into consideration.

Studies in perhaps seventy-five societies have not, unfortunately,
served to settle these questions. The finding has been that societies
do vary considerably in the typical performances that are given by
their members, ranging from the sparseness and brevity of the
Ojibwa Rorschachs, for example, to the richness and expressiveness
of the Algerian, Japanese, and Hindu records and the cryptic and
almost impossible to interpret records of the Melanesian peoples.
The TAT records range from the two and three sentence records
of Navaho and Hopi children to the fifty and seventy-five pages
given by Javanese young men. What is perhaps most obvious is that
the way the test works varies considerably from group to group. A
large and important question is whether these differences result
simply from the subject's approaching the test in a different frame-
work and with different cultural conventions or whether they re-
flect genuine differences in personality processes. The difficulty of
separating these two possibilities is one of the chief obstacles of Ror-
schach interpretation in cross-cultural settings.

The discovery of this great variability which clearly transcends
the individual variability that exists in our own society has been of
great interest, however, to the extent that it reveals to us new modes
of reaction and presents us with concrete examples of personality

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 247

functioning which have radically different bases than exist in West-
ern society. The understanding and appreciation of these differences
should widen our understanding of the human species and of the
possibilities that are open to it.

What is the Best Way to Study Personality

It is clear that projective tests "work better" in some societies
than others in the sense that in some groups they yield more ex-
tensive and richer information. This seems to be analagous to the
fact that the tests work better with some individuals than with
others. A general problem thus raised, might be phrased, "How do
the characteristics of the people being studied influence the way
that they should be studied?"

The TAT study of Lucien Hanks, Jr. (1956) utilizing a set of
specially drawn pictures paralleling the Murray cards, is most no-
table for the sparseness of the stories told. The subjects, who were
mostly agricultural workers from Bang Chan in Thailand, gave
almost no fantasy material. Hanks, in trying to account for the
briefness of the stories, raises the interesting question of whether
the test situation has created inhibiting anxiety in his subjects or
whether the ability to fantasy was undeveloped in his subjects. An
examination of the records suggests that the key to their sparseness
lies in the fact that the subjects, without exception, were not telling
stories but simply describing what seemed to them to be happening
in the pictures at the moment. While it seems possible that the Thai
cannot tell stories or are reluctant to do so; that they did not un-
derstand what was required of them or, understanding, did not
know how or did not wish to comply, it is clear that both cognitive
orientation and motivation are essential factors in the projective
test situation and that without understanding them, it is almost
hopeless to attempt an interpretation of materials from societies
other than our own. While these factors can frequently be inferred
from the records themselves, more often they remain unclear, and
we are uncertain whether the variation of the records from those
of some other culture is the result of differences in what the subjects
were trying to do, differences in how hard they were trying, or ac-
tual differences in the personality and intellectual characteristics
of the subjects. Of course, these three factors are not independent
since what we mean by personality characteristics is sometimes only
that the subject prefers to do one thing rather than something else
or that he has a tendency to understand things in some particular
way.

248 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

It is interesting to note, in line with this same research and in
vivid contrast to the Thai's performances, the fantastically lengthy
and intricate stories collected from young men in Java by Hildred
Geertz (1957). Using a specially constructed set of TAT cards
and recording the stories in the native language, Geertz obtained
protocols averaging over fifty typewritten pages in length. It seems
very possible that contrary to Hanks' findings, the Javanese have
the capacity to give very rich, imaginative, and revealing fan-
tasies. These conditions undoubtedly vary from culture to culture
and from individual to individual. Their discovery requires a high
degree of ingenuity and flexibility from the test administration, and
an acknowledgment that the standard instructions and testing situ-
ation must sometimes be abandoned in the search for the better
conditions under which it is possible to elicit significant personality
data. It also requires that the tester investigate the subject's under-
standing of the test situation and the nature of his motivations and
concerns about the test. Since this kind of research has hardly been
done in our own culture, it is perhaps optimistic to expect that it
can be done in cross-cultural studies. However, it does seem to be
the very minimum needed.

The general principle which should hold for all projective tech-
nique interpretation is that the absence of some particular kind of
material should not be regarded as indicating the absence of the
ability necessary to produce the material. Instead, one should inter-
pret what has been given as the preferred style or mode of the sub-
ject under the particular circumstances of the existing situation.
This principle is specially important in cross-cultural studies. The
Rorschach study of Carstairs (1956) is very relevant to this issue.
His extensive series was collected in Delwara village in Udaipur and
in the Bhil tribe, also in Udaipur. Despite the fact that most subjects
in the Delwara group were unsure of themselves and showed many
signs of anxiety, these records are rich and interesting. Although a
great many of the subjects seemed reluctant and anxious and felt
that they were not doing what was required of them, they were
appropriately oriented toward the task and gave the kinds of ex-
pressive responses which Rorschach workers expect and hope for.
Perhaps something in the cultural situation and in the "modal per-
sonality" characteristics of the group is appropriate to the require-
ments of the Rorschach test.

Carstairs' Bhil Rorschachs were collected under much more fa-
vorable circumstances than were the Hindu records. He reports that
the Bhils seemed to enjoy the test and had an easy relationship with

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 249

the tester. Despite this, they had a much more difficult time in giving
responses and the responses are much less revealing. There is more
stereotypy, vagueness, and rejection of cards. The content seems less
emotionally charged and less symbolic in nature. A comparison of
the two sets of Rorschachs suggests that far deeper and more pro-
found factors than the immediate test situation are involved in the
differences between the Bhil and Hindu records. The former, despite
a great readiness to respond freely and spontaneously, gave com-
paratively little; while the latter, despite considerable reticence,
caution, and anxiety, were extremely expressive. It is difficult to say
why this is so. One might speculate that two different kinds of ac-
tions are involved: the personality of the subjects and their char-
acteristic modes of cognition. It is not possible to specify at this
time how these factors operate in the Hindu and Bhil groups. Con-
ceivably, however, the greater anxiety and involvement of the
Hindu group could stem from unsolved personality problems which
were being worked out very near to the surface of consciousness. If
this were the case, the Rorschach situation might have greater func-
tional significance for the subjects. The Bhils, on the other hand,
whose anxieties and problems apparently are considerably more re-
pressed, did not find the situation of psychological use since they
were not "working through" their problems, but were suppressing
them.

A number of studies suggest that the acculturation variable has
something to do with expressiveness on projective tests, the general
finding being (see Hallowell 1942, Spindler 1955) that accultura-
tion is associated with greater expressiveness. An obvious point is
that as nonliterate peoples become more and more influenced by
western culture and become more like the population for whom the
tests were devised, the tests will work better, in the sense of yielding
richer and more valid data. As has been suggested above, the diffi-
culty in using projective techniques cross-culturally is not only a
matter of increased uncertainty about the validity of the tests but
involves the sparseness of some of the materials and the inability to
obtain rich, imaginative, personal, and expressive data in contrast to
brief, superficial, and stereotyped responses with a minimum of
personal involvement. Although the latter are certainly not un-
known in our society and in some parts of the population may even
predominate, it does appear that the Rorschach and TAT generally
do yield better materials in our own society than in most others. The
reasons for this are not completely obvious, especially where the
Rorschach test is concerned. The success of these tests in our own

250 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

society seems not to be based on an explicit recognition of the fea-
tures of our culture and its people that make us more permeable to
particular kinds of personality study procedures, but rather to be
based either on pragmatic grounds or an intuitive understanding of
what is appropriate in a personality study.

One factor of importance to personality study is an openness and
willingness to be known by others, the exact opposite of what
Lerner (1961) finds in the French, who speak of the "refus de
s'engager," who answer the telephone by saying, "Je vous ecoute,"
and who answer the greeting on the street, "Comment va?" with
the ironic reply, "On se defend." Western society is not the only one
in which this openness to personality study is found. Geertz's
lengthy Javanese TATs and many other sets of data indicate that
the quality of openness is widely distributed. However, it would
probably be premature to state that openness to personality study
is a general quality of any people.

I have conducted informal studies with a group of young Navaho
men which make it clear that certain techniques yield more infor-
mation about personality in this group than others. These very shy,
noncommunicative individuals proved to be very difficult subjects
despite their apparent eagerness to co-operate and be of help. Ror-
schach responses and TAT stories were sparse and unrevealing. On
the other hand, the Rosenzweig Picture Frustration test yielded
very good data. Perhaps most interesting were my attempts to get
life history materials. Individual after individual gave the briefest
and most impersonal possible account of his life. In varying the con-
ditions of the study in an attempt to get more expressive materials,
I found that if the subjects were allowed to write their life stories,
they furnished quite lengthy and expressive accounts, despite
considerable difficulty with pencil and written English. It seems,
therefore, that two different problems exist, one having to do
with the reasons for the differences in the general tendency to per-
meability in different societies, and the other dealing with the varia-
tions in the conditions under which individuals in different societies
are willing and able to be personally expressive.

With respect to the first of these problems, we might speculate
that conceptions of personality and individuality prevalent in the
culture are among the relevant factors. For example, in a culture in
which there is considerable concern about self and where thought
about differentiated individuality is high, Rorschach materials may
be specially rich and revealing. Hallowell's (1954) analysis of con-
cepts of self and of kinds of self-awareness as cultural variables

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 251

influencing persons' self-images and experience of self is very rele-
vant to this problem and offers many exciting leads.

What Has Cross-Culturol Use of Projective Techniques
Tauglit Us about Personality Development

One of the great hopes and aims of cross-cultural personality
study has been the feeling that a better understanding of personality
functioning itself might be achieved if cultural factors could be
given more serious consideration. It is difficult to say whether any-
thing of real value has been accomplished along these lines. Perhaps
the best criteria that can be utilized is whether any new conceptions
of personality functioning have emerged as a result of these studies.
Here my impression is that they have not. Of the theoretical work
of anthropologists only A. I. Hallowell has made any significant
contributions; his work on the self and some of his theoretical writ-
ing being in my opinion of great importance for psychologists.
However, while his work with projective techniques may have
added to his psychological orientation and sophistication, it has in
itself been of no great importance.

Of the psychologists who have been influenced by anthropologi-
cal work, Erik Erikson, Abram Kardiner, and Erich Fromm have
made perhaps the only significant additions to our conception of
personality functioning, the remainder of neo-Freudian social
thinking coming fairly directly from Freud and Adler and not
being related to postwar empirical work at all. One might say that
psychoanalytic theory has had a much greater influence on the cul-
ture and personality field than this field has had on psychoanalytic
or other personality theory. Projective test studies have in the main
been used to support and bolster conceptions which have emerged
from these theories, principally the notion that child-rearing prac-
tices have a crucial role in the development of adult personality
characteristics. Considerable support for this hypothesis has been
developed by empirical studies, although it is perhaps not com-
pletely conclusive as yet. However, important influences of these
studies on theories of personality functioning have not yet occurred.

Nevertheless, there is perhaps some reason to be optimistic that
such influence may not be too long in coming. Perhaps the fact that
psychologists themselves have been very slow in coming into the
culture-and-personality field is responsible. While anthropologists
have shown a high degree of sophistication in the use of psychologi-
cal concepts and a few like Hallowell have become first-rate psy-
chological theorists, their contribution to what are essentially psy-

252 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

etiological problems is necessarily limited. If, as perhaps can be
anticipated in the not too distant future, psychologists in substan-
tial numbers take up the problem, further theoretical development
can be expected.

A Summing Up

My judgments about the cross-cultural use of projective tests
have been very harsh. I have looked for the positive values in these
tests and found them very scant. I have looked at the difficulties in
their use and found them to be enormous, and have concluded that
as these tests are being used and interpreted at present, only a modi-
cum of validity and value can be obtained from them.

Nevertheless, cross-cultural personality study is one of the most
rewarding, exciting, and important areas in the social sciences. The
diflSculties that have been noted are not in the least discouraging but
on the contrary add to the feeling that this is an extremely produc-
tive field which is just at the beginning of making a great contribu-
tion to the development both of social and psychological theory. My
criticisms of current practices have been aimed mostly at those who
would suggest that the problems do not exist or can be ignored. If
there is any general moral to my remarks, it is that psychological
anthropology in the next decade must center around research in
how to study personality and how to use these tools with depth and
validity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Theodora M. and Francis L. K. Hsu

1949 Some aspects of personality of Chinese as revealed by the Rorschach test.
Journal of Projective Techniques 13:28 5-3 o i .
Adcock, C. J. and J. E. Richie

1958 Intercultural use of Rorschach. American Anthropologist 60:881-892.
BiLLiG, D., J. GiLLiN, and W. Davidson

1947-48 Aspects of personaUty and culture in a Guatemalan community. Jovu-nal
of Personality 16:153-187, 326-368.

Carstairs, G. M.

1956a Rorschachs of forty high caste Hindus and ten Moslem men from
Delwara, Udaipus, India. In B. Kaplan (ed.) , Primary records in culture
and personality. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, Vol. i .

Carstairs, G. M.

1956b Rorschachs of twenty-two Bhil men from Udaipus, India. In B. Kaplan
(ed.). Primary records in culture and personality. Madison, University
of Wisconsin Press, Vol. i.

CROSS-CULTURAL USE OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES 253

DeVos, G.

1952 A quantitative approach to affective symbolism in Rorschach responses.
Journal of Projective Techniques 16:133-150.

1955 A quantitative Rorschach assessment of maladjustment and rigidity
in acculturating Japanese Americans. Genetic Psychology Monographs
52:51-87.

Dicks, H. V.

1952 Observations on contemporary Russian behavior. Human Relations
5:111-175.

DuBois, C.

1944 The people of Alor. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Erickson, E. H.

1950 Childhood and society. New York, Norton.
Geertz, H.

1957 Modified TAT's of thirty-three Japanese men and women. In B. Kaplan
(ed.), Primary records in culture and personaUty. Madison, University
of Wisconsin Press, Vol. 2.
Gladwin, T. and S. B. Sarason

1953 Truk: man in paradise. New York, The Viking Fund.
Hallowell, a. I.

1942 Acculturation processes and personality changes as indicated by the
Rorschach technique. Rorschach Research Exchange 6:42-50.

1954 The self and its behavioral environment. Explorations, Vol. 2. Re-
printed in A. I. Hallowell, Culture and experience. Philadelphia, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1955.

Hanks, L.

1956 Modified TAT's of forty-seven Thai children and adults. In B. Kaplan
(ed.). Primary records in culture and personality. Madison, University
of Wisconsin Press, Vol. i.

Henry, Jules and Melford E. Spiro

1953 Psychological techniques: projective tests in field work. In A. L.
Kroeber and Others, Anthropology today, pp. 417—429. Chicago, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Hsu, Francis L. K., Blanche Watrous and Edith Lord

1 96 1 Culture pattern and adolescent behavior. International Journal of Social
Psychiatry, Vol. VII, No. i, 33-53.
Inkeles, a., E. Hanfmann, and H. Beier

1959 Modal personality and adjustment to the Soviet socio-political system.
Human Relations, Vol. 2, No. i. Reprinted in B. Kaplan (ed.). Study-
ing personality cross-culturally. Evanston, Row, Peterson, and Co.,
1961.
Inkeles, A. and D. J. Levinson

1956 National character: the study of modal personality and socio-cultural
systems. In G. Lindsey (ed.), pp. 977—1020. Handbook of social
psychology. Cambridge, Addison-Wesley.
Joseph, Alice and Veronica F. Murray

195 1 Chamorros and Carolinians of Sapian: personality studies. Cambridge,
Harvard University Press.

254 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Kaplan, B.

1954 A study of Rorschach responses in four cultures. Papers of Peabody
Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. Harvard University, Vol. 42,
No. 2,

1956-57 Primary records in culture and personality. Madison, University of
Wisconsin Press, Vols. 1—2.
1957 Personality and social structure. In J. B. Gittler, Review of sociology:
analysis of a decade. New York, Wiley and Sons.

Kaplan, B. and S. Berger

1956 Increments and consistency of performance in four repeated Rorschach
administrations. Journal of Projective Techniques, Vol. 20, No. 3.

Lessa, W. a. and M. Spiegelman

1954 Ulithian personality as seen through ethnological materials and thematic
test analysis. University of California Publications in Culture and So-
ciety. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, Vol. 2.

Lerner, D.

1 96 1 Interviewing Frenchmen. In B. Kaplan (ed.). Studying personality
cross-culturally. Evanston, Row, Peterson and Co.

Murray, H. A.

1938 Explorations in personality. New York, Oxford Press.

Parsons, T. and E. A. Shils

195 1 Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge, Harvard University
Press.

Riesman, D.

1952 Faces in the crowd. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Smith, M. B.

1954 Anthropology and psychology. In J. Gillin (ed.), pp. 32-66. For a
science of social man. New York, Macmillan.

Spindler, G.

1955 Socio-cultural and psychological processes in Menomini acculturation.
University of California Publications in Culture and Society. Berkeley
and Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Spiro, M.

195 1 Culture and personality: the natural history of a false dichotomy.
Psychiatry 15:19—46.

Straus, M. A. and J. H. Straus

1956-57 Personal insecurity and Sinhalese social structure: Rorschach evidence
for primary school children. Eastern Anthropologist, Vol. 10, No. 2.

VoGT, E. A.

195 I Navaho veterans: a study of changing values. Papers of Peabody Mu-
seum of Archeology and Ethnology. Harvard University, Vol. 4 1 , No. i .

Wallace, A. F. C.

1952 The modal personality structure of the Tuscarora Indians as revealed
by the Rorschach test. Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American
Ethnology, Bulletin 150.

chapter ^

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND
CULTURE

ANTHONY F. C. WALLACE

The University of Pennsylvania

Introduction

Do DIFFERENT culturcs encourage different styles of mental illness?
Are there societies in which mental illness is absent, or at least rare in
comparison with our own? Have either style or frequency of men-
tal illness, or both, changed during the history of Western civiliza-
tion? These and similar questions, prompted by practical concern
with the mental health of our contemporary world populations,
have evoked answers from anthropologists. Yes, different cultures
do encourage different styles of mental illness, but the major cate-
gories of mental illness (the organic psychoses, the functional psy-
choses, the neuroses, the situational reactions, etc.) seem to be
universal human afflictions. No, there are no societies of whom it
can be said with confidence that mental illness is absent or, with
certainty, that it is even rare, but there are certainly differences in
the frequencies of illness and in the readiness of different social sys-
tems to recognize what Western psychiatry would call illness as
significant disorder. Yes, styles and frequencies of various mental
illnesses have changed in recent western history (hysteria, for in-
stance, is now a relatively rare diagnosis, and devils and demons have
been replaced by radio and radar in paranoid delusions) , but we do
not know all of the reasons for such changes over time nor for the
differences between social classes and between regions.

Thus, the relation between culture and mental health remains an
intriguing problem for anthropologists, a promising field for re-
search, and perhaps some day a richly rewarding field for applica-
tion. At the present time, like other scientists interested in mental

255

256 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

illness, anthropologists are still searching for more adequate con-
cepts, more powerful theories, and more effective techniques of
observation. One of the avenues of research which has been under
rapid construction outside of anthropology is biological in con-
cept and method; and since this approach is relatively unexploited
by anthropologists, yet is potentially of great significance for an-
thropological theory, a considerable part of this chapter will be
devoted to considering the ways in which the current cultural-
anthropological work in this area can assimilate and exploit what
may be regarded, in the context of anthropology, as a physical-
anthropological position.

CERTAIN LIMITATIONS OF CONVENTIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL
THEORIES OF MENTAL ILLNESS

The culture and personality tradition in anthropology has bor-
rowed its models of personality development, its characterology,
and its conceptions of mental illness almost exclusively from a com-
bination of learning, Gestalt, and psychoanalytic theories. This is in
part a historical accident: these functional approaches were de-
veloping most vigorously in American psychology and psychiatry
just at the time, in the late 1920's and early 193 o's, when cultural
anthropologists were first turning their attention seriously to the
individual. Anthropologists found these psychologies readily ap-
plicable to an understanding of the individual in culture; and the
psychologists and psychoanalysts found in cross-cultural materials
useful corroborative evidence for their theories. But the more re-
cently developed biological approach, while it has not as yet (any-
more than the functional approach) provided a spectrum of
"cures" of such refractory disease clusters as schizophrenia and
cerebral arteriosclerosis, has already yielded a considerable body of
knowledge of processes (in this case, of organic mechanisms) which
are implicated in one or another type of psychopathology. This
knowledge should be incorporated without delay, in general out-
line, into the conceptual armamentarium of every anthropologist
concerned not only with mental disease but also with normal per-
sonality development and function.

At the present time, anthropological treatments of mental disease
topics, particularly by culture and personality scholars, generally
depend on a simple paradigm: the symptomatology of the illness
under scrutiny is assumed to be motivated behavior expressive of

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 2 57

psychological conflicts and to some degree effective in reducing ten-
sion and anxiety; the symptoms are "interpreted" in terms of some
deductive schema intended to lay bare the (usually assumed to be
unconscious) conflict; cultural Anlagen in the symptomatic be-
havior are pointed out; and finally, the source of the conflict is
sought in traumatic emotional and/or cognitive dilemmas imposed
by the victim's culture. This procedure almost completely neglects
the victim's body; or, rather, it attributes to the victim's psyche a
virtually magical ability to control the state of its body, by un-
critically assuming that almost any somatic expression can be satis-
factorily explained merely by asserting a plausible concomitant
intrapsychic conflict. Even the "psychosomatic" position, it must
be emphasized, is not "organic" in the sense indicated above, for it
seeks the explanation of both somatic and behavioral disorder in
antecedent psychological and cultural rather than in antecedent
physiological conditions: thus the ulcer is explained by reference
to the autonomic discharge attendant upon intrapsychic conflict,
and the existence of intrapsychic conflict is explained by reference
to culturally enjoined learning experiences rather than by any neu-
rophysiological process.

Thus, even with regard to syndromes familiar to Western clini-
cians and conventionally (if not invariably) conceived as func-
tional in etiology, the assumption that biological determinants are
negligible is becoming an increasingly hazardous one to make. But
the anthropologist is peculiarly vulnerable to criticism when he
utilizes the functional paradigm without qualification to explain
exotic forms of mental illness, such as the pibloktoq of the Polar Es-
kimo and the windigo psychosis of the northern Algonkian hunters.
Here, in addition to the difficulties engendered by the fundamental
ambiguity of current psychiatric theory over the respective causal
roles of psychological and organic factors in clinically familiar syn-
dromes, there are (or ought to be) serious uncertainties introduced
by recognition of the extreme climatic, epidemiological (in respect
to infectious diseases) , and nutritional conditions to which tech-
nologically primitive populations are at times exposed (see, for
example. Tooth's discussion of the difficulty even psychiatrists ex-
perience, when using purely behavioral criteria, in making the
differential diagnosis between schizophrenia and certain types of
trypanosomiasis in West Africa) (Tooth, 1950) .

This paper is not intended, however, as an admonition to anthro-

258 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

pologists to abandon an obsolete dogma for the sake of embracing
a new scientific faith. Rather, the necessity for incorporating a new
viewpoint into an existing tradition is pointed out. That this incor-
poration will entail modification of some beliefs and procedures
may be expected; but the new theoretical position should be a strong
synthesis rather than a weak substitute.

THE ORGANIC APPROACH IN PSYCHIATRY

The year 1927 may be taken as the beginning of codification of
the culture and personality position in anthropology, for in that
year Sapir's pioneer paper, "The Unconscious Patterning of Be-
havior in Society," was published in a symposium on The Uncon-
scious (Mandelbaum 1949). Sapir's paper, probably the first
major piece of theoretical writing in the culture and personality
tradition, set, or at least prefigured, the frame of reference of later
anthropological work in this area. This frame of reference was pre-
dominantly psychological rather than biological: it implied that
the fundamental, and often unconscious, organizations of indi-
vidual behavior which are conventionally labeled "personality" are
molded, not by physical constitution, but by a combination of
cultural milieu and individual experience. The correspondingly
functional character of the conventional culture and personality
view of mental disorder, as it developed in the next few years in the
work of Sapir, Benedict, Mead, and others, can be readily explained
by the absence of any substantial competing body of thought; for
the biological approach in psychiatry did not even begin to make
headway until after 1927.

The most impressive body of psychiatric theory in 1927 was
psychoanalytic. This theory, although it gave lip service to biologi-
cal thinking, and although its builders were well grounded in
neurology, was in operation uncompromisingly psychological. Ac-
cordingly, the published case histories provided very little informa-
tion concerning the physiological status of the patients. The analyst
sometimes used physical metaphors (like "the economy of psychic
energy"), invoked constitutional predispositions, and made as-
sumptions about organically grounded instincts, erogenous body
zones, and stages of sexual maturation. Freud, himself a neurologist
of distinction, even asserted that behind the analyst stood the man
with the syringe. But the psychoanalytic physiology, as it grew
beyond Freud's control, was increasingly a pseudophysiology.
Biological man was for all practical purposes constant in the psy-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 259

choanalytic equation, and "psychological" events (learnings, com-
munications, fantasies, motives, defense mechanisms, etc.) were the
variables.

Most of the currently prominent "organic" methods of treatment
were developed after psychoanalysis reached its theoretical matu-
rity. In 1927 psychiatry had little else to oflfer in treatment beyond
psychological (including psychoanalytic) methods for the well-
to-do and custodial care (eked out by sedatives, hydrotherapy, and
work therapy) for the poor. The insulin coma treatment for schizo-
phrenia was introduced about 1930 and metrazol convulsive ther-
apy in 1936; electroshock was not developed until 1938 (and all of
these treatments were first publicly described in Europe) . Psycho-
surgery was seriously developed in Portugal about 1935 and in this
country in 1936. Psychopharmacology, hitherto a somewhat exotic
specialty, began to flourish only during World War II. The use of
drugs for abreaction of emotional conflict in combat neuroses be-
came prominent during the early years of the war; and the intensive
study of the psychotomimetic drugs (principally hallucinogens)
and their experimental use for therapeutic purposes has developed
chiefly since World War II. The new tranquilizing (or "ataractic")
drugs were first offered to the medical profession in 1952, and the en-
ergizers (or "psychostimulants") have come even later.

Basic science contributions, apart from psychoanalytic theory,
were equally uninspiring in 1927. Inspired by the discovery of the
role of syphilis in paretic psychoses, early speculations about the role
of focal infection in the etiology of the other psychoses were failing
to find clinical confirmation. Berger's first report on the use of the
electroencephalograph (EEG) for recording "brain waves" (elec-
trical potentials originating in the cerebral cortex and in other parts
of the brain as well) was not published in Germany until 1929; not
until 1935 did American scientists publish confirmatory findings.
Clinical chemistry had only in the preceding fifteen years developed
the basic techniques for analysis of small samples of blood; prior to
World War I, investigations of human metabolic processes had had
to depend largely on studies of diet and urine, because the quantities
of blood required for chemical analysis were so large as to prohibit
their use as routine clinical procedures. The application of these new
techniques of blood analysis to problems of psychiatric research,
and the biochemical findings based on their use, came almost en-
tirely after 1927. Thus, for instance, endocrinology was still in its
infancy in 1927. The importance of the hormones of the adrenal

260 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cortex, which play a role in regulating the carbohydrate metabolism
and the balance of mineral electrolytes in the body fluids, and which
in excess can precipitate psychotic states, was not realized until the
late 1920's. Research in that area was so slow in diffusing into other
branches of knowledge that as late as 1944, in a widely read two-
volume symposium entitled Personality and the Behavior Disorders
(Hunt 1944), the adrenal cortex is given one paragraph (and no
mention in the index.) Thus Selye's first publication on the cele-
brated stress or general adaptation syndrome concept was first pub-
lished in Nature in 1936 {vide Selye 1956); and the "cortisone
psychoses" did not even exist until cortisone was isolated, synthe-
sized, and finally used in the treatment of arthritis about 1945.
Franz Kallman's early report on his genetic studies of schizophrenia
utilizing pairs of identical twins was published in 1938 (Kallman
1938). The more modern theories of nerve impulse transmission
emerged during and after World War II, some of them stimulated
by investigations into the action of the so-called "nerve gases" by
the Army Chemical Center.

But there is no reason to continue the demonstration farther. The
major point is clear: a large part of the modern knowledge of the
physiological parameters of the behavior of the central nervous sys-
tem in man has been accumulated since the original conceptual
structure of the culture and personality viewpoint was built by
Sapir, Mead, and other pioneer scholars. Whole literatures, rivaling
in size the entire body of culture and personality writings, now exist
on such topics as the relation between the adrenal hormones and
mental function, the localization of labor in the brain as revealed by
electroencephalographic and derivative techniques, and the effects
of drugs on mood and cognitive process. And the major portion of
all of these fields of knowledge has been contributed well after cul-
ture and personality committed itself to a functional approach.

As yet, the various special lines of the new organic approach have
not achieved synthesis either among themselves or with the (actually
older) psychosocial tradition in psychiatry and the social sciences.
Nevertheless, a general philosophy would seem to animate the ap-
proach and to determine the nature of any future synthesis with
the functional position. This philosophy would seem to reside in four
principles:

I. Statements about "behavior," "mind," "personality," "psyche," "mental
illness," and other "psychological" entities are statements about physical systems
which include brain (for the brain is the mind).

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 261

2. Any physical disfunction of brain implies some mental disfunction.

3. Some physical disfunctions will produce disorganizations of neural systems
most of whose components will remain individually undamaged.

4. Most cases of chronic, and many of acute, behavior disorders (including the
functional psychoses) are the symptomatic consequences of chronic, or acute,
physical disfunctions of brain.

The reader will note that the organic approach, as thus stated, does
not claim that every socially undesirable mental state, attitude, or
motive necessarily implies a physical disfunction; thus, evidences of
hostility and anxiety, " neurotic" defenses, suicide, antisocial acting
out, and so forth may in principle be produced by brains which
function perfectly well but have been subjected to environmental
pressures (including faulty communication) to which these "symp-
toms" are "normal" responses. But the organic approach would dif-
fer from the functional approach in claiming that an adequately
functioning brain will be able to adapt to, or reduce, environmental
pressures, and that chronic mental disfunctions are therefore pre-
ponderantly the consequence of a chronic physical disfunction
which existed prior to, or independently of, the organism's embar-
rassment by environmental pressures. A radical functional theory,
by contrast, would ascribe a far smaller role to organic factors as
causal agents in all except the gross and obvious types of organic
brain damage; but most functionalists would probably concede that
chronic psychogenic stress can on occasion elicit physiological
alterations, sometimes irreversible, which aggravate functional
mental disorders (just as chronic psychogenic stress can lead to non-
mental organic disorders such as duodenal ulcer) .

More specifically the organic approach can be divided into such
main topical areas as:

1. The study of the anatomy and physiology of the central nervous system
(including the autonomic system) considered as an entity.

2. The study of the localization and organization of labor in brain (including
the logical structure of nerve nets) .

3 . The study of nerve and nerve impulse.

4. The study of the relation of metabolic (including digestive, excretory,
circulatory, endocrine, and intracellular biochemical) processes to cerebral func-
tion.

5. The study of the genetics of mental disorders.

6. The study of the effect of hypoxia, hypoglycemia, and electrolyte imbalance
on cerebral function and the various processes responsible for hypoxia, hypogly-
cemia, and electrolyte imbalance.

7. Psychopharmacology (including the study of tranquilizers, energizers, and
psychotomimetic agents).

262 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

8. The study of the eflfect of nutritional variables on cerebral function.

9. The study of the shock therapies (principally insuUn coma and electro-
shock) .

10. The search for blood fractions containing suspected psychopathogenic
(toxic) substances spontaneously produced by the body.

The disciplines involved in these and other studies of psychopa-
thology range from mathematical physics and computer design,
through such laboratory sciences as physical chemistry, biochemis-
try, clinical chemistry, physiology, experimental psychology, and
neuropsychiatry, to those areas of anthropology and sociology
which can contribute data, method, or theory to organically
oriented investigations.

A major problem in the organic approach has, of course, been its
relative insularity from psychosocial knowledge (this has not been
a problem of the functional approach alone) . Accordingly a major
need of both approaches is a better understanding of how knowl-
edge and speculation concerning the physical aspects of human
systems can best be related to knowledge and speculation concern-
ing the psychological and social aspects of these systems. This is
imperative because, although cases of mental illness are usually first
identified in the community by laymen using social criteria rather
than criteria of physical science, and although some part of the
total disease process is invariably a function of social system inter-
acting with individual personality, if the development of many of
these cases is dependent on organic processes, then very careful
analysis must be made of the interaction of social and organic
events. And anthropology, by both theory and field investigation,
can contribute significantly to the advancement of this kind of
analysis.

AN ILLUSTRATIVE PROBLEM: PIBLOKTOQ'

In its simplest form, the problem faced by anthropological the-
ory in the area of mental illness can be illustrated by the syndrome
pibloktoq among the Polar Eskimo of the Thule District of north-

^ The description of the pibloktoq syndrome is based on a compilation of published and manu-
script descriptions, both specific and generalized, by a variety of observers, from the missionary
Hans Egede in 1765 to about 1940. Seventeen photographs of a woman during a pibloktoq attack
at Etah were taken by Donald MacMillan in June 19 14; we were able to use copies of these
from the original negatives on file in the Photographic Division of the American Museum of
Natural History. I am indebted to Mr. Robert Ackerman, my collaborator in the pibloktoq
study, who has collected many of the data and contributed heavily to their interpretation; to
Dr. Zachary Gussow, who kindly permitted use of his unpublished manuscript on pibloktoq;
and to Dr. Gilbert Ling, who reviewed the calcium hypothesis and contributed to its refinement.

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 263

ern Greenland. The classic course of the syndrome, as judged from
cases described by various travelers in the north (MacMillan 1934;
Peary 1907; Rasmussen 191 5; Whitney 191 1) and from photo-
graphs of one attack (American Museum of Natural History
19 14), is as follows:

1 . Prodrome. In some cases a period of hours or days is reported during which
the victim seems to be mildly irritable or withdrawn.

2. Excitement. Suddenly, with little or no warning, the victim becomes
wildly excited. He may tear off his clothing, break furniture, shout obscenely,
throw objects, eat feces, or perform other irrational acts. Usually he finally leaves
shelter and runs frantically onto tundra or ice pack, plunges into snowdrifts,
climbs onto icebergs, and may actually place himself in considerable danger, from
which pursuing persons usually rescue him, however. Excitement may persist for
a few minutes up to about half an hour.

3. Convulsions and Stupor. The excitement is succeeded by convulsive sei-
zures in at least some cases, by collapse, and finally by stuporous sleep or coma
lasting for up to twelve hours.

4. Recovery. Following an attack, the victim behaves perfectly normally;
there is amnesia for the experience. Some victims have repeated attacks; others
are not known to have had more than one.

The epidemiological parameters seem to be:

1. Geographical. Pibloktoq (or, in Danish usage, perdlerorpoq) is known to
occur among the Polar Eskimo of the Thule District. Whether the same syndrome
(whatever it is called) occurs elsewhere is uncertain. Hoygaard, in a dietary and
medical study of the Angmagssalik Eskimo in 1936-37, reported that "^^ Hysterical
fits accompanied by strong mental and physical excitation were frequent, espe-
cially in women" (Hoygaard 1941:72) . It does not seem to have been noted, how-
ever, among Canadian or Alaskan Eskimo, nor is it certain that it occurs in Asia
or northern Europe. Thus we can only say that it certainly occurs in northwest
Greenland; that it probably occurs elsewhere in Greenland; and that it may occur
anywhere in the world. Whether or not the syndrome is to be considered a uniquely
arctic or even Polar Eskimo affliction depends on whether it is a unique disease.

2. Seasonal. Reports describe cases occuring at all seasons of the year but
cases are said to be fewer in the summer.

3. Historical. As might be expected, since the Thule Eskimo were not visited
by white men until 18 18, the case notes and descriptions are recent, the best of
them dating from the time of Peary's visits to the Polar Eskimo in the first decade
of the twentieth century. Detailed accounts have been provided by Peary ( 1907) ,
MacMillan (1934), Knud and Niels Rasmussen ( 1 9 1 5 ) , and Gussow (i960), and
others familiar with the Polar Eskimo. It is probable, however, that the disorder
is fairly ancient in the area. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, northwest
Greenlanders (possibly including the Polar Eskimo) were reported to be peculiarly
subject to the "falling sickness." And in the 1850's the crew of Kane's icebound
ship, twice wintering north of Thule, were afflicted by a strange "epilepto-
tetanoidal disease" which, in combination with scurvy, killed at least two men.

264 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

incapacitated others, and rendered their dogs worthless (Kane, 1856). "Epilepto-
tetanoidal" is a reasonably accurate descriptive phrase for pibloktoq.

4. Frequency. Pibloktoq can apparently reach epidemic proportions: eight of
seventeen Eskimo women associated with Peary's 1908 expedition were afflicted
during one winter season; other observers have claimed that at certain times cases
could be seen almost every day in a single village.

5. Racial Nonspecificity. As was noted above, several probable cases of
pibloktoq among scorbutic whites were observed by Kane and Hayes in the 1850's
in the same region.

6. Possible Species Nonspecificity. "Fits" among sled dogs, with social with-
drawal, snarling, fighting, and convulsive seizures, but usually ending in death,
are said to be regarded by Eskimo as the same syndrome and are given the same
name, pibloktoq, as the human attacks.

The Hysteria Hypothesis

The major psychological explanation of the pibloktoq syndrome
has been psychoanalytic. In 191 3 A. A. Brill, Freud's self-appointed
American apostle, wrote a paper on the subject based on a reading
of one of Peary's books and on personal discussion with Donald
MacMillan, the naval officer who accompanied Peary (Brill 1913) .
Brill considered the syndrome to be classic hysteria major. Following
a somewhat simplified Freudian model, he interpreted the seizures
as expressions of frustration at lack of love and cited as the type
case a female who displayed particularly flamboyant attacks. This
attractive young woman had not succeeded in getting a husband
because she was a poor seamstress; she was consequently frustrated
in her emotional need for love in all but the most crudely physical
sense. More recently, Gussow (i960) has extended Brill's formula-
tion, interpreting the hysterical flight as a seductive maneuver, an
"invitation to be pursued," in persons whose chronic insecurities
have been mobilized by some precipitating loss or fear of loss, and
who seek loving reassurance in a "primitive and infantile, but char-
acteristically Eskimo, manner." Indeed, he feels that such reactions
are a manifestation of the basic Eskimo personality. The greater
frequency of pibloktoq in women he explains culturally as the
result of "the socially subservient position of women . . . and their
added helplessness in the face of culturally traumatic experiences."
The nudity is in part explained by the common tendency of Eskimo
to undress indoors and to chill the naked body out of doors after
the sweat bath. The glossolalia, mimetic behavior, shouting, weep-
ing, and singing sometimes observed he also explains culturally by
pointing out that these behaviors are found in shamanistic per-
formances and religious ceremonies, not only among the Eskimo,
but also in Korea. The flight is considered to be a hysterically moti-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 265

vated invitation to be taken care of, rather than a component of
an involuntary psychomotor seizure pattern, because no cases of
flight have been reported in which the victim was not seen, fol-
lowed, and rescued. The asserted tendency for pibloktoq to occur
in winter is illuminated by the observation "that winter, more than
other seasons, intensifies Eskimo insecurity — and hence their prone -
ness to derangement — through increased threat of starvation, high
rate of accidents, fear of the future, and so forth."

These psychoanalytic and psychocultural explanations, however,
are for several reasons not entirely satisfying. Nudity, for instance,
is indeed culturally prefigured, since it is the only means of reducing
body temperature in persons who have no clothes to wear other than
heavy furs in poorly ventilated dwellings where the temperature
may rise to over ioo° F. But this suggests that the denudation may
be merely a response to a sudden somatic sensation of extreme heat.
The fact that most reported victims of hysterical flight were res-
cued from danger without injury may obviously be an artifact of
observation: any victims who froze, drowned, lost themselves, were
carried away on drifting ice, fell and died alone in the snow, and so
on, would by definition be those who were not observed. Further-
more, in at least one case, a rescued woman tvas injured; she suf-
fered a frozen hand and breast, a serious condition in the absence of
European medical technology. Two of Kane's men died and the
dogs often die. Glossolalia, singing, and so forth are hardly evidence
for an influence of Eskimo culture on the form of this hysteria,
since these behaviors are virtually pandemic. The evidences of ex-
treme physiological stress (bloodshot eyes, flushing of face, foam-
ing at mouth, convulsive movements) and the demented behavior
(attempting to walk on the ceiling, eating of feces, and ineffectual
destructiveness) are not prefigured in the culture. And finally, the
Eskimo are not reported to explain these fits (in contrast to psy-
chotic disorders) by supernatural theories of disease (such as pos-
session, witchcraft, punishment for taboo violation, or soul loss)
but seem to regard them as natural ailments, experienced by dogs
and men alike, comparable perhaps to the common cold, the broken
limb, and other ills that the flesh is heir to. This phlegmatic response
would not provide very much in the way of reward for a hysterical
fit.

The Calcium Deficiency Hypothesis

An alternative, and in part biological, hypothesis can be sug-
gested which explains pibloktoq with at least equal plausibility.

266 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Low concentrations of ionized calcium in the blood (hypocal-
cemia) produce a neuromuscular syndrome known as tetany which
is often complicated by emotional and cognitive disorganization.
The neurological symptoms of tetany include characteristic mus-
cular spasms of hands, feet, throat, face, and other musculature,
and in severe attacks, major convulsive seizures. The tetanic syn-
drome may be precipitated by trivial stimuli and is usually brief
and sporadic rather than continuous (continuous tetany may of
course be fatal) . Although the information available in the photo-
graphs and literature is not sufficient in itself to establish the diag-
nosis, the symptoms of pibloktoq are compatible with the clinical
picture of hypocalcemic tetany, and several authorities have sug-
gested the calcium deficiency hypothesis (Hoygaard 1941:72;
Baashuus- Jensen 1935:344, 388; and Alexander Leighton in a per-
sonal communication) . Observation and testing in the field would
be required to confirm the hypocalcemic hypothesis and to rule out
alternative diagnoses (hypoglycemic shock, hysteria, food poison-
ing, virus, encephalitis, etc.). It is also possible that a tendency
toward epilepsy may have been genetically determined by inbreed-
ing in this small isolated group; this is suggested by reports that
epilepsy is more common in northern Greenland than elsewhere on
the island. The hypocalcemia and epilepsy theories are not mutually
exclusive, however, since hypocalcemia probably would tend to
precipitate a latent seizure in persons prone to epilepsy. Observation
and testing for differential diagnosis would require both the elicit-
ing of neurological signs in victims during attack, or in persons with
a history of attacks, and blood tests on victims and on samples of
pibloktoq-prone and piblokfoq-iree persons for serum calcium,
serum potassium, and possibly other constituents.

The plausibility of the calcium deficiency hypothesis is supported
not merely by the opinions of certain authorities and by the com-
patibility of the pibloktoq syndrome with the syndrome of hypo-
calcemic tetany, however. It is also suggested by indirect evidence,
both medical and ecological.

Medically, the Eskimo of Greenland (including the Thule Dis-
trict) are characterized by a proneness to hemorrhage and slow
coagulation (Hoygaard 1941:83-85, and Cook 1894:172). Such a
tendency toward bleeding might conceivably be associated with low
serum calcium levels (although vitamin K deficiency is more likely
to lead to this condition) . At Angmagssalik, convulsions in infants,
suggestive of hypocalcemic tetany, were reported by Hoygaard to

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 267

be frequent (Hoygaard 1941:78, 135), and Bertelsen noted in a
medical report on the Greenland Eskimo that there was a high
frequency of cramps, especially of the legs, even in adults (Bertel-
sen 1940:216) . These observations are reminiscent of the account
by Kane of the "strange epilepto-tetanoidal disease" which inca-
pacitated his crew north of Smith Sound in the 185 o's. He diagnosed
two fatal cases of "tetanus" displaying laryngospasm (these could
have been actually hypocalcemic tetany going into statics eclainp-
ticus) , two fatal cases of the "epilepto-tetanoidal disease," and
numerous cases of cramps and muscular pains, sometimes accom-
panied by "mental symptoms" of disorientation and confusion,
both in dogs and man (Kane 1856).

Ecologically, it may without hesitation be stated that the high
arctic environment does not provide rich sources of nutritionally
available calcium during all seasons of the year to technologically
primitive populations. Hoygaard found that nearly half of the an-
nual calcium intake at Angmagssalik was provided by dried capelin
(the bones of dried capelin being edible) . When dried capelin was
available, the calcium intake was low but above the level asserted
by medical authorities to be the minimum for maintenance of
health. But without dried capelin (a circumstance which periodi-
cally occurred as a result of unavailability of the fish or unsuitability
of the weather for drying them) , calcium intake dropped well be-
low the minimum (Hoygaard 1941 ) . Rodahl also found the dietary
of certain Alaskan Eskimo groups to be relatively low in calcium
(Rodahl 1957) . At Thule, although no careful dietary studies have
been found, it is reported that little fishing is done because fish are
sparse and consequently capelin is not caught in substantial quan-
tity. Probably substituting for dried capelin, however, are birds —
the "little auks" — which, after storage in seal oil, can be eaten whole,
including, apparently, some of the bones (MacMillan 1918). A
further ecological complication may be a product of the high lati-
tude itself. Man requires a certain quantity of vitamin Da in order
to absorb and utilize dietary calcium efficiently (and possibly also
to metabolize carbohydrate efficiently) . This vitamin is formed in
the human and animal skin when ultraviolet light activates cer-
tain cholesterol-containing oils. In the high arctic, however, a com-
bination of low sun angle during summer, a long period of winter
darkness, and the need for heavy clothing during most of the year,
must prevent the human body from synthesizing much of its own
vitamin Da. Whether sufficient vitamin Ds can be secured from sea

268 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

fauna at this latitude is uncertain. Seal oil contains significant quan-
tities of vitamin Da but, at Thule, the fish oils rich in vitamin Da,
such as cod liver oil, are probably not a major source of supply be-
cause of the aforementioned lightness of fishing in that region. To
summarize the ecological problem briefly, even if sufficient vitamin
Ds is available to allow maximum efficiency in calcium absorption
and utilization, it is still highly probable that some people, at some
seasons of the year, will be unable to secure sufficient dietary calcium
to meet published medical standards. If such a low calcium intake
were coupled with a high protein and high potassium intake, the
neurological consequences would be intensified, and the heavy meat
consumption of Polar Eskimo entails a large intake of protein and
potassium.

One fact, however, militates against a simple dietary calcium
deficiency hypothesis: the reported extreme rarity of rickets in
Eskimo infants and of osteomalacia in Eskimo adults (for example,
in pregnant and lactating women) (Bertelsen 1940). These are
diseases in which, as a consequence of inadequate calcium intake
or utilization, or both, the bones yield their calcium to the blood
and, eventually, to the urine, with the sufferer thus gradually losing
calcium from the body at the expense of bony tissue. In temperate
latitudes, rickets and osteomalacia are normally forestalled by milk,
sunlight, and supplementary vitamin Ds preparations in cod liver
oil and vitamin pills. If one hypothesizes that the Eskimo diet is
low in calcium, and perhaps in sun-formed vitamin Ds, how is it
that rickets is not evident? The answer to this question requires
another hypothesis concerning hormonal function. It would seem
that if calcium and/or vitamin Ds intake is chronically low in the
high arctic environment, then the Eskimo physiology must for
generations have been forced to "choose" between tetany and
rickets — and, unlike more southerly populations, it has "chosen"
tetany as the lesser of two evils. (More precisely, of course, it is
the environment which has selected the better-fitted physiological
alternative. ) Rickets and osteomalacia would in a primitive Eskimo
economy be fatal because they are physically crippling. Sporadic
attacks of tetany, even if occasionally damaging or even fatal,
would be by comparison merely an annoyance. Hence the hypo-
calcemia hypothesis requires the corollary that the Polar and per-
haps other Eskimo tend to be mildly hypoparathyroid (or, more
exactly, again, that in this cultural-ecological matrix, optimum

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 269

parathyroid function requires a lower activity than does optimum
function under the conditions of European and American medical
practice) . Such a mild "hypoparathyroidism" would be conceived
as a product of natural selection for primitive life in an arctic en-
vironment, yielding a type of hormonal balance which retains cal-
cium in the bones even if calcium levels in serum fall occasionally.
There is, as a matter of fact, some evidence to support this hypothe-
sis. The doomed medieval Norsemen, not preadapted to a high arctic
environment, who settled along the west coast of Greenland, and
who finally died out and were replaced by ricketless Eskimo, did
suffer from rickets and osteomalacia (Maxwell 1930:20).

But if we propose a hypocalcemia hypothesis, do we ignore Es-
kimo culture? Certainly not. Consideration of cultural factors is,
in fact, already implicit in the hypothesis as enunciated. This hy-
pothesis rests on the assumption that the subsistence technology is
"primitive," that is, in this application of the concept, that manu-
factured vitamins and imported or specially processed calcium-
containing foods are not available and that, to hunters, a strong and
undistorted skeletal structure is of greater survival value than free-
dom from occasional attacks of tetany. These cultural characteris-
tics render the population vulnerable to a local dietary calcium
and/or vitamin Ds shortage and select the nervous and muscular
system rather than the skeleton as the target tissue of any calcium
and/or vitamin Ds nutritional deficiency.

But Eskimo culture also functions to minimize, within the limits
stated above, the frequency and severity of attacks, via the customs
of securing, processing, and storing of large quantities of calcium-
containing birds (the "little auks") ; of obtaining, preserving, and
making extensive use of vitamin-Ds-containing seal oils; of strip-
ping and exposing the body to direct sunlight whenever the weather
permits; of weaning children late (thus ensuring them maximal cal-
cium intake in mother's milk during the rickets-vulnerable period
of infancy) ; of securing to pregnant women (who are particularly
vulnerable to osteomalacia) and children preferred access to fresh
and stored foods high in calcium (specifically, the little auks and
whatever dried fish are available) by making women and children
chiefly responsible for netting the birds and collecting the eggs, and
(to judge from taboos reported from Eskimo groups other than
Thule) by maintaining food taboos which have the effect at cer-
tain times of substantially restricting the pregnant or lactating

270 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

mother to the use of dried fish, birds, or other stored foods high
in calcium.

It is possible that, apart from its role in etiology, Eskimo custom
also affects the details of overt symptomatology. Conceivably the
frequently reported impetuous flight from the group during the
initial phases of an attack may reflect a personality trait common
among Eskimo: withdrawal from, rather than aggression in, a situ-
ation when the individual's confidence in his ability to master it
has been shaken. Such a tendency may be reflected in the tendency
for Eskimo men to abandon kayak hunting if their confidence has
once been disturbed ("kayak-phobia") ; by the practice of kivik-
toq, or "going into the mountains" to live a hermit's life, in men
and women alike who feel rejected by their communities; by the
reported willingness of the aged and infirm to be abandoned to die;
and by the anxiousness of Eskimo parents not to disturb the con-
fidence of their children, even when playing dangerously, by frus-
trating negative commands. Such a psychological interpretation —
which is, in a sense, directly contradictory to the hysteria hypothesis
— rests on the assumption that any incipient neurological disfunc-
tion is susceptible to different interpretations by the victim and his
associates and can therefore precipitate different overt responses,
depending on particular customs of the individual and group.

And finally, with regard to its handling of cases of pibloktoq,
Eskimo custom obviously plays a very important role. An attack of
pibloktoq is not automatically taken as a sign of the individual's
general incompetency. The victim is, if necessary, prevented from
injuring himself or others; otherwise he is left alone while the at-
tack spends itself. The attack may be the subject of good-humored
joking later but is not used to justify restriction of the victim's so-
cial participation. There is, in other words, little or no stigma; the
attack is treated as an isolated event rather than as a symptom of
deeper illness. Such a phlegmatic approach would seem well calcu-
lated once again to minimize any damage to the individual's per-
sonal confidence and thus would work to forestall the development
of chronic psychological invalidism. The impact on chronicity of
differential handling of such episodic disorders is well illustrated in
the history of American combat psychiatry, which between World
War II and the Korean War achieved a 50 per cent reduction in the
rate of chronic psychoneurosis developing out of combat break-
down simply by refusing to treat the breakdown as a symptom of
illness (Glass 1953)-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 271

Implicotions of the Alternotive Theories

Two alternative armchair theories of pibloktoq have been pre-
sented. Although the "organic" (hypocalcemia) theory seems
preferable, the organic theory is just as much concerned with analy-
sis of cultural factors as is the "psychological" (hysteria) theory.
In order to choose between the two, field investigation will be
necessary. Such field investigation will have considerable signifi-
cance for anthropological theories of mental illness (and profes-
sional psychiatric theory, for that matter) . For not only will it
contribute to the solution of a particular — and to some eyes, per-
haps, an unnecessarily exotic diagnostic problem, it will also bear
on two major theoretical issues.

One of these major issues is the understanding of hysteria itself.
As is well known, psychoanalysis was originally conceived as a
means for treating hysteria, and upon the analysis of cases diag-
nosed as hysteria much of its theoretical structure has been erected.
Since Freud's time, hysteria has become a rare disorder in most of
Europe and America. This may be the consequence of culturally
determined changes in modal personality structure in Western
countries and in preferences for various styles of psychosomatic
expression. It may also be the result of changes in diagnostic prac-
tice (it has been suggested, for instance, that "hysteria has van-
ished right into the diagnosis of epilepsy" (Peterson 1950) ) . And
it may be the result of culturally determined changes in such mat-
ters as style of dress and housing, hours of work, methods of light-
ing, and diet, which could affect, in particular, calcium intake and
utilization in persons vulnerable to tetany and rickets. Certainly
rickets has become more rare in precisely those groups once most
prone to grand hysteria: the Western European urban populations.
But now we are suggesting that at least one type of hysteria (the
"grand hysterical attack") may not be purely psychogenic!

Such an implication demands support by way of empirical in-
vestigation— an investigation which, in fact, takes up again an
abortive line of inquiry into the relationship between tetany and
hysteria that began in Europe before the psychoanalytic theories
of hysteria swept competing approaches from the field (Barrett
1919—1920:385-386). It is of more than antiquarian interest to
recall that between 1880 and 1895 there was a veritable endemic of
tetany among the working class of Vienna, Paris, and other Euro-
pean cities (Shelling 1935:115—116). This plague of tetany was.

272 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

at the time, not understood etiologically, for the role of calcium in
tetany had not been established. During the same period, the work
of French and Viennese neuropsychiatrists on hysteria was being
pursued most intensively, and it culminated, as everyone knows, in
Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria, which was published in
1895 after a preliminary publication in 1893. This study revealed
the psychological connection between the hysterical symptom and
traumatic emotional conflict and suggested a technique of "talk-
ing" therapy which soon developed into the method of psycho-
analysis. We might now ask, however, whether the physiological
milieu of hypocalcemia may not have been a conditioning factor in
hysteria. The most serious endemics of rickets and of hypocalcemic
tetany — determined by constraints of custom and/or economy on
food, dress, interior lighting, working hours, and access to open
spaces not only among working people but among all classes in late
nineteenth century Europe — came at precisely the same time that
hysteria reached its peak as a psychiatric problem. The discovery
of the value of sunlight, milk, and vitamin-Ds-containing foods,
and the general amelioration of social conditions, during the early
twentieth century, was accompanied by a drastic reduction in the
frequencies of rickets, of tetany, and of hysteria. Thus we may
suggest, as a hypothesis for medicohistorical investigation, that the
hysterical attack and perhaps even hysterical conversion will occur
most readily in persons with low levels of serum ionized calcium and
that chronically low levels may maintain a neurophysiological
milieu in which either tetany, hysterical attacks, hypersuggesti-
bility, or hysterical learning of conversion symptoms is sooner or
later inevitable, the choice of disorder depending on various con-
ditioning factors of situation, personal history, and biochemical in-
dividuality.

Suggesting that the late nineteenth century European hysterias
may have been in considerable proportion undiagnosed cases of
serum calcium deficiency raises a major issue in psychiatric theory,
for psychoanalysis was founded on the analysis of hysterics. In view
of this fact, it may be well to evaluate further the culture-historical
dimensions of the issue. The late nineteenth century students of
hysteria — including Freud — were aware that hysterics might dis-
play unusual physiological profiles as well as disordered behavior,
and some felt that hereditary predisposition played a role in the
pathogenesis of the disease. But these psychiatrists of the 1890's
were in somewhat the same position vis a vis physiological explana-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 273

tions of hysteria as the anthropologists of the 1920's were vis a vis
explanations of psychopathology in general: physiological investi-
gations had not advanced far enough to provide a base for framing
testable physiological hypotheses.

Thus the first demonstration that tetany was associated with re-
duced concentration of calcium in the blood was not made until
1908; hitherto the diagnosis depended on the finding of positive
neurological signs. Not until 1921 did the development of micro-
metric methods of determining quantities of serum calcium make
possible widespread testing for serum calcium level (Shelling 1935:
114— 116). Differential diagnosis in certain cases between hysteria
and tetany was extremely difficult, and in fact probably was arbi-
trary, before the development of the serum calcium and tetany
hypothesis and the provision of appropriate methods of clinical
chemistry. Consequently, some cases which today would probably
be regarded as unequivocally tetany (e.g., the tetanic syndrome
following thyroidectomy) were in 1904 diagnosed as mixtures of
tetany and hysteria (cf. Curschmann 1904) . Thus it is impossible
that Freud could have considered the possibility that hysteria might
be a symptomatic consequence of low serum calcium. The cultural
milieu in which he worked had not provided him with the concepts
or tools by which the question could have been asked or answered.
Inasmuch as we cannot return to the nineteenth century to do
serum calcium determinations on Freud's original patients, we can-
not say what the results would have been, nor can we estimate the
impact on the development of psychoanalysis if the findings had
been positive. But at least we have still another historical answer to
the question "Why has hysteria virtually disappeared in Europe and
the United States?" Our (metaphorical) answer is, "It dissolved
in bottles of milk and cod-liver oil" — that is to say, the cultural
changes associated with an appreciation of the importance of sun-
light, vitamin Ds, milk, and various other factors for maintaining
proper calcium balance, together with a general improvement of
nutritional standards, has virtually eliminated (except in certain
rare medical conditions) a total syndrome, one symptom cluster of
which was once (and still is) called tetany, and another symptom
cluster of which was once (but no longer is) called "grand hysteri-
cal attack."

The need for empirical evidence bearing on the hypotheses out-
lined above leads immediately to a consideration of the second major
issue: the larger theoretical structure which should guide such an

274 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

investigation. It is evident that even if it is possible to identify a
specific physiological variable as the precipitant of the overt
symptomatology, an adequate explanation of the frequency of the
syndrome in the population, its geographical range, its racial and
species distribution, its seasonal variation, its history, and the sever-
ity and details of form of the symptoms themselves, must depend
on evaluating other variables, physiological, psychological, and
cultural. It is the interaction of these other variables with the im-
mediately precipitating physiological variable which provides the
necessary and sufficient conditions for a type of mental illness to
occur in a particular group with a particular frequency. We have
already suggested some of these conditions in the pihloktoq analy-
sis. Let us now turn our attention to the development of a frame
of reference which can guide the refinement of theory and the
acquisition of relevant empirical data. We shall begin, in the next
section, with a further discussion of a point introduced in the
pibloktoq analysis: the importance of the "theory of illness" in the
formation of a symptomatic structure. And finally we shall at-
tempt to generalize the line of thought represented in the pibloktoq
analysis, and in the following discussion, into a rough model of a
biocultural approach to mental illness.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURALLY INSTITUTIONALIZED

THEORIES OF ILLNESS AS DETERMINANTS OF RESPONSE

TO ORGANICALLY BASED PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Mental illness is an episode in a life program, usually following a
more or less extended period of normalcy (as defined by both the
person and his community) , and terminated either by death or by
a return (temporary perhaps) to normalcy. In the biocultural
model, a conjunction of pathogenic, organic, and psychological
events is considered to abort a life program normal to the society
by crippling the victim's apparatus for cognitive organization.
With the onset of the physiologically determined desemantication
(reduced cognitive organization capacity) the victim is unable to
organize his perceptions, his motives, and his actions meaningfully
so as to satisfy his own wishes without frustrating those of others
or vice versa. His more or less desperate efforts to protect himself
from the consequences which he expects to follow the drastic re-
duction of cognitive capacity are apt to be the most conspicuous
symptoms of the disorder: withdrawal, aggression, paranoid delu-
sion, and the bizarre use of the familiar mechanisms of defense like

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 275

repression, sublimation, denial, etc. And simultaneously, the vic-
tim's community is responding to this overt symptomatology with
its own procedures of withdrawal, aggression, therapy, and so forth.

What will determine the victim's and the community's expecta-
tions of consequences and their choices of defensive strategy? Evi-
dently the frequency, duration, and predictability of periods of
desemantication, and their commonness in the population, will be
data of extreme importance in the evaluation of self by the victim
and of victim by community. If the period of desemantication is
relatively brief (not more than a few days) , is relatively infrequent
(not more than once a month) , is predictable (either by a calendri-
cal device or by association with other scheduled events) , and is
commonly observed to occur in others without dire consequences,
then even severe degrees of desemantication with considerable asso-
ciated inconvenience and discomfort may be tolerated by the per-
sonality. Similarly, brief, infrequent, predictable, and common
overt disorders may be tolerated by the community. Such situa-
tions (to give some familiar examples) are premenstrual tension,
drug and alcoholic intoxication, ritually induced dissociation, ex-
haustion, and the Polar Eskimo pibloktoq. The more delayed in the
life program, the more frequent, the more prolonged, the less pre-
dictable, and the less common the event, the more threatening it
will be to the personality and to the community, and the more
desperate and (for the victim) the more ill conceived their com-
plementary defensive strategies will become. Where the desemanti-
cation is severe and irreversible, as in chronic brain syndromes, the
victim may be so preoccupied with maintaining the former sense of
competence that even trivial contretemps precipitate "cata-
strophic" reactions (Goldstein 1940). Schizophrenia and perhaps
the affective psychoses (such as involutional melancholia) would
appear to have an intermediate status between chronic syndromes
and brief episodic attacks. The desemantication is not fully contin-
uous and the victim is consequently able to retain for a considerable
period an intermittent normalcy of function, but the episodes are
sufficiently frequent, prolonged, and severe to result in an accumu-
lation of permanent defensive strategies which eventually in them-
selves make adequate social participation almost impossible during
the clear periods, and, sometimes, even after the desemantication
phase itself has ended.

But it is not merely the timing and conventionality of the dis-
order which will affect the defensive response of the victim and

276 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

his community. The personahty of the victim and the culture of
the group provide models of the experiences and symptoms of the
event which assign to them definite meanings and provide recipes
for handling the situation. These models are, in the individual's
case, a function of the history of his learnings, and in the com-
munity's case, a function of other aspects of the culture, its social
structure, and its history. They are widely variable in form and are
not entirely predictable from a knowledge of the timing and con-
ventionality of the disorder. While the anthropologist may or may
not undertake the solution of problems of differential diagnosis and
etiology (which, as we observed earlier, unavoidably involve ques-
tions of biological as well as psychological dynamics) , he can cer-
tainly investigate the patient's and the community's theories of
illness and its treatment. Thus his most immediately relevant con-
tribution can be an analysis of how, in the society in question, symp-
tomatology and its programming are normally conceptualized. As
we have indicated above, whatever its etiology, the course of an
illness occurs in a social matrix and is observed both by the victim
and his associates. Their conception of what is happening will play
an important part in determining what will be their response to
the symptoms (see Wallace 1959) . Thus, even if etiology and the
primary symptoms of an illness were, except in an epidemiological
inquiry, to be considered as physiological accidents and thus as
largely independent of culture, the efforts of the victim and of his
fellows to cope with the illness must be recognized as being highly
dependent on culture, for these responses to illness are very con-
siderably determined by what may be called the native — and, in
particular, the patient's — theory of illness. In short, since the cause
of illness even if physiologically initiated is progressively modified
by feedback via the victim's and the community's conception of
the illness, the victim's personality and the community's culture
play a determining role.

Some of the recent literature in social psychiatry has directed at-
tention to theory of illness as a significant variable. Of particular
interest are the studies of psychiatric illness in New Haven sum-
marized in Hollingshead and Redlich's book Social Class and Men-
tal Illness (1958). These studies demonstrate again not only class
differentials in prevalence of certain kinds of treated mental illness
(for example, that schizophrenia is about nine times as prevalent
in the lowest socioeconomic group as in the highest, even after
standardizing for population size) , but also class differentials in

I

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 277

methods of treatment (that is, that lowest-class schizophrenics re-
ceive either organic treatment or no treatment at all, while highest-
class schizophrenics receive psychotherapy and/or organic treat-
ment) . These differences are doubtless partly a function of
differential access to economic resources; but, as HoUingshead and
Redlich carefully show, they are also partly a function of differences
in the conceptions of illness and of treatment between lower-class
and higher-class patients. Specifically, the dissonance between the
lower-class patients' and their middle-class physicians' theories of
what illness is, how it originates, and how it is cured, interferes with
free communication. These differences make mutual acceptance,
liking, trust, and intelligent co-operation difficult, and often re-
sult in either mutual withdrawal or the patient's refusal to enter
into a psychotherapeutic relationship at all.

Other sources have approached the problem of theory of illness
from various standpoints. Cannon and others, for instance, have
analyzed the phenomenon of "voodoo death" as a type of overre-
sponse to a "realistically" trivial trauma by a victim who is con-
vinced that he will die because he has been bewitched by an enemy
or doomed for the infraction of some taboo (Cannon 1942) . Com-
parable, if less dramatic, studies have revealed that bodily injuries
and mental infirmities of one sort or another lead to different re-
sponses depending on the culturally defined meaning of the situ-
ation. For instance, in their collection of papers reporting on in-
vestigations by the National Institute of Mental Health of the
impact of mental illness on the family, Clausen and Yarrow describe
in some detail the differences in the "meaning" of mental illness
to various persons, including the patient, and the effect of these
semantic positions in shaping the path to, through, and from the
mental hospital (Clausen and Yarrow 1955). In their study of
thirty-three families in which the husband was the patient, they
found that nearly half of the husbands were never seen by a psychia-
trist before hospitalization was arranged. The difficulty, and usually
the reluctance, with which the patient's family came to define his
problem as one requiring psychiatric care, and the slowness and
uncertainty with which they proceeded to secure that care, meant
that "discontinuities of action were frequent, and paths to the hos-
pital were beset with obstacles and traumata for husband and wife"
(Clausen and Yarrow 1955:32). And in our own research at the
Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, we have been concerned
with the problem of how the patient's theory of the mechanism of

278 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

hallucination affects his and his fellows' response to that experience.
We have worked with cross-cultural materials in the literature and
have pointed out, for instance, the contrast between the responses
to mescaline intoxication of normal white volunteers and of Amer-
ican Indian religious peyotists (Wallace, 1959).

A Model for ihe Analysis of Theories of Mental Illness

We conceive that among the set (mazeway) of cognitive "maps"
which each individual maintains, describing and interpreting the
world as he perceives it, is his theory of mental illness. This map
gives meaning to experience, by defining the possible states which
a person can occupy in a mental health context, and by relating the
possible states which the person can occupy to one another via vari-
ous transfer mechanisms, so as to provide the rationale for decision.
Such a map can therefore be conceived of as having three aspects:
(i) the states specified; (2) the transfer mechanisms which are
conceived to effect change from one state to another; and (3) the
program, of illness and recovery which is described by the whole sys-
tem. We confine our attention here to the patient's program for the
patient himself; his programs for other persons, and the program
of others for him, may (or may not) be different. Thus in the fol-
lowing analyses the entity to which each state description refers
is constant, being ego, even though ego is variable in the sense of
having different properties at different stages of the program, and
in the sense of being "now" at one or another of these stages in ego's
own (not necessarily correct) opinion. (Interesting possibilities of
programs involving multiple referent entities, because of the logical
complexities of such schemas, are not considered here.)

Evidently, one can "plug in" on an individual's program at a
number of different levels of abstraction. In order to minimize
partly the unreliability of reporting which ensues if level of ab-
straction is left unspecified, we have found it useful to base analysis
on five "states," which will constitute stages of every program:
"normalcy," "upset," "psychosis," "in treatment," and "innovative
personality." These are always to be understood as the subject's
concepts of his own possible states and not as the observer's concepts
of the subject's condition. The terms are unimportant; they simply
label positions in the model. Normalcy refers to a state in which the
person is performing to his own and other's satisfaction the roles
appropriate to his situation in society. Upset refers to a state where
role performance has been reduced to a level of minimal adequacy,

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 279

with noticeable personal and/or group discomfort. Psychosis is a
state where role performance has become so inadequate that in
order to reduce personal and group discomfort, some degree of so-
cial isolation (either self- or group-imposed) must be instituted.
In treatment is a state where the person is receiving ministrations
from specialists, designed to remove the conditions responsible for
personal and group discomfort, and to return the patient to full
social participation. Innovative personality is a state in which the
person is again able to perform roles to his own and group satisfac-
tion, but roles different to a greater or lesser degree from those
performed in state N (as the difference approaches insignificance,
P approaches N) . These five states may be conceived as arranged
in a graph whose starting point is N, with "goodness" of state de-
creasing in order of position to the right of N:

We assume that any individual classification of states will include
these five except where concept I is equivalent to N, in which case
the graph reduces to:

We also assume that between any two states one of four transfer
relations may be conceived: no transfer possible (symbolized by

open space); one-directional transfer ( ^); one-directional

transfer ( ^ ) ; and reversible transfer ( * * ) . Definition of the

states and of the transfer mechanisms can usually be best repre-
sented not on the graph but in appended tables in order to avoid
cluttering the graph with written notations. The reader will note

280 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

that any two states may stand, in relation to one another, as positive
and negative goals depending on their relative position on the value
dimension. For instance, U may be a negative goal for a person
who is in state N, but a positive goal for a person in state P. And
finally, depending on the circumstances, additional states may be
added to the model if they are part of the subject individual's or
culture's phenomenological world.

A given patient's theory of illness can be inferred from several
types of behavior:

1. Plain statements ("It's worrying that makes people lose their minds"),

2. Comparative statements ("Joan was real sick when they brought her in, but
now that she's been here awhile, she's quieted down a lot").

3. Differential motor behavior (avoiding certain patients while socializing with
others) .

4. Case history material (information that experiencing hallucinations first
convinced the patient that he was seriously ill and required psychiatric help).

These and other data, obtained from tape-recorded interviews with
patient and his family and associates, records kept by social workers
and therapists, direct observation on the ward, and so on, permit the
classification of concepts and beliefs, and the working out of their
interrelationships in the subject's mazeway. The investigator must
keep constantly in mind that these belief structures can change and
(this is often difficult) that it is the subject's (or the community's)
belief system, and not the patient's "true" condition as perceived
by the clinician, that is being studied. (And if the clinician's belief
system is being studied, the validity of the clinician's beliefs is tech-
nically irrelevant.) The tediousness of the task should not be under-
estimated. A satisfactory case history, for instance, covering day-
by-day events for months prior to hospitalization, and during the
hospital stay itself, requires extensive checking and cross-checking
with dozens of sources of information. The process is comparable
to the compilation of data for a biography. Discrete items of in-
formation, culled from various sources, are ordered first chrono-
logically and then by topic until an internally coherent process
appears in which the subject's decisions and attitudes are demon-
strably related to his current situation and past experience. Thus
one source may reveal that on a certain date the patient, a ritually
faithful Catholic, failed to go to Mass; another source may show
that the day before, he had an interview with his priest, who coun-
seled him to exercise will power and to cease wallowing in self-pity;
a third source reveals that next week the patient went to his family

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 281

doctor and received a prescription for tranquilizers; and a fourth
source finally shows that some time during the week preceding the
visit to the priest, the patient experienced a frightening impulse to
kill his wife and child. These details fit into the pattern of a process.
With increasing fear of losing self-control, the patient, who still
regards his "upset" state as one of moral uncertainty, turns to the
priest for help; but the priest's advice does not help to resolve the
uncertainty, and he redefines his state as an "illness" requiring medi-
cal attention.

Illustrotion: A Zulu Theory of Mental Illness

Among the Zulu known to Canon Callaway in South Africa,
about the middle of the last century, a complex and rather sophisti-
cated theory was held which, in its formal structure, is not dissimi-
lar to some varieties of current psychiatric theory. The structure of
this theory is given in the following formula :

N ^I) >V >F

S<r

\

w

The definition of the states, as given in Callaway's translation of the
Zulu text (Callaway 193 1) is as follows:

N: "Robust"; good appetite; not choosy about food.

D: "Delicate, not having any real disease, but delicate."

A: "111"; choosy about food; loss of appetite; suffers vague pains; anxious
dreams; possessed by spirits of ancestors.

U: "111"; choosy about food; loss of appetite; suffers vague pains; anxious

dreams; possessed by a class of spirits known as Amatongo.
P: "A fool," "unable to understand anything," "mad/' not a "man."

T: Continued ill health, sleeplessness, loss of weight, skin diseases, but hope-
ful of becoming a shaman.
S: Good physical health; the state of being a shaman or inyanga, i.e., one with
a "soft head" who, with the help of his familiar spirits among the Ama-
tongo, performs the respectable special role of "diviner" (finder of lost
objects and physician to possessed persons) .

N-

-^ D

D -

-^ A

A -

—>N

2 82 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

W: "Always out of health," unable to divine, but of unusual wisdom, and
able to work.

The transfer operations, to the extent that they are described in
Callaway's text, are:

Initial possession by either Amatongo or ancestral spirits.

Completion of possession by ancestral spirits.

Relinquishment of possession by ancestral spirits after being
exorcised by sacrifice of cattle under direction of shamans.

D > U: Amatongo increase control over victim but divide into two

groups, one group (under influence of medicines and cattle sac-
rifice exorcism) objecting to complete possession and the other
insisting on complete possession.

U > P: Continued "blocking the way" of the A ;»fl/ow,^o by exorcism and

by medicines taken by mouth.

U > T: Patient's family, patient, and community, recognize that Ama-
tongo are struggling to possess patient, and terminate medicines
and exorcism.

T > S: Patient seeks communication with Amatongo in his dreams and

singing; community participates in his singing and ask him ques-
tions for Amatongo to answer.

S > W: A "great doctor" can "lay the spirit" of Amatongo to the extent

of preventing the patient from remaining a diviner but only at
the cost of leaving him chronically in state W.

Notable features of the model are, first, the importance of the dif-
ferential diagnosis (by a shaman) between possession by the rela-
tively benevolent ancestors and by the dangerous Amatongo; and
second, the irreversible nature of Amatongo possession, which even-
tuates in a state of dementia unless the victim accepts his fate and
undergoes the complete course of training as an inyanga.

Applicafion to Clinical Case Material

In the application of the foregoing concepts to clinical case ma-
terial, it must be born in mind that the structure and development
of a patient's theory of illness may be related to, but is nevertheless
distinct from, the structure and development of his conflict struc-
ture ("neurosis") and of his therapeutic regime. In one of the two
cases which we have analyzed in some detail by the help of the
model, we found the model to be helpful in understanding a tem-
porary impasse, with an associated flurry of disturbed behavior,
reached at a certain stage in therapy. The crucial problem in treat-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 28 3

ment, from the therapist's viewpoint, was the patient's unwiUing-
ness to accept the presence in himself of hostile feelings toward vari-
ous close relatives. The therapist defined the goal of treatment (I)
as a less repressive personality and he encouraged the patient to
assert himself and his needs more freely and to recognize that these
needs, and the hostilities generated by their frustration, were not
evil but merely human. The patient was stubbornly resistant, not
merely because of the psychodynamics of the situation, but also
because the therapist was suggesting that he "act out" in somewhat
the same way as his own psychotic father had acted out before
his hospitalization some years before. The therapist thus was sug-
gesting to the patient a state I which, in the patient's theory of
illness, was hard to distinguish from P. The patient's conscious at-
tention was, at this time, centered on a struggle to avoid entering
state P; hence the therapist's suggestions were terrifying, not only
because they may have aroused unconscious resistance (in the con-
ventional psychodynamic sense), but because they pushed him
toward a self -identification with a psychotic father.

The resolution of the impasse was provided by his development
of a compromise, which the therapist was willing to accept, be-
tween his original theory and the therapist's theory. This compro-
mise took the following form:

N >\] >P

\.y

He steadfastly retained the belief that the object of his efforts was
a return to his normal, presymptomatic, good-husband-and-f ather
self (N) . But he accepted T as a necessary way station on the path
to N and as a means of avoiding the alternative state P. His ac-
ceptance of the existence and value of T were followed almost im-
mediately by release to the outpatient department.

Application to the Classification of Cultures

Because of the ubiquity of the major types of mental disease,
and because of the uncertainty of etiological understanding, it is
hazardous to classify cultures as more or less pathogenic in respect
to any particular mental illness or to mental illness in general. In all
likelihood, as knowledge of the causes of mental illness is extended,
it will become easier to discern the relation between culture and

284 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

etiology. Thus in the future it may be possible to regard the fre-
quency, distribution, and forms of mental illness in a society as an
index of its culture. But at the present time, despite the currency
of certain hypotheses based on psychodynamic assumptions about
the relation between culture and mental illness, it is not feasible to
establish a classification based on demonstrated etiological processes.

It is however reasonable to suggest that cultures may, even on the
basis of present knowledge, be classified with respect to such cul-
turally institutionalized responses to various types of mental illness
as the society's taxonomy and definitions of mental illness, its theory
or theories of illness, and its techniques of therapy and their ra-
tionale. Such a classification must, in effect, form a matrix of in-
tersection of a constant typology of mental illness (that is, a typol-
ogy defined by the investigator and used as a constant referent for
controlling cross-cultural comparisons) and of alternatively pos-
sible responses available cross-culturally. The types so defined may
then be investigated in order to discern whether or not a correlation
exists between response type and other aspects of culture. If such
correlations can be shown to exist, then at least response to mental
illness may be considered an index of culture.

Evidently a number of possible schemes, of varying degrees of
complexity and abstraction, can be created, based on different con-
stant typologies and different panels of alternative responses. One
typological system based on theoretical considerations introduced
in the preceding sections will be outlined here. For the constant
typology, not Western diagnostic categories, but the two dichoto-
mous dimensions of severity and chronicity will be used (mild
versus severe, and intermittent versus continuous) . For the response
typology, two dichotomous dimensions will be used: episodic versus
symptomatic interpretations of illness, and treatment versus ex-
trusion as a method of handling illness. These concepts may be de-
fined further as follows: Mildness and severity refer to the degree
of abnormality of the overt behavior itself and not to its duration
or frequency of occurence; intermittency and continuousness refer
to halves of a continuum, intermittency being the half in which
the disorder can best be characterized as discrete attacks separated
by intervals of normalcy, and continuousness as the half in which
the disorder can be characterized as a period of uninterrupted dis-
function. Episodic interpretations of illness confine attention only
to the overt disorder itself and regard it as an isolated episode in an
essentially normal life program, whereas symptomatic interpreta-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 285

tions construe the overt disorder as a sign of a more serious under-
lying inadequacy which threatens to recur, possibly in a more un-
desirable form, on later occasions. Treatment as a method of
handling illness implies a policy of attempting to cure, to improve,
or to tolerate (even by ignoring the behavior) and make the best use
of the victim, in contrast to the method of extrusion, which by
such devices as confinement, banishment, or even execution at-
tempts to rid society entirely of an incompatible participant. The
suggested dichotomies are, of course, divisions of continua, and the
distinctions are easier to make in extreme than in intermediate cases.
Thus a series of epileptic attacks is easy to classify in the constant
typology as intermittent and severe, and a case of obsessive fear of
heights as mild and continuous ; but a given schizophrenic psychosis
may be neither clearly continuous nor notably severe, yet seem by
contrast with epilepsy and the fear of heights to require the con-
tinuous and severe classification.

The whole schema may be represented in the following diagram:

Intermittent

Continuous

Mild

Severe

Episodic or Symptomatic
Treatment or Extrusion

Episodic or Symptomatic
Treatment or Extrusion

Episodic or Symptomatic
Treatment or Extrusion

Episodic or Symptomatic
Treatment or Extrusion

Thus any group, with respect to any given syndrome, may be classi-
fied as episodic-treatment, episodic-extrusion, symptomatic-treat-
ment, or symptomatic-extrusion, within that cell which character-
izes the syndrome on the constant typology. If we consider
pibloktoq, for instance, we would classify this as intermittent-se-
vere in the constant typology, and the Polar Eskimo handling of
it as episodic-treatment in the response typology. The same syn-
drome in the context of, let us say, an operational wing of the U.S.
Strategic Air Command would also be classified as intermittent-
severe, but the handling of the condition would be classified as
symptomatic -extrusion. And, again, this same intermittent-severe
syndrome in the context of a liberal arts college campus would be
handled either as episodic-treatment or symptomatic-treatment.

The number of possible cultural patterns established by this
paradigm is quite large. Although, with regard to any single syn-

286

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

drome, only four types of response are considered, there are four
types of syndrome, with regard to each of which these four possi-
bihties exist. Therefore the number of possible cultural patterns
is 4^ or 256. Furthermore, of course, any description of the way in
which a society handles mental disorders will make many distinc-
tions, even of a classificatory kind, that cannot be included in a
pattern classification scheme. Thus, for instance, with respect to
the "treatment" class, it will be noted in any description whether
the condition in question is ignored, is recognized but tolerated, or
is directly approached by a means of therapy. If therapy is em-
ployed, it can be medical (physiological) or psychological; and if
psychological, it can be secular or religious, cathartic or repressive,
and so on. Rather than attempt to embrace all of the 256 patterns,
let alone the further elaborations and refinements desirable for any
sort of descriptive account, therefore, it would appear to be useful
to note that among the large number of possible patterns, several
stand out as stock patterns which may be used for the purpose of
seeking to establish whether or not, in principle, correlations may
exist between a group's manner of handling behavior disorder and
other aspects of its culture.

Four such ideal pattern types are offered below:

Mild

Severe

Int.

Cont.

Int.

Cont.

Int.

Cont.

Int.

Cont.

Sy

Sy

Ep

Sy

Sy

Sy

Sy

Sy

Ex

Ex

Tr

Tr

Tr

Tr

Tr

Tr

Sy

Sy

Ep

Sy

Sy

Sy

Sy

Sy

Ex

Ex

Tr

Ex

Ex

Ex

Tr

Tr

III

IV

It is suggested' — with the hope not so much that the suggestions will
convince as provoke thought and consideration in empirical studies
— that these four patterns of institutionalized response to mental
illness are associated with definite types of social structures. Pat-
tern I, for instance, would seem to be characteristic of aggressive
and power-seeking, self-selected, elite groups generally, whether
they be kinship, military, political, economic, or religious. These
elite groups extrude (screen out) all persons with visible behavioral
anomalies (symptomatic of possible other disabilities as yet unre-
vealed) in order to maintain a maximally reliable and effective or-
ganization. Pattern II would seem to be characteristic of techno-

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 287

logically primitive, small communities that recognize disorder as a
symptom of a hidden, threatening weakness only when it is con-
tinuous, and that will resort to extrusion only when it is both con-
tinuous and severe. Pattern III would seem to be characteristic of
prenineteenth century Western civilization generally: all disorders
are symptomatic, and all serious disorders require extrusion. Pattern
IV, on the other hand, would seem to characterize the psychody-
namic tradition in twentieth century Western psychiatry, and an
increasing number of other educated subgroups in Western popu-
lations, who regard all disorders as symptomatic, but also consider
that all disorders should be treated rather than disposed of by ex-
trusion.

Space does not permit further elaboration of these concepts; but
enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate not only the problems in
attempting to create a taxonomy of responses to mental illness with
cultural index value, but also the possible value of such a taxonomy
in establishing relations between responses to mental illness and
other aspects of culture. To the extent that these patterns of re-
sponse have a bearing on the course of various syndromes, whatever
their etiology may be, a taxonomy of this kind may additionally
have some utility as an evaluative index of social efficiency in han-
dling the problems of mental illness. We may speculate, for in-
stance, that a group whose response to a behavioral disorder is to
regard it as symptomatic of an underlying and threatening chronic
incompetency, rather than an episode in a normal life program, will
induce in the victim a sense of his own inadequacy that is in itself
directly pathogenic. We may further speculate that his anxious
efforts to defend himself will markedly affect the form and course
of the disorder itself. If these defensive efforts are not directed
toward the securing of a validly effective therapy, then the patho-
genic pressure of the culturally institutionalized definitions of
and responses to mental illness will be uncompensated. In such an
unhappy case, even if the etiology of the disorder were actually
completely organic, the culture would be playing a contributory
role in the mental disease process.

TOWARD A BIOCULTURAL THEORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS:

THE INTEGRATION OF THE ORGANIC

AND FUNCTIONAL APPROACHES

How can the cultural anthropologist relate his conceptions of
the structuring of social behavior to biological theories of mental

288 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

illness? The model of mental illness advocated in this paper as an
answer to this question is essentially homeostatic. A behavior sys-
tem is considered to be disturbed when an independent variable,
organic in nature, passes certain boundary values; and the responses
of the various components of this system can be construed as moti-
vated efforts to restore equilibrium. These responses are prescribed
by the system itself in its theory of illness. But mere lip service to
the ideal of an "interdisciplinary" approach, and pleas for the recog-
nition of the importance of biological or cultural factors, will not
solve the scientific problem. Only an approach which considers the
specific nature of the interaction between biological and cultural
(psychosocial) variables can have high predictive value.

The specific nature of this biocultural interaction can best be
investigated by conceiving of the total course of the psychotic
episode as a single event and then analyzing it into stages. Each stage
is defined by a change in one of the major relevant dimensions of
the event. A number of plausible programs can be constructed by a
priori reasoning from different assumptions about the identity of
the initial stage. One such program derives from the assumption
(not yet justified by empirical findings) that the initial event in
the psychotic episode is the occurrence of an organic disfunction
in a hitherto intact (even if peculiarly vulnerable) individual.

If one makes this assumption, every episode of serious mental ill-
ness can be divided into four stages (exclusive of therapeutic and
rehabilitation stages) .

In the first stage, the organism is functioning normally.

In the second stage, an intermittent or continuous, of greater or
lesser severity, organic interference with normal brain function oc-
curs. Presumably the oft-remarked transcultural invariance of the
major clinical entities and the absence of unique ethnic psychoses
result because the number of types of organic interference is lim-
ited. Many sources of such interferences are known, however:
cerebral hypoglycemia or hypoxia, electrolyte disturbances, gross
tissue change, hormonal autointoxication, toxic metabolites, drugs,
viral invasion, anomalies of enzyme action, and so on. These im-
mediate sources in turn can theoretically depend upon many "final"
causes, including prolonged states of psychodynamically and so-
cially determined stress (such as those revealed by psychoanalytic
investigations) which may produce temporary, and conceivably
sometimes even irreversible, changes in body chemistry. Genetic
factors may also be responsible for differential vulnerabilities within

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 2 89

a population to the various noxious factors. Thus even from an
organismic position one can comfortably look to social and psycho-
logical processes as "final" causes, particularly if the differential
incidence of disorders rather than the understanding of individual
cases is of primary concern. Coincident with the neural dysfunc-
tion occurs psychological dysfunction. The quality of this dysfunc-
tion is best conceived as a relative difficulty in organizing cognitive
content: difficulty in finding the "meaning" of perceptual data,
difficulty in maintaining the structure of motives, difficulty in re-
lating affect to "rational" considerations. These difficulties may be
metaphorically described as desemantication: the shrinking of the
semantic matrix. This kind of dysfunction can vary in severity
from an almost imperceptible decrement to a decrement so cata-
strophic as to approximate decerebration, with attendant loss of
perceptual contact with the environment, motor discharge, and
release of autonomic functions. At an intermediate level between
mild confusion and unconsciousness would seem to fall the experi-
ence of meaninglessness, described by some schizophrenics as a sense
of unreality, depersonalization, and loss of identity. Desemantica-
tion may be briefly episodic, as in hysteriform attacks, or chronic,
as (apparently) in schizophrenia. Also coincident with neural and
psychological dysfunction is primary behavioral failure attendent
upon the desemantication. This is failure as judged by either the
victim and members of his group, or both, and may occur in a
variety of sectors of life, both interpersonal and technological.
While incompetence in interpersonal relations may be the most
conspicuous consequence of desemantication in the eyes of the
group, technical failures in performing essential routine tasks, such
as walking, paddling a kayak, ironing clothes, and preparing food,
may come first to the victim's own awareness. Such failures may
vary in duration and in the social or individual importance of the
area of behavior involved.

If negative self -evaluation by the victim follows the events of the
second stage, then the third stage will occur, characterized by
anxiety, depression, and other negative affects directed toward the
self. All persons constantly monitor and evaluate their competence
in attaining their goals, both by self-perception and by perception
of others' response to their behavior. A person experiencing dese-
mantication finds the performance of his tasks more difficult and
in some instances impossible. If the desemantication is continuous
and is relatively severe, he will be unable to deny the reality of his

290 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

loss of competency. His evaluation of these failures, which is a
complex function of his current experience, the responses of others,
and past learning, will be less effective than normal precisely because
of the desemantication itself. But it will be based, in every instance,
in part on concepts available to him from his past learning of the
culturally standardized interpretations of the specific experiences
and incompetencies which he now recognizes in himself. Thus he
may interpret the perplexing voices which he hears as religious reve-
lations, as the delirium accompanying fever, as the result of over-
work, as the consequence of emotional conflict, and so forth, de-
pending on the content of the experience, the reactions of others,
and the explanations offered by his own cultural background. To
the extent that the self-evaluation is negative, he loses confidence
in his ability to control his own behavior, to master his environment,
and to relate his behavior systematically with others.

The fourth stage is cognitive damage incurred in the course of
the victim's defensive response to the negative self-evaluation. The
response to his own anxiety and depression is, because of the exist-
ence of physiological dysfunction, itself apt to be disorganized. But
it is designed to improve the negative self-image and to protect the
person from catastrophe, and may in some degree relieve the pa-
tient's anxiety and depression, albeit at the cost of cognitive damage
in the form of paranoid delusions, self-limiting withdrawal from
society, and so on. Part of the response may be "neurotic," in the
sense of utilizing such mechanisms of defense as denial, repression,
projection, paranoid oversimplification, and so on. Part of it may
be impulsive fighting with, or withdrawing from, a now dangerous
and exhausting world. Part of it may take the form of seeking help.
The style in which the person goes about attempting to defend him-
self, maintain self-respect, and secure help will of course reflect his
cultural learning.

Through the second, third, and fourth stages, the victim's com-
munity is also evaluating and responding to him as a "changed per-
son." Even in a homogeneous community, the social evaluation and
response may be considerably different from the victim's, both be-
cause the victim's desemantication constrains his behavior, and be-
cause his motives may be divergent from those of the group.
Whether or not his motives diverge from the group will depend
considerably on the nature of these beliefs. Thus, for instance, if
mental illness as evidenced by hallucination is culturally defined as
a degrading condition to which society responds by social extrusion,

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 291

the victim will be strongly motivated to conceal his condition,
to deny it, to withdraw from prying eyes, and to accuse others of
conspiracy against him if the charge is made. If, on the other hand,
hallucination is a sign of contact — uncomfortable perhaps — with
the supernatural world, and is responded to with rituals of intensi-
fied social acceptance, the hallucinator's motives will in all likeli-
hood not be directed toward denial, concealment, and defense, but
toward maximum publicity.

This model of the process of becoming mentally ill, as an imme-
diate consequence of neurophysiological dysfunction, in a social
environment, may be succinctly represented in a paradigm. Such a
paradigm, of course, represents only a canonical form or modal
type. The symbols are read as follows: "O" represents level of
neurophysiological function of brain; "S" represents level of se-
mantic psychological function; "B" represents level of overt be-
havioral success in achieving goals in social context; "A" repre-
sents level of anxiety, depression, and other negative affect directed
toward self; and "D" represents the degree of cognitive damage
incurred in the course of the defensive responses of the individual
to his own negative self-evaluation. The operator j represents
pathological change, and A represents "and."

Stage o: Eufunction (0,S,B,) A (A) A (D)
If physiological injury occurs, then

Stage i: Primary Dysfunction (jO, jS, jB) A (A) A (D)
If negative self -evaluation occurs, then

Stage 2: Anxiety and Depression ( | O, J, S, | B) A ( i A) A (D)
If anxiety and depression are severe and prolonged, then

Stage 3: Cognitive Damage ( | O, | S, j B) A (A) A ( j D)

CONCLUSION

The importance of the organic factors in psychopathology has
been largely ignored by anthropological theory, which has empha-
sized psychological factors almost exclusively. If the viewpoint is
taken that organic events play a significant role in the etiology of
many mental disorders, it is possible to see the role of cultural dif-
ferences as particularly relevant to etiology via their influence in
determining the frequency with which the pathogenic organic
events occur. From this point of view also, the culturally institu-
tionalized theories of illness and of therapy appear to be extremely
important in deciding the nature of the victim's and his group's

292 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

responses to the disorder. A model of mental illness as a type of event
is offered which integrates the organic and psychosocial approaches.
It may be hoped that anthropologists who have occasion to make
observations in the field on persons with mental illness will in the
future be able to obtain and record more extensive information on
the physical status and history of the victims. Data on nutrition,
infectious diseases, head injuries, and autonomic symptomatology,
both with regard to the individual cases and also with respect to
the community as a whole, would be helpful in describing indi-
vidual cases, in understanding group differences, and in putting the
brakes on overly facile attributions of psychopathology to "social
structure," "culture," and "basic personality."

BIBLIOGRAPHY*

American Museum of Natural History, Photographic Division.

1 9 14 Photographs of the Crockerland Expedition.
Baashuus-Jensen, J.

1935 Arctic nervous diseases. Veterinary Journal (London) 91:339-350,
379-390.
Barrett, Albert M.
1919-20 Psychosis associated with tetany. American Journal of Insanity 76:373-

392.
Bellak, Leopold (ed.)

1958 Schizophrenia: a review of the syndrome. New York, Logos Press.
Bertelsen, a.

1940 Gr0nlandsk medicinsk statistik og nosografi. Meddelelser om Gr0nland,
Bd 117, Nr. 3. Copenhagen.
Brill, A. A.

19 1 3 Pibloktoq or hysteria among Peary's Eskimos. Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease 40:514-520.
Callaway, Canon H.

193 1 The religion of the Amazulu of South Africa, as told by themselves. In
A. L. Kroeber and T. T. Waterman, Source book in anthropology. New
York, Harcourt, Brace.
Cannon, Walter B.

1942 Voodoo death. American Anthropologist 44:169-181.
Clausen, J. A., and M. R. Yarrow

1955 The impact of mental illness on the family. Journal of Social Issues
11: (4) (whole issue) .
Cook, Frederick A.

1894 Medical observations among the Esquimaux. Transactions of the New
York Obstetrical Society, 1 893-1 894, pp. 171-174.

* A short bibliography of other works dealing with the same subject but not referred to
here is appended at the end of this chapter. A selected bibliography bearing on the mutual relation-
ship between anthropology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis is given in the Appendix at end of the
book.

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 293

CURSCHMANN, HaNS

1904 Tetanic, psuedotetanie und ihre mischformen bei hysteric. Deutsche
zeitschrift fiir ncrvenhcilkundc 27: article 12, 239-268.

Glass, Albert J.

1953 Psychotherapy in the combat zone. In Symposium on Stress, Washing-
ton, Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Goldstein, Kurt

1940 Human nature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Gussow, Z.

i960 Pibloktoq (hysteria) among the Polar Eskimo: an ethnopsychiatric
study. In W. Muensterberger, ed.. Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences.
New^ York, Ruternational Universities Press.

Hollingshead, a. B., and F. C. Redlich

1958 Social class and mental illness. New York, Wiley.

HOYGAARD, ArNE

1 94 1 Studies on the nutrition and physio-pathology of Eskimos. Oslo,
Skrifter utgitt au Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo, I. Mat.-
Naturv. Klasse 1940 No. 9.

Hunt, J. McV. (ed.)

1944 Personality and the behavior disorders. Nev/ York, Ronald Press.

Kallman, Franz

1938 The genetics of schizophrenia. New York, J. J. Augustin.

Kane, E. K.

1856 Arctic explorations: the second Grinnell expedition. Philadelphia, Childs
and Peterson.

MacMillan, Donald B.

19 1 8 Food supply of the Smith Sound Eskimos. American Museum Journal

18: 161— 176.
1934 How Peary reached the pole. Boston, Houghton.

Mandelbaum, David G.

1949 Selected writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley, University of Cahfornia
Press.

Maxwell, J. P.

1930 Further studies in osteomalacia. Proceedings of the Royal Society of
Medicine 23:63 9-640.

MiLBANK Memorial Fund

1952 The biology of mental health and mental disease. New York, Hoeber.

Peary, Robert E. ,

1907 Nearest the pole. New York, Doubleday, Page.
Peterson, Donald B., et al.

1950 Role of hypnosis in differentiation of epileptic from convulsive-like
seizures. American Journal af Psychiatry 107:428-443.

Rasmussen, Knud

1915 Foran Dagens 0je: Liv I Gr0nland. Copenhagen.

294 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

RODAHL, K.

1957 Human acclimatization to cold. Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, Tech-
nical Report 57-21.

Selye, Hans

1956 The stress of life. New York, McGraw-Hill.

Shelling, D. H.

1935 The parathyroids in health and disease. St. Louis, Mosby.

Tooth, Geoffrey

1950 Studies in mental illness in the Gold Coast. London, H. M. Stationery
Office.

"Wallace, Anthony F. C.

1959 Cultural determinants of response to hallucinatory experience. A.M. A.

Archives of General Psychiatry 1:58-69.
1959 The institutionalization of cathartic and control strategies in Iroquois
religious psychotherapy. In Marvin Opler, ed., Culture and mental
health. New York, MacMillan.
Whitney, H.

191 1 Hunting with the Eskimos. New York, Century.

SELECTED GENERAL WORKS DEALING WITH PHYSICAL

AGENTS OR PROCESSES WHICH LEAD TO

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OR REDUCE IT

Arieti, Silvano, ed.

1959 American handbook of psychiatry. 2 vols. New York, Basic Books.
Bellak, Leopold, ed.

1958 Schizophrenia: a review of the syndrome. New York, Logos Press.
Best, Charles H. and Norman B. Taylor

1955 The physiological basis of medical practice. 6th ed. Baltimore, Wi-Uams
and Wilkins.

Davidson, S., A. P. Meiklejohn, and R. Passmore

1959 Human nutrition and dietetics. Baltimore, Williams and Wilkins.
Dewan, John G. and William B. Spaulding

1958 The organic psychoses. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Duncan, Garfield G., ed.

1952 Diseases of metabolism. 3d ed. Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders.
Goldstein, Kurt

1940 Human nature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
HosKiNS, R. G.

1946 The biology of schizophrenia. New York, W. W. Norton and Co.
Kallman, Franz

1938 The genetics of schizophrenia. New York, J. J. Augustin.
Kline, Nathan S.

1956 Psychopharmacology. Washington, D.C., American Association for the
Advancement of Science.

MENTAL ILLNESS, BIOLOGY, AND CULTURE 295

Merritt, H. Houston and Clarence C. Hare, eds.

1953 Metabolic and toxic diseases of the nervous system. Baltimore, Williams
and Wilkins.

MiLBANK Memorial Fund

1952 The biology of mental health and mental disease. New York, Hoeber.
Pfeiffer, John

1955 The human brain. New York, Harper & Bros.

Research Publications of the Association for Research in Nervous and
Mental Disease.

Sargant, "William

1954 An introduction to physical methods of treatment in psychiatry. Balti-
more, Williams and Wilkins.

Selye, Hans

1950 The physiology and pathology of exposure to stress. Montreal, Acta.

1956 The stress of life. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Williams, Roger J.

1956 Biochemical individuality. New York, Wiley.

chapter i o

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES
OF DREAMS

ROY G. D'ANDRADE

Harvard University

Historically, the investigation of dreams has occupied an inter-
esting position in anthropological theory. From an early position of
prominence in the nineteenth century, the study of dreams became
more and more peripheral to the major interests of anthropolo-
gists. Perhaps this was due to the Freudian revolution, which radi-
cally altered the general conception of dreams, and also to the shift
in interest away from cultural evolution. Before Freud, dreams
had been considered a possible major influence on the origin and
development of religion. After Freud, dreams came to be considered
disguised representations of motives, and, therefore, more relevant
to the analysis of the individual psyche than to an analysis of social
and cultural events.

However, by 1930, anthropologists had begun to raise questions
concerning the psychoanalytic theory of dreams, and especially the
assumption that dream symbols had the same meaning in societies
with cultural traditions very different from those of Western
Europe. Since 1930, numerous dreams from non-Western peoples
have been interpreted by field workers interested in the relation
between culture and personality, and the psychological uses and
functions of dreams in a number of non-Western societies have also
been examined. Thus, dreams have again entered into the discus-
sion of man's cultural life, although in a psychological rather than
evolutionary context.

This review will attempt to bring together the anthropological
findings concerning dreams, focussing on the interaction of cul-
tural and psychological factors. First, as a historical introduction,
the influence of dreams on the origin and development of culture

296

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 297

will be discussed. Next the question of universal symbolism in
dreams will be considered, followed by a review of the results of
psychological interpretations of dreams from "primitive" or non-
Western societies. The last two sections will consider the ways in
which culture influences and utilizes dreams.

The Influence of Dreams on fhe Origin and Development of Culture

The cultural study of dreams begins in modern anthropology
with Tylor's work on animism. Tylor considered animism, or the
"doctrine of the soul," to be the basic substratum of religion, from
which arose more complex forms of religious belief. In order to ac-
count for the origin of animism, Tylor turned to the ethnographic
materials available to him concerning dreams, and especially the
widespread belief that during dreams the soul may travel about,
meet other souls, and receive injuries which may affect the health of
the dreamer. From this association of dreams and beliefs about the
soul, Tylor inferred that the idea of the soul arose from man's at-
tempt to account for the phantom visitors in sleep and dreams, and
to explain the differences between sleeping and waking, and life and
death. This thesis has been found plausible by a wide range of schol-
ars. Lowie stated:

His (Tylor's) theory is avowedly a psychological interpretation pure and
simple, but inasmuch as it not only explains the empirical observations, but oper-
ates exclusively with facts like death, dreams, and visions, all of which demon-
strably exercise a strong influence on the minds of primitive man, it must be
conceded to have a high degree of probability. I for one, certainly have never
encountered any rival hypothesis that could be considered a serious competitor.
( 1924:108)

Tylor was not the first to present this idea. Thomas Hobbes,
in 1 65 1, stated:

From this ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams and other strong fancies
from Vision and Sense did arise the greater part of the religion of the Gentiles
in times past that worshipped Satyres, Faunes, Nymphs, and the like; and nowa-
days the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and Goblins, and the
power of Witches. (Leviathan, ch. xii, quoted by Jones 193 i.)

A further elaboration of this thesis from the psychoanalytic point
of view has been presented by Ernest Jones, who postulates that
the conceptions of werewolves, vampires, incubi, witches, and the
devil, current in the Middle Ages, were also derived from dream
experiences. Specifically, Jones tries to show that these supernatural
figures were derived from nightmares, with which they share nu-

298 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

merous common features, such as an identical latent content repre-
senting incestuous wishes, extreme dread, transformation of per-
sons into animals, the occurrence of fantastic animal forms, the
alternation of the imagined object between extreme attractiveness
and intense repulsiveness, the idea of flying through the air, and the
representation of sexual acts as torturing assaults. Also these crea-
tures appeared frequently in nightmares, and were, at the time,
considered to be a direct cause of nightmares (1931:239).

Lincoln, in the Dream in Primitive Culture, presents a number
of ethnographic examples in which cultural items, such as curing
rituals, art work, songs and dances, religious cults, and so forth,
were supposedly invented in dreams, Lincoln points out that it is
usually in culturally defined and expected dreams that these cul-
ture items originate, rather than idiosyncratic dreams, and that
these culture items are often presented in the dream by an ancestor-
like spirit. Lincoln concludes :

... a large part of primitive culture is a result of the dream, or more accurately
a result of the psychological and cultural processes behind the dream. These
processes are given form in the dream and influence the culture directly from the
latter. (1935:93)

The general thesis of Tylor, Jones, Lincoln, and others that
dreams have been either a primary or secondary source of innova-
tion is a difficult argument to prove or disprove. Generally, the
argument is based on similarities between typical dream experiences
and cultural items and the frequent appearance in dreams of these
items. Even where there are cultural demands that an individual in-
vent a song or myth or ritual in dreams, this process is often only a
minor reworking of already existing materials, for which the dream
is as much an expected means of validation as an actual source of
invention. Devereux, in a careful study of Mohave dreams and
rituals, finds:

Although Mohave shamans and singers are supposed to acquire their knowledge
in dreams they actually learn it in waking Hfe and then have dreams which con-
dense or allude to this body of knowledge. (1957:1044)

While the influence of dreams on the origin and development of
culture remains obscure, these studies have clarified one aspect of
the relation of dreams to culture. They document the persistent
association found between dreams and beliefs about supernatural,
including other souls. Dreams have been shown to be one of the
chief means of communication with supernaturals, and super-

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 299

naturals have been found to have certain similarities to figures
which typically appear in dreams. It appears that dreams, as a com-
mon projective experience, merge with and take material from
other culturally defined projective systems, and also give the indi-
vidual direct access to these projective systems, although the degree
of merger and access varies from culture to culture.

Universal Symbolism in Dreams

Of the complex theory presented by Freud in the Interpretation
of Dreams, anthropologists have discussed most frequently the
problem of the universality of dream symbols. The relevance of this
problem has been succinctly put forward by C. G. Seligman.

If it can be shown that identical symbols (i.e., identical symbols with the same
meaning attached to them) prevail, then we shall have to admit that the uncon-
scious of the most diverse races is qualitatively so alike that it actually constitutes
a common store on which fantasy may draw, and it becomes imperative to give full
weight to this in any discussion of the origin of myths and beliefs. (1927:200)

In the Interpretation of Dreams, symbolization is treated as just
one of the processes by which the latent content, consisting of a
series of thoughts expressing a wish, may be transformed into the
jumble of vivid images which comprise the manifest content of the
dream. The latent dream thoughts may also be changed through
condensation and displacement, that is, by the use of hints or
allusion, or by the substitution of a part for the whole, or by repre-
senting words in pun-like images. Unlike the processes of conden-
sation and displacement, however, symbolization is considered to
be more limited in scope, and to refer, especially in dreams, to only
a limited number of things: the nuclear family, the human body,
and the biological activities of the body, such as birth, sucking, def-
ecation, copulation, and death (Freud 1920:156-177).

"While the hypothesized processes of condensation and displace-
ment have not been subject to much question, the possibility that
man uses a special vocabulary without awareness and tuition has
been the subject of frequent debate. And the possibility that this
vocabulary is everywhere the same, impervious to culture, has also
raised questions, especially among anthropologists. It should be men-
tioned that the issue here is not whether dreams can be interpreted
solely through symbols, but whether a certain cognitive process,
symbolization, is universal. Any interpretation of dreams based on
symbols alone would leave out all the other processes of dream for-
mation, thereby omitting the analysis of a large amount of material.

300 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

and resulting in an oversimplified if not incorrect analysis (Freud
1900:353, Eggan 1952, Roheim 1947:88).

Unfortunately, actual investigations of dream symbolism in non-
Western cultures have been relatively rare, perhaps because of the
great methodological difficulties. Those studies of non-Western
dreams which have used symbols in dream interpretation have some-
times brought out impressive convergences with other personality
data (Devereux 1951, Lee 1958). However, these convergences
cannot be considered good evidence for the universality of dream
symbols, since the conclusions derived from the interpretation of
dream symbols have not been compared systematically with, nor
constructed independently from, other personality data.

There is, however, some assessable evidence on the issue of sym-
bolism in dreams. Within Western culture, supportive evidence has
been reported from the studies of hypnotic dreams, in which a
subject is instructed to dream of certain activities in a hidden or dis-
guised way, and to remember the dream but to forget the instruc-
tions upon waking. Roffenstein reports the following dream by an
uneducated woman told to dream of sexual intercourse with her
father:

I dreamt about my father, as if he had presented me with a great bag, a traveUng
bag, and with it he gave me a large key. It was a very large key. It looked like
a key to a house. I had a sad feeling, and I wondered about its being so big; it
couldn't possibly fit. Then I opened the bag. A snake jumped out right against
my mouth. I shrieked aloud and then I woke. (1951:255)

The symbols of the key and the snake for the penis, and the traveling
bag and mouth for the female genitalia, stand out clearly. While
this kind of evidence supports the symbolism hypothesis, one posi-
tive instance is not a proof.

However, even if Western dreamers do use (sometimes, at least)
a stereotyped set of symbols, it would be rash to then assume that
these same symbols are used in the same way in all cultures. One ex-
cellent but laborious method of investigating the universality of
dream symbolism is to compare interpretations based on the sym-
bolism found in the dreams of non-Western informants with iude-
pendently collected history materials. An example of this method
has been reported by Honigman.

It has been suggested that in dreams protrusions symbolize the male sex organ
and the male's normally assertive role in copulation. Aware of this cUnically de-
rived interpretation, we implicitly predicted sexual inadequacy or impotence for
a young Kaska man who reported a dream in which he was attacked by a grizzly

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 301

bear. "My gun stick. I get nervous. I try to take shot at him. My gun got no
power. Goes ssssss — goes out quick." When interviewed, the informant rejected
the interpretation equating gun and penis. Our prediction was nevertheless con-
firmed when on two subsequent occasions, according to reUable testimony, the
informant experienced acute impotence." (1954:158-159)

Another kind of evidence for the universahty of dream symbols
is found in the meaning that particular cultures assign to certain
dreams. It has been found that a number of cultures, widely dis-
persed, attribute to certain common dreams similar meanings which
correspond closely to the psychoanalytic interpretations of these
dreams. C. G. Seligman has collected a number of examples of such
similarities (1924, 1932), and a review of this material may be
found in Lincoln (1935:107-131). Two of the most remarkable
of these similarities are the interpretations that feces in a dream
stand for wealth, which is reported for the Ashanti, Tikopia, West-
ern Europeans, Thai, Tangerians, Naga, Chinese, and Sinhalese, and
the interpretation that loss of a tooth in a dream indicates death,
illness, or disaster, reported for the Lolo, Araucanians, Chuckchee,
Western Europeans, Chiricahua, Cuna, Ashanti, Naga, Malayans,
Achelenese, Japanese, Chinese, and Diegueno (Seligman 1924) . Al-
though these interpretations are not made by every culture, it seems
unlikely that widely dispersed cultures should have hit upon such
similar symbolism by chance.

From these bits of evidence, it would seem that some degree of
universal symbolism in dreams is probable. Seligman's conclusions,
set down in 1924, seem to be still adequate. He stated:

The essential dream mechanisms of non-Europeans including savage and bar-
baric peoples, appear to be the same as in ourselves. Thus dreams with symbolism,
sometimes elaborate and recondite, often simple and obvious, occur. These dreams
may be wish-fulfillments or be provoked by conflict.

Dreams with the same manifest content to which identical (latent) meanings
are attached (type dreams) occur, not only in cognate groups, but among peoples
of diverse race and in every stage of culture. (1924:46)

A complete validation of the hypothesis of universal symbolism
is, of course, impossible. The important issue is the degree of proba-
bility which is to be assigned to this hypothesis. Perhaps it would be
more fruitful to investigate the degree to which universal symbols,
in dreams and in other fantasy materials, can be laid over with
secondary cultural and individual meanings, and the degree to
which culture is selective in choosing from the stock of possible
symbols, than to try to document such an unwieldy issue as the uni-

302 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

versality of symbols. Lee, for example, in his study of Zulu dreams,
demonstrates the way in which different dream symbols are used
by women at various points along the life cycle.

Lee finds that unmarried women are more likely to have symbolic
birth dreams of still water, compared to married women with few
children, who are more likely to have undisguised dreams of babies.
Married women with -many children, however, are likely to have
frightening symbolic birth dreams of flooded rivers (1958). This
selectivity in dream symbolism supports the hypothesis that symbols
are less likely to be used if the wish symbolized is acceptable, and also
demonstrates something of the complex relations between cultural
norms, social roles, and motivation.

PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF
NON-WESTERN DREAMS

This section will review some of the findings and basic issues
involved in the psychological interpretation of dreams from non-
Western societies. The theory and techniques of dream interpreta-
tion used by field workers in non- Western societies have been based
on Freud's monumental Interpretation of Dreams, although a num-
ber of warnings about complete acceptance of the psychoanalytic
methods and theory have been presented by anthropologists who
have worked with non- Western dreams (Eggan 1952, Honigmann

1954)-

From a scanning of the published interpretation of non- Western

dreams by Lincoln ( 1935) ,Roheim (1946, 1949, 1950) ,Devereaux
(1951), and Kluckhohn and Morgan (1951), all of whom have
used psychoanalytic techniques, it appears that dreams from dif-
ferent cultures frequently have strikingly similar latent contents.
Typically, the analysis of non-Western dreams has revealed inces-
tuous attachments, sibling rivalry, anxiety associated with castra-
tion and maternal separation, cross-sex identification, and so forth.
Roheim, a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, has used dreams con-
sistently to illustrate Oedipal concerns in non-Western peoples. He
has attempted to show, for instance, that among the Baiga such typ-
ical Oedipal concerns as castration anxiety and hostility toward the
father are prominent in fantasy, although the sexual behavior of
both adults and children is subject to very few restrictions.

Another man reported to Elwin the dream "I was in a rage, wrestling with
my father; then a tiger knocked me down and killed me. I went below the earth,
and there I turned into a tiny man only a foot high. A great snake saw me and

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 30 3

said, "I am going to eat you." I said "Open your mouth," and in I went and
came out the other end. At once I flew away; up to my own house." (Elwin
1939:432-434)

The tiger is a representation of the father. The tiny man a foot high who goes
into the earth is the dreamer's penis entering Mother Earth. The snake in this
dream represents both father (phallus) and mother (devouring). Entering and
flying are symbols of coitus. The latent dream wish is to kill the father (tiger) and
have intercourse with the mother (Roheim 1946:507).

Some of the findings about the universal characteristics of the
latent content of dreams may be due to bias in the theory and meth-
ods of dream interpretation, and especially to an overreliance on
symbolic interpretation. This is not the case for all of these studies,
however. For example, Clyde Kluckhohn's conclusions from his
study of Navaho dreams are based not only on his informants'
dreams, but on observations made after years of field work. The fol-
lowing excerpt is taken from the analyses of a series of dreams from
a five-year-old Navaho boy.

Dream 2

"We were in our hogan, and a wolf came, and he had long teeth, and he
frightened us and Mamie ran to the bed, and I ran outside where my mother was
and I hid behind her and she scared away the wolf.
Associations

Yesterday I was playing in a deep arroyo. And above it my father was building
on the adobe house. And I built some steps up the arroyo so I could climb out. The
white dog and puppies came down into the arroyo. I got scared and couldn't find
the steps. So I ran home.
Inierpretation

The dream itself is oedipal. The general pattern is already familiar from dreams
of the other children. "Father threatens children. Mother protects us." Wolf in the
dream and dog in the associations seem to be equated. The long teeth may repre-
sent the penis, but they also recall the vagina dentata motif. Crawling out of the
deep arroyo represents birth, and the whole of this part of the association suggests
speculation about the father's part in the birth process. (Kluckhohn and Morgan
1951:130)

In the same paper Kluckhohn states :

I still believe that some of the cautions uttered by Boas and others on the pos-
sible extravagances of interpretations in terms of universal symbols, completely
or largely divorced from minute examination of cultural context, are sound. But
the facts uncovered in my own field work and that of my collaborators have forced
me to the conclusion that Freud and other psychoanalyists have depicted with
astonishing correctness many central themes in motivational life which are uni-
versal. The styles of expression of these themes and much of the manifest content
are culturally determined, but the underlying psychologic drama transcends cul-
tural differences. (Kluckhohn and Morgan 1951:120)

304 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Since these depth interpretations of dreams tend to find universal
themes, is there any reason to include such investigations in the study
of particular cultures? Roheim has argued strongly that dream in-
terpretation can be extremely useful in uncovering the unconscious
meaning of various cultural practices, such as initiation ceremonies
and totemism. This is to be done by analyzing the context in
which aspects of these practices occur in dreams ( Roheim 1932:21).
For example, in the controversy over the supposed lack of knowl-
edge of physical paternity of the Aranda, Roheim used the analyses
of dreams concerning birth to indicate not only unconscious knowl-
edge of the process of impregnation on the part of the Aranda, but
also to illustrate that the official denial serves other personality needs,
such as avoidance of rivalrous feelings toward the real father, and
identification with the supernatural fathers, as well as disguised
gratification of Oedipal wishes (Roheim 1938:359).

It should be pointed out that it is the more unconscious and primi-
tive dream contents which seem most universal rather than the par-
ticular manner in which these impulses are expressed and defended
against, and the specific reality situations which are associated with
these impulses. For example, many of the dreams of Devereux's
Plains Indian patient have the characteristics of moral maxims. In
these dreams, significant figures often give the dreamer advice, help-
ing him carry out his dream activities successfully. In other dreams
the dreamer gives advice to himself, and to others. Here the mani-
fest dream content shows a kind of moral life style typical of some
individuals from the Plains culture area. This kind of manifest con-
tent would be most unusual in Alor where theft and lying are more
prevalent dream activities.

In the last decade, there has been a shift of interest from the latent
to the manifest content of dreams. The psychoanalytic concern
with the functions of the ego and the potentialities of quantitative
data treament have contributed to this change in interest. Within
anthropology, Dorothy Eggan has pioneered in the study of the
manifest contents of dreams. Mrs. Eggan has collected more than
six hundred Hopi dreams from twenty informants in five Hopi
villages, including over two hundred dreams with associations from
a single informant who has been the subject of an extensive life
study. Mrs. Eggan presents fifteen dreams from this informant,
taken over a number of years, whose manifest contents demonstrate
vividly some of the less conscious motivations in this man's life
(Eggan 1949). The manifest content of this informant's dreams

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 305

has also been subjected to a content analysis (Eggan 1952). The
high ratio of the number of dreams which the dreamer felt were
"bad" compared to the number experienced as "good," and the large
number of dream elements dealing with security and support on
the one hand, and elements of persecution and conflict on the other,
portray the conflicts and unrest in the dreamer's personality.

The shift in emphasis from latent to manifest content in the study
of dreams, both Western and non-Western, has also been accom-
panied by the use of more explicit theory and hypothesis in the con-
struction of content categories (Hall 1956) . (C/. Eggan i960 for
a further review of some of the current psychological research on
manifest content in Western dreams.) Dittman and Moore (1957)
have attempted to rate Navaho dreams for degree of emotional dis-
turbance, comparing the dreams of members of the Peyote cult
with nonmembers. They found that the members of the Peyote cult
had somewhat more disturbed dreams, but only measured by the
global dream ratings made by raters who had some knowledge of
Navaho culture.

Based on an earlier version of Schneider's analysis of the dream of
the Yir-Yoront, a small Australian tribe, (Schneider 1941 ) , Walter
Sears, in an undergraduate honors thesis, compared Navaho dreams
with the dreams of the Yir-Yoront, and found that the Navaho
have more threatening and terrifying dreams, fewer dreams in
which aggression is directly expressed by the dreamer, fewer dreams
with explicit sexual activities, and more dreams about white culture
than the Yir-Yoront. Generally, it would seem that the Navaho are
less free about the expression of impulses than the Yir-Yoront, and
concomitantly find dreaming more unpleasant (Sears 1948).

Another comparative study, by Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago, con-
trasts the typical dreams of American and Japanese college students
( 1958) . Griffith and his co-workers used the questionnaire method,
requesting that the subjects check from a list of thirty-four typical
dreams those which they could recall. It was found that there were
great similarities between Japanese and Americans in the frequencies
with which most typical dreams are recalled, with about as much
agreement between the two cultures as there was between males
and females within either culture. There were some small but sig-
nificant diff^erences between the Japanese and Americans, however,
the Japanese reporting more dreams of being attacked or pursued, of
trying to do something again and again, of school, teachers, and
studying, of being frozen with fright, of flying or soaring through

306 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the air, and of wild, violent beasts. The Americans report more
dreams of arriving late, of missing trains, of being locked up, of
loved persons being dead, of finding money, of being inappropri-
ately dressed, of being nude, and of lunatics or insane people. These
differences can be tentatively interpreted as indicating that Ameri-
cans are more concerned with time, money, physical freedom and
body shame than the Japanese, but less concerned with feelings of
responsibility and projected aggression.

An outline for an analysis of individual dreams, including both
manifest and latent content, has been presented by Eric Erikson
in a paper on the dream specimen in psychoanalysis (1954) . This
outline breaks up the manifest content into verbal, sensory, spatial,
temporal, somatic, interpersonal, and affective qualities, and the
latent content into the sleep-disturbing stimulus, the day residue,
acute life conflicts, repetitive conflicts, associated basic childhood
conflict, impulses, and methods of defense. Using this outline, Erik-
son reanalyses Freud's Irma dream (Freud 1900:106-120), illus-
trating brilliantly not only the sexual and aggressive impulses woven
into the dream, but also how the social and emotional conflicts at-
tendant upon intellectual creativity were pictured by Freud in the
dream, and solved within the dream by an individual ritual of iden-
tification.

Adelson (i960) , using a modified form of Erikson's outline for
the analysis of manifest content, has contrasted the dreams of col-
lege girls who have highly rated literary creativity with the dreams
of those who display little literary creativity. Creative girls tend
to have dreams in which impossible events occur, often in an exotic
setting, with many changes in these settings, while girls without
much creative talent had dreams tied to the local, prosaic, and fa-
miliar. Also, 20 per cent of the dreams of the creative girls were
marked by the absence of the dreamer, while the noncreative girls
always appeared in their own dreams. And finally, creative girls
tended to have open and even flamboyant sexual activities occur in
their dreams, contrasting sharply with the vague, timid, and sym-
bolic dreams of the noncreative girls. Generally, it would seem that
creative people, at least in dreams, can tolerate, and perhaps prefer,
more incoherent, illogical, and directly expressive materials, and
can treat these materials more impersonally.

Recently, the study of dreams has received tremendous impetus
from the psychological research on dreaming conducted by Dement,
Kleitman, and others. They have found that an individual while

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 307

dreaming moves his eyes much as he would if watching a play, and
that such eye movements occur during light sleep, indicated by
electroencephalographic records. If woken during rapid eye move-
ment periods, an individual is able to report a dream approximately
80 per cent of the time often in considerable detail. Even habitual
nondreamers, who remember less than one dream a month, are able
to report dreams on almost 50 per cent of the wakenings after rapid
eye movements (Goodenough, Shapiro, Holden, and Steinschriber
1959) . Eye movement periods, and presumably dreams, range from
3 to 50 minutes in duration, averaging about 20 minutes, and tend
to occur periodically throughout the night at intervals of 70 to 100
minutes (Dement and Kleitman 1957) . The increase in both quan-
tity and quality of dream reports made possible by this technique
offers tremendous advantages in the study of dreams. Using this
technique, Dement found that schizophrenics dream approximately
the same amount of time as normals, but differ in their reports of
dreams. Approximately half of the schizophrenic subjects fre-
quently reported dreams of isolated, motionless, inanimate objects,
apparently hanging in space. Dement rules out communication
problems as the cause of this difference, but notes that although the
schizophrenic subjects report motionless objects, their eyeballs were
moving as if following moving objects. Dement concludes that this
peculiar type of dream report is due to a "distorted schizophrenic
concept of a more active visual experience" (1955:268).

Dorothy Eggan reports, concerning a series of studies at Billings
Hospital using Dement-Kleitman techniques, that the manifest
content of dreams may show certain regularities over the course
of an evening.

Tresman, Rechtschaffen, OflFenkrantz, and Wolpert studied the patterning of
dream content in two subjects over several nights of dreaming, while Offenkrantz
and Rechtschaffen (1960a, 1960b) submitted the dream sequences of two addi-
tional subjects to intensive clinical analysis. The results of these studies suggest
the following: "While there is rarely a direct continuity of manifest content from
dream to dream in the course of a night, a single emotional conflict, expressed
in a variety of contents, may underlie all the dreams of an evening. There is a
tendency for specific elements of manifest content to be repeated at similar times
on different nights. The early dreams of a night tend to deal with events of the
very recent past, often the experimental situation itself. Dreams of childhood
scenes occur more often later in the night. (Eggan, personal communication)

Findings based on two very different methods have been presented
in this section. The first method, dream interpretation, uses symbols
and associations to reconstruct the motivation which gave rise to

308 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the dream. The validity of this method obviously depends greatly on
the skill and insight of the investigator. Using this method, very
similar motives and conflicts have been found for peoples from dif-
ferent cultures.

The second method, content analysis, charts the frequency with
which particular categories of dream events occur, making a com-
parison of large samples of dreams possible. Using this method, dif-
ferences in dreams have been found between such groups as the
Navaho and the Yir-Yoront, creative and noncreative girls, schizo-
phrenics and normals, and so forth.

The difference in the type of findings reported for these two
methods would seem to indicate that different levels of personality
are being analyzed. It has been suggested that the individual dream
interpretations have tended to refer to the more primitive and basic
motivations similar in all cultures, while the content analyses have
dealt more with the way in which impulses are expressed, defended
against, and reintegrated, material which shows more individual
and culturally distinctive patterning.

THE EFFECT OF CULTURE ON DREAMS

Dreams, like other kinds of human behavior, can be expected to
show some degree of cultural patterning. In dreams, however, con-
scious self-control and external restraints, which serve as the two
great agents of conformity with cultural norms, are almost com-
pletely absent. Cultural patterning in dreams must come from deep
within the individual rather than from conscious imitation of a
cultural model, or the restrictions of cultural institutions. For this
reason, cultural patterning in dreams seems especially relevant to
an understanding of which aspects of cultural norms are most
deeply internalized.

One of the simplest and most direct ways in which culture might
be expected to affect dreams is in manifest content. Certainly, peo-
ples who have never seen automobiles are not likely to dream of
them. However, there is evidence that dreams do not give a faith-
ful point-by-point representation of the sector of culture experi-
enced and manipulated by the individual in waking life, but instead
give a selective, edited picture of the individual's cultural world.

First, some dreams seem almost completely bare of cultural items
of any sort. Often these dreams are symbolic dreams of flying, body
destruction, landscapes, animals, and so forth. Perhaps the cultural
bareness of these dreams is due to the difficulty in translating dream

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 309

images into words, and then retranslating into the ethnographer's
language. I would guess that about one fifth of the dreams I have
examined from non-Western cultures lack any culturally distinc-
tive materials in manifest content, although this seems to vary by
culture.

Second, certain areas of cultural life are overrepresented in the
manifest content of dreams, while other areas may be considerably
underrepresented. Within the United States, Calvin Hall finds that:

Dreams contain few ideas of a political or economic nature. They have little
or nothing to say about current events in the world of affairs. I was collecting
dreams daily from students during the last days of the war with Japan when the
first atomic bomb was exploded, yet this dramatic event did not register in a
single dream. Presidential elections, declarations of war, the diplomatic struggles
of great powers, major athletic contests, all of the happenings that appear in news-
papers and become the major topics of conversation among people are pretty
largely ignored in dreams.

What then is there left to dream about? There is the whole world of the per-
sonal, the intimate, the emotional and the conflictful, and it is this world of ideas
out of which dreams are formed. (1953:1 1— 12)

Emotionally, the content of dreams seems to contain more nega-
tive feelings than waking life. In a content analysis of a large sample
of Western dreams, Hall found that 40 per cent of the emotions
displayed in dreams can be characterized as apprehension, 18 per
cent as anger, and 6 per cent as sadness. Another 1 8 per cent of the
emotions are characterized as neutral excitement and surprise, while
only 1 8 per cent are characterized as happiness. In this same sample
almost half of the dream persons were strangers to the dreamer,
while about 20 per cent were family, of which 34 per cent were
mother, 27 per cent father, 14 per cent brother and 12 per cent
sister (Hall 1951) .

The manifest content of dreams may also reflect the sex of the
dreamer. Hall finds that men in our culture dream about males
twice as frequently as about females, while women dream equally
about both ( Hall 1 9 5 1 ) . In Lee's study of Zulu dreams ( 1 9 5 8 ) , an
unusual degree of difference between the manifest contents of the
dreams of men and the dreams of women was found; the women
dream more of babies and children, the men dream more of fighting
and cattle. This difference reflects the traditional division of labor,
although at the time of the study, the traditional separateness of
men's and women's activities had broken down. Lee's hypothesis,
that the content of dreams is laid down in the early years of life.

310 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

oflfers an interesting avenue of exploration, which might account
for the lack of political and economic activities noted by Hall.

Devereux offers a similar hypothesis about the relation between
the dream content and childhood experience of a Plains Indian in
psychotherapy. The items of aboriginal culture which appeared in
this patient's dreams were those which "reflected most clearly both
the highest traditional values of Wolf culture (pseudonym for the
patient's culture) , and the least rational parts thereof: i.e., medicine
bundles, magic and the like" (1951:100). These aboriginal mate-
rials began to appear with greater frequency in the patient's dreams
when he began to analyze his own past, and dreams with many ab-
original items were often the most significant and revealing.

Devereux speculates that the small amount of manifest content
taken from the immediate present in this patient's dreams may be
due to the fact that these dreams reflected life-long defense mechan-
isms, laid down in childhood, and also to the fact that Plains Indian
children were often brought up by their grandparents, who embody
the more traditional culture (1951:88).

Holmberg, in his study of the Siriono, found the manifest con-
tent of dreams to be related to one of the central features of Siriono
life. The Siriono are a hunting and gathering people of the interior
Amazon, who are often if not always hungry and who spend much
of their time in a grim search for food. Holmberg found that more
than half of a sample of fifty dreams were concerned with eating
food, hunting game, and collecting edible products from the forest.
One of the most common dreams is that a relative out hunting has
had luck and is returning with game for the dreamer (Holmberg
1950:91). He found that "one of the striking things about food
dreams is that they seem to occur just about as often when a person
is not hungry as when he is hungry" (Holmberg 1950:91). This
would lead one to speculate that food has come to symbolize a num-
ber of things for the Siriono besides its hunger-reducing properties.

So far some of the ways in which dreams tend to give a selective
and edited picture of the dreamer's culture have been described.
Schneider and Sharp, in a thorough and systematic monograph,
have investigated the relation between Yir-Yoront dreams and cul-
ture. The dreams were collected by R. L. Sharp, and analyzed by
D. Schneider (in manuscript) . Schneider begins with the assump-
tion that dreams portray the dreamer's view of the world, or his
"definition of the situation," and that culture, as a system of norms,
afl^ects but is not identical with this definition of the situation.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 311

In order to investigate the relation between Yir-Yoront dreams
and culture Schneider has analyzed the manifest content of 149
dreams taken from 51 subjects, 43 men and 8 women. Four kinds
of dream situations were studied; dreams involving sex, aggression,
death, and contact with white culture. Certain striking regularities
in these areas were uncovered. Nineteen dreams containing explicit
material on sexual intercourse were found, all from men. The part-
ner in these dreams is in a little more than half of the cases from the
approved classificatory kinship class (mother's brother's daughter) ,
although in only one case is the sex partner actually a wife.

Perhaps the most interesting finding from a review of the dreams of sexual
intercourse is that when the sex partner is of a prohibited degree of relationship,
and where no adjustment to this fact has been made in waking Ufe, the
men picture ( i ) a specific interruption before or during the act of intercourse
which occurs as (a) an organic defect of the woman's sexual organs or (b) an
overt, verbal rejection of the male dreamer's advances which have little deterrent
effect in the dream. (2) The magnitude of the interruption correlates with the
strength of the prohibition on sexual relations. Intercourse with FaSiDa never
gets started; with the SiDa, the act is completed but with difficulty; with the
SiDaDa there is merely verbal rejection of the man by the woman. (Chapter
5:2-3)

Another interesting finding involves the expression of aggression.
In Yir-Yoront dreams both mother's brother and elder brother are
frequent aggressors against the dreamer. This is quite different from
the actual situation, in which a man gives gifts and shows respect
towards his mother's brother, and treats his older brother with
deference. Dreams involving death also show some surprising pat-
terning. While there is no cultural belief in resurrection, in most
of the dreams of death in which the dreamer himself dies, the
dreamer then "stands alive" or is resurrected. However, in dreams
in which someone else dies, the corpse most frequently remains dead.

These findings raise some interesting questions about the relation
between any fantasy product, such as dreams, and the actual ex-
periences of the individual. Certainly most fantasy, including
dreams, contains something of a "reflection" of the individual's ex-
periences and his "definition of the situation." Usually this "re-
flected" material is selected and edited according to the particular
interests and concerns of the person. For example, it has already been
mentioned that personal and intimate materials are more likely to
appear in American dreams than public and political matters.

Selection and editing of fantasy, however, results in only mild
distortions of the individual's actual experience. Sometimes the di-^-

312 PSYCnOLOCICAL ANTHROPOT.OGY

tortion is more drastic, as in obvious cases of wish fulfillment.
Schneider and Sharp consider the fact that the sex partner in Yir-
Yoront dreams is almost always some one other than a wife to be the
result of wish fulfillment, and, in a sense, still a part of the indi-
vidual's definition of the situation.

Projection is a still more drastic kind of distortion. Certainly the
Yir-Yoront tendency to picture mother's brother and elder brother
as hostile and aggressive, when the shoe is on the other foot, would
seem to fit neatly the definition of projection. Other dream mate-
rials may also involve projection, but are less discernible because the
individual's actual experiences are less clearly known. For example,
it may be that the dreamer's portrayal of the woman as the source
of interruption of intercourse is pure projection, or this may be an
accurate portrayal of what actually happens. If it is projection, this
would make some sense out of such bizarre items as the woman's
clitoris falling off in one of these dreams, and the other images of
the woman having damaged genitals. It would then be really the
man's genitals which would become injured, or which he fears would
become injured if intercourse with a forbidden woman were to take
place. Here the dreamer's actual "definition of situation" is reversed,
although the anxiety is still apparent as sexual in origin.

An even more elaborate kind of distortion occurs in instances of
symbolization. For example, it may be that the resurrection dreams
of the Yir-Yoront are symbolic dreams of repeated sexual inter-
course, in which the penis dies and is then born again. The men of
the Yir-Yoront "in waking life, talk as if a single act of intercourse
was more unusual than four, five, or six," but in overt sex dreams
rarely have more than one act of intercourse. Perhaps the same anx-
iety that gives rise to this kind of bragging also motivates the "stand
alive" dreams. The following dream of a mature man may be a case
in point, and gives something of the flavor of Yir-Yoront dreams
in general.

I'm making a forked support for the corpse at Olwin-an. It is for Spear's sister
(dead, unknown) . I saw Yaltide's vagina. Her legs were far apart. A mob from the
north (Yir Ma'as and others) speared me. I lay down alongside the corpse. I
was full of spears. The North people cut me up. They took my bones out. They
cut me up like a wallaby. They ate my liver and flesh after cooking it. I came
alive again. I had healed up but had no bones, which had been smashed up and
the marrow eaten. My brains, bones, etc. were all eaten. Wil (also was eaten). I
rolled up belongings and left. I went along and died. I was buried. I heard people
keening for me. Women were jabbing sticks in their vaginas so that blood would
run out; they were sorry. Blood running down their legs, vaginas. I came alive

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 313

again. Stretched arms and legs and back. I went off hunting. I killed two goannas,
cooked them and woke up.

Inf.: Parkaia perhaps sent dream. My mother, who is Spear's sister (dead, un-
known), was dead in the dream. Yaltelde, my sister, was simply mourning the
corpse. I dreamed this last night, (dream 34)

If this hypothesis is correct, it would help explain why "dreams
of death are noticeably lacking in intense affect," and why resurrec-
tion occurs in dreams but not as an item of cultural belief. In any
case, the relation between the culture, the individual's experience,
and dreams of "standing alive" is not a simple one.

To summarize so far, it seems that there is no simple relation be-
tween culture and the manifest content of dreams. This appears to
be because a dream is not exclusively a cognitive act, in which things
once perceived are reshuffled and reviewed in the mind's eye. Instead,
the dream is a selective, edited, and sometimes highly distorted ver-
sion of the individual's experience. This selectivity and distortion
is generally considered to be an effect of motivation, as well as the
type of special mental process involved in dreaming. The various
examples of selectivity in dream content mentioned above, such as
the frequent reference to food in the dreams of the Siriono, the sex
differences in the dreams of the Zulu, an acculturated Plains In-
dian's tendency to dream about nonrational aspects of his aboriginal
culture, and Hall's finding that American dreamers dream about
the personal and intimate rather than the political and economic,
would, therefore, be held to be due to the particular needs of indi-
viduals in these societies. More dramatic distortions seem to be
due to conflict. The Yir-Yoront projection of hostility onto the
mother's brother may represent such a conflict, perhaps in this case
between aggressive feelings and anxiety about retaliation.

The effect of culture on dreams may be seen more directly in the
"culture pattern dream." (Lincoln 1935:189). These dreams,
which are specified and sanctioned by the culture, and which usu-
ally involve supernaturals or supernatural manifestations, are often
considered visions (Lincoln 1935:189). The Crow, for example,
gave great importance to culture pattern dreams, and success in
life was considered to depend upon these visions. Lowie remarks
that he never succeeded in securing a detailed narrative of an ordi-
nary dream, because his informants would report only visions
(1922:342) . Typically, culture pattern dreams of this type involve
a preparatory phase of fasting, isolation and self-mutilation, fol-
lowed by a hallucinatory experience, in which a spirit helper, usually

314 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

in human guise, adopts the dreamer as his child, and gives him spe-
cific instructions in the use of a supernatural power.

Although it might seem likely that individuals would falsify
such experiences in order to gain honor and riches, Lowie reports
that this was not the case. In fact, some people were never success-
ful in obtaining a vision, and others, who thought they had received
a true revelation, later became convinced through testing their sup-
posedly acquired powers that they had been deceived by their vision
(1924:8-14).

In those cases in which an individual believes that he has had a
culture pattern dream, the degree to which the content of the dream
has been affected by secondary elaboration, in which the dreamer
unwittingly assimilates the dream experience to a previous cultural
model, remains problematic. Sometimes such a process of secondary
elaboration can be seen quite clearly. Erika Bourguigon notes that
in Haiti a dream may be recounted as if a particular supernatural
had appeared in it, although more detailed questioning would reveal
that only an ordinary person with certain characteristics which
might indicate a disguised supernatural had been seen in the dream.
Her conclusion, based on Haitian materials, is probably represent-
ative for other societies in which culture pattern dreaming occurs.

While it is difficult to see to what extent dreams themselves may be culturally
patterned, the cultural dogma of the dreams as appearance of the gods interacts
with the dream content in such a way that an interpreted version of the dream
seems to be experienced by the dreamer. (E. Bourguigon 1954:268)

The effect of acculturation on culture pattern dreaming has
been discussed by Radin and King. Radin presents some evidence
that as a result of acculturation, the Ottawa and Ojibwa stopped
having culture pattern dreams and began to have dreams concerned
only with personal problems (Radin 1936). King documents the
opposite case, in which an acculturated Mountain Maidu Indian
(whose biological father was white) had a series of culture pattern
dreams which incorporated elements of Western culture (King
1943) . In this series of dreams the dreamer was able to defeat the
magical attacks of malicious shamans by using both Indian and
white kinds of magical power. King finds that the remarkably good
adjustment of this man to Western culture is shown in these dreams,
and also speculates that dreams might be fruitfully used to study
psychological adjustment in acculturation.

Cultural beliefs and theories about dreams also appear to affect

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 315

the content of dreams and emotional reactions to dreams. One often
quoted example of the effect of dream theories is the difference be-
tween the Tikopia and the Trobriand Islanders in their emotional
reactions to incest dreams (Firth 1934). The Tikopia believe that
incest dreams are inspired by malignant spirits who may imperson-
ate relatives and seduce the dreamer. The Trobriand Islanders, on
the other hand, believe more in the reality of their dreams, and react
with shame and guilt to incest dreams. While the Tikopia do not re-
act with shame and guilt, they nevertheless do not completely escape
the consequences of such dreams. For the Tikopia, sexual intercourse
in a dream is sexual intercourse with a spirit, and intercourse with
spirits results in loss of vitality and illness. In general, Tikopia dream
theory demands taboo on sexual intercourse as a goal of the dream,
while Trobriand dream theory involves a taboo only on certain
sexual objects, a difference which may correspond to personality
features characteristic of these two societies.

A somewhat more subtle effect of dream theories on dreams has
been noted by Devereux, who points out that where dreams are
given certain kinds of objective reality, the dreams of individuals ap-
pear to be more egosyntonic, and in such cultures dream events tend
to be more similar to real life events, and also to be more useful to the
individual, who may use his dreams to plan new activities, and to
attempt to integrate old and painful experiences by reworking them
successfully (1951:87).

Another possible effect of dream theories has been explored by
Hallowell, who finds that where dreams are considered to be actual
experiences of the self, as among the Objiwa, that the self may be
conceived of and experienced as capable of dream-like activities,
such as physical metamorphosis, separation from the body, and the
ability to shift back and forth in time. As a result of such a self-
conception, and the integration of dreams with waking experiences,
the "behavioral environment" or "habitat" of the individual may
come to have radically different qualities than the "physical en-
vironment" (1955:172-182).

The findings concerning culture pattern dreams suggests that,
while it is possible for some individuals to dream as required, this
is not an easy task, and for some persons even impossible. Some of the
implications of this situation will be discussed below.

With respect to the ways in which cultural cognitive structures
affect dreams, the findings of Firth, Devereux, and Hallowell sug-
gest that native dream theories play a part in taming fantasy, mak-

316 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ing it more like waking life, and, reciprocally, in making waking life
more like dream fantasy.

The Cultural Uses of Dreams

In the ethnographic literature a wide range of beliefs and prac-
tices concerning dreams has been reported. These beliefs and prac-
tices enter into many different aspects of culture. One important set
of culture traits relates dreams to the religious system, and includes
the use of dreams to contact and gain power from supernaturals,
as well as the more common beliefs that the soul wanders during
dreams, meets other souls, and is responsible for its actions. Another
set of traits concerns the use of dreams in the social system, in which
there may be formal or informal statuses and roles involving dreams,
such as dream interpreters, or shamanistic dream performances, and
roles which can only be assumed if the proper dream is dreamed. An
almost universal set of traits involves the use of dreams to predict
the future. The last major group of traits involves emotional ca-
tharsis through ritualized methods of reacting to dream experi-
ences, in which the effect of a bad dream may be dispelled or a good
dream made to come true by a more or less elaborate ritual, such
as not telling the dream, or acting out the dream commands, or
making a sacrifice.

These traits are not cultural monads, but have functional rela-
tions with other phenomena, cultural, social, and individual. Two
examples of such relations, concerning "primitive dream psycho-
therapy" and "unconscious role acceptance" have been discussed in
the anthropological literature.

"Unconscious role acceptance" becomes a factor in a social sys-
tem when culture pattern dreams are used to determine which roles
an individual will assume. The dreamer may either be obligated to
assume a particular role because he has had a certain type of dream,
as, for example, among the Sioux, where dreams of the moon, or a
hermaphroditic buffalo, require the individual to become a her-
dache, or the dreamer may be required to dream a particular culture
pattern dream before he is allowed to assume a certain role, as among
the Pukapuka, where qualifications for priesthood require that a
man have dream contact with supernatural powers during the ini-
tiation period.

Since dreams are not under direct conscious control, the use of
culture pattern dreams to determine role taking brings factors of
"unconscious choice" into consideration. A young man who is re-

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 317

quired to have a vision and obtain a spirit helper before he may have
all the responsibilities and privileges of the adult role may con-
sciously want to assume an adult role, but if on a less conscious level
he feels he is not ready to become a man, dreaming the required
dream would probably be an impossibility, both because of uncon-
scious sabotage, and because typically the content of the culture
pattern dream in these cases is psychologically sound, symbolizing
accurately the resolution of dependency conflicts. Also, where an
individual is forced into a deviant role because of his dreams, not
only are unconscious factors taken into account, but a culturally
legitimate excuse is given for such deviancy. Erikson, in his discus-
sion of the Sioux, states:

A homogenous culture such as that of the Sioux, then, deals with its deviants
by finding them a secondary role, as clown, prostitute, or artist, without, how-
ever, freeing them entirely from the ridicule and horror which the vast majority
must maintain in order to suppress in themselves what the deviant represents.
However, the horror remains directed against the power of the spirits which have
intruded themselves upon the deviant individual's dreams. It does not turn against
the stricken individual himself. In this way, primitive cultures accept the power
of the unconscious. As psychopathologists, we must admire the way in which these
"primitive" systems managed to maintain elastic mastery in a matter where more
sophisticated systems have failed. (1950:137)

Another example of the use of dreams to manage psychological
problems can be found in primitive psychotherapy, discussed by
Wallace (1958) , Devereux ( 1 951) , Kilton Stewart (1954, 1951),
and Toff elmier and Luomala (1936). Generally, such therapy seems
to consist of a cultural recognition that dreams reveal hidden wishes
and conflicts, and a culturally prescribed method of dealing with
those wishes and conflicts. The most common method of handling
such wishes and conflicts seems to be to fulfill or act out the wish,
once it is revealed. Anthony Wallace presents an impressive example
of this method in his study of Iroquois dream theory.

Intuitively, the Iroquois had achieved a great deal of psychological sophistica-
tion. They recognized conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. They knew the
great force of unconscious desires, and were aware that the frustration of these
desires could cause mental and physical ("psychosomatic") illness. They under-
stood that these desires were expressed in symbolic form by dreams, but that the
individual could not always properly interpret these dreams himself. They had
noted the distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams, and
employed what sounds like the technique of free association to uncover the latent
meaning. And they considered that the best method for the relief of psychic and
psychosomatic distress was to give the frustrated desire satisfaction, either directly
or symbolically. (1958:237—238)

318 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Among the Senoi, impulses revealed in dreams are evidently han-
dled in an unusually sociable fashion, so that if a man dreamed he
was attacked by another, he would attempt to settle the differences
between them through discussion and mediation (K. Stewart 195 1 ) •
The Navaho, on the other hand, use dreams not to reveal wishes, but
to indicate proper curing rituals. Lincoln suggests that the Navaho
curing ceremonies prescribed on the basis of the content of dreams
have symbols similar to those of the diagnostic dreams, and that the
particular curing ceremony is effective because it resolves sym-
bolically the unconscious conflict in the dream. For example:

Dreams of death, that is, of one's own death, or the death of neighbors and
relatives, also dreams that your teeth have fallen out require the Hozhonju or
Chant of the Restoration of the Family.

Sttggestion. Death dreams are generally death wishes, and the symbol of losing
a tooth as often meaning castration anxiety because of death wishes is widespread.
(Here again occurs the association of loss of a tooth, death of a relative as in the
universal type dreams.) The Hozhonji is to restore the family, that is to protect
it from death wishes towards the parents. (Lincoln 1935:180)

It has been suggested by Stewart that a therapeutic psychological
effect may be obtained if the symbolic forms which emerge in trance
and dream are taken as objective dangers, and group support is
given to mastering these symbolic dangers. Stewart presents a vivid
if journalistic account of the psychotherapeutic methods of the
Phillipine Negritos. A group of shamans co-operate in placing the
patient in trance, and then encourage the patient to meet and over-
come the spirit that has caused the patient's illness. This spirit, which
has been attacking the patient in his dreams, is made to give the
patient a song, and to become the patient's spirit helper. Stewart
comments that this method seems effective in curing chronic physi-
cal ailments, such as skin irritations, headache, and recurrent fever,
which probably have at least a partial psychosomatic origin. In this
form of therapy, conflicts are externalized as spirits, and group
support is given to overcoming their symbolic representations. Also,
a spirit, once faced and overcome, is made to work for the person,
and a public ritual is used to displace previous anxiety (Stewart

1954)-

A technique of dream therapy has been reported for the Diegueno

Indians of southern California which seems to be similar to Western

psychotherapy in its management of dreams. This technique is used

to treat persons who appear to be afflicted with obsessive sexual

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 319

fantasies. There are two recognized forms of this type of illness.
The first, which is less serious, is characterized by symptoms of ex-
cessive dreaming, laziness, and social withdrawal. The second form
of this malady is considered to be an advanced form of the first,
and appears to be an actual psychosis, characterized by persistent
hallucinations of a spirit lover, a supernatural bullet hawk which
takes human form as a person of either sex. Persons afflicted with
this hallucination are called "spouses of that bird."

To treat these maladies, a dream shaman is sought. The shaman
attempts to get the patient to talk about his dreams and sexual life,
actual and imaginary. The shaman begins by asserting that he al-
ready knows all the patient's dreams, so that there is no use in trying
to conceal anything. A mild type of hypnotic trance may be used
to encourage the patient's talking, except in the more severely
psychotic cases, which do not respond to this kind of treatment.
Along with discussion of the patient's sexual life and fantasies, the
shaman also prescribes blood letting and special nourishing foods.
For the unwed, marriage is recommended, apparently to help the
patient shift from substitute gratification in fantasy to real life
situations (Toffelmier and Loumala 1936) . The technique of ther-
apy in this example is in many ways unusual. The technique of dis-
cussing with the patient his fantasies, including dreams, rather than
permitting the patient to enact his fantasies, or to create a ritual
defense against them, is particularly striking. It is not surprising
that in this culture shamans are selected because of their stable
(rather than unstable) personalities.

To summarize the material which has been treated so far in this
section, the distinctions between content, structure, function, and
process in culture may provide a useful framework (Hsu 1959).
The cultural uses of dreams may be considered to be a type of cul-
ture content, having relations with the structural, functional, and
procedural aspects of culture and society. Dreams may affect the
structure of a society in becoming the subject matter of formal and
informal roles, such as that of the dream interpreter, or in becoming
a prerequisite for the ascription and achievement of roles, bringing
factors of unconscious choice into the process of role allocation, as
well as offering justification for the choice of deviant roles. Dreams
may also function to help the individual maintain psychic equi-
librium, serving as an important part of non- Western and Western
psychotherapy.

320 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Dream Usages and Their Correlates

The next part of this section will present the results of a cross-
cultural study of the conditions which affect the cultural uses of
dreams. In this study I have attempted to find out why some socie-
ties have extensive uses for dreams, while other societies do not.
On the basis of case history materials reported in the ethnographic
literature, it seemed to me that anxiety about being alone and on
one's own often gives rise to a strong preoccupation with dreams
and fantasy. If this were true, then societies in which individuals
frequently experience anxiety concerning isolation and self-reliance
would be likely to place an especially strong cultural emphasis on
dreams. I therefore attempted to specify the social conditions which
would be most likely to subject individuals to this type of anxiety,
so that it would be possible to predict the degree of emphasis placed
on dreams in any given culture from these conditions.

Field workers interested in culture and personality have presented
several examples of the effect of social isolation and the effect of cul-
tural roles which demand independent and self-reliant action. Mar-
garet Mead recounts the story of an orphaned Manus boy who felt
isolated and unloved, and who, unlike the other Manus children, was
preoccupied with fantasies about a guardian spirit which he took
to be his own father (Mead 1932:183) . A similar case has been re-
ported by Dorothy Eggan, in a study of mythic materials in dreams
(1955). One of her Hopi informants, who also felt isolated and
abandoned, also turned inward to fantasy about a supernatural
helper. Dorothy Eggan comments:

Benedict has pointed out that although the Pueblo area is surrounded by the
concept of a power-giving or protecting Guardian Spirit, such a concept has not
been standardized in the Pueblo groups because they are dominated by the "neces-
sity of the group ceremonial approach not that of individual experience" (Bene-
dict 1923:36). But in Sam we find a man who, because of personal problems,
although believing firmly in the "group approach," was frequently made to feel
less a part of the community than he needed to feel. Consequently he has elaborated
the concept of dtimalaitaka (guide or guardian spirit) , which is found among the
Hopi, but which is generally rather vague and unstressed, into an ever present and
active spirit who comes to him in dreams, takes him to witches' meetings and on
treasure hunts, gives him strength, wisdom and advice, rescues him from danger-
ous situations, and always assures him that he is on the right road and that his
enemies are wrong. (1955:448)

Wallace, in his study of Iroquois dream theory, also concludes
that anxiety about independence is related to this kind of extensive
use of dreams:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 321

. . . the typical Iroquois male, who In his daily life was a brave, generous, active,
and independent spirit, nevertheless cherished some strong, if unconscious, wishes
to be passive, to beg, to be cared for. This unallowable tendency, so threatening
to a man's sense of self-esteem, could not appear easily even in a dream; when it
did, it was either experienced as an intolerably painful episode of torture, or was
put in terms of a meeting with a supernatural protector. However, the Iroquois
themselves unwittingly make the translation: an active manifest dream is ful-
filled by a passive receiving action. The arrangement of the dream guessing rite
raises this dependency to an exquisite degree: the dreamer cannot even ask for his
wish; like a baby, he must content himself with cryptic signs and symbols until
someone guesses what he wants and gives it to him. (1958:247).

These reports indicate that anxiety about being isolated and on
one's own may give rise to preoccupation with dreams and fantasy,
especially fantasy about magical helpers. The content of such fan-
tasy seems to serve as a denial of the individual's actual isolation and
helplessness, thereby partially relieving these anxieties.

In order to measure the degree of cultural preoccupation with
dreams, the following traits involving dreams were coded for a sam-
ple of sixty-three societies taken from the Human Relations Area
Files. No society was selected unless at least a paragraph on dreams
could be found in the literature, and no more than two societies have
been taken from any one culture area, using Murdock's World
Ethnographic Sample (1957) :

a) Supernaturals appear in dreams and give important powers, aid, ritual, and
information.

b) Religious experts (priests, shamans) expected to use their own dreams in
performance of their role (e.g., curing, divination) .

c) Culture pattern dreams required before some roles may be assumed.

d) Dreams induced by special techniques (e.g., fasting, drugs, sleeping alone,
etc.) .

e) Formal or informal role of dream interpreter.

/) Undoing ritual after some dreams (e.g., sacrifice, avoidance).
g) Supernaturals appear in dreams and harm or foreshadow harm to the
dreamer.

These particular traits were selected because they are neither uni-
versal nor extremely rare, and because they cover a wide range of
types of uses of dreams. I had hoped that all of these traits would be
positively correlated with each other; however, this proved not to
be the case. Only four of these traits showed high significant corre-
lations with each other: traits a, b, c, and d. The other three traits
were uncorrected with each other, and with these four.

If all seven traits had been strongly intercorrelated, it would have
been reasonable to assume that there is a general factor of preoccu-

322 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

pation with dreams. The findings seem to indicate, however, that
rather than a general factor of preoccupation with dreams, there is
a more hmited complex centered about the use of dreams to seek
and control supernatural powers. Traits a, b, and d involve this
seeking and controlling of supernatural power quite directly. Trait
c, involving culture pattern dreams which are required before cer-
tain roles may be assumed, is less directly related to seeking super-
natural aid. However, it seems that such culture pattern dreams
often consist of a visitation by a magical helper, who teaches the
aspiring shaman or warrior important supernatural techniques. The
other dream traits, involving dream interpretation, undoing rituals
and possible supernatural harm, are unrelated to this complex, and
have not been used in measuring this type of cultural preoccupation
with dreams.

In view of these findings, the original hypothesis has been modi-
fied to state that anxiety about being alone and on one's own gives
rise to the use of dreams to seek and control supernatural powers.
The extent of this use of dreams has been measured by the number
of traits a, b, c, and d reported present for each society. The median
number of traits reported present for this cross-cultural sample is
one. Societies with none of these four traits fall below the median,
and are considered low on the use of dreams to seek and control su-
pernatural powers. Societies with one or more traits reported pres-
ent are considered high on this use of dreams.

The first condition specified as a possible cause of anxiety about
isolation and independence involves residence at marriage. If, at
marriage, a son or daughter moves far away from his or her parents,
the loss of parental support should give rise to anxiety about being
isolated and on one's own. In order to test this hypothesis, estimates
of the distances that sons and daughters most usually move at mar-
riage for each society have been taken from a cross-cultural study
of residence by Whiting and D'Andrade (1959). Table i presents
the association between the typical distances for parents and mar-
ried son and the use of dreams to seek and control supernatural
powers. The data in this table indicate that the further the son
typically moves away from his parents, the more likely a society is
to use dreams to seek and control supernatural powers. The degree
of association is fairly strong, and significant at the .01 level. No
table has been presented for the relation of distance between parents
and married daughter and use of dreams because it was found that
there is no association between these two measures. Apparently,

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS

323

TABLE I

Relation of Most Typical Distance Between Married Son and Parents to

Use of Dreams to Seek and Control Supernatural Powers

The societies are grouped in columns on the basis of distance between married son and parents

and in descending degree of extensiveness of use of dreams to seek and control supernatural

powers. The letters in parentheses after each society designate the traits reported present. (See

page 321 for definition of traits.)

Son Resides
in Parents'
Household

Son Resides
in Same Village
or Local Group

Son Resides in
Different Village
or Local Group

Papago {a,b,c,d)
Kapauku {a,b)
Ifugao (c)

Comanche {a,b,c,d)
Semang {a,b,c,d)
Pukapuka {a,b,c)
Chukchee {a,b)
Rwala {b,d)
Araucanians {b)
Azande {d)
Fang (a)
Nyakusa {b)
Wolof {b)

Crow {a,b,c,d)
Iroquois (a,b,c,d)
Jivaro (a,b,c,d)
Naskapl (a,b,c,d)
Ojibwa {a,b,c,d)
Omaha (a,b,c,d)
Paiute {a,b,c,d)
Andamans {a,b,c)
Copper Eskimo {a,b,c)
Cuna (a,b,c)
Kaska {a,c,d)
Lapps {a,b)
Yaruro {b,d)
Bemba {b)
Mundurucu (a)
Trobriands (r)
Yakut ((/)

Bhil (-)
Iban (-)
Lepcha (-)
Mataco (-)
Nama (-)
Samoa (— )
Siriono (— )
Tupinamba (— )

Ashanti (-)
Aymara (-)
Ifaluk (-)
Kurtatchi (-)
Marquesas (— )
MinChia (— )
Mossi (— )
Riffians (-)
Somali (-)
Tallensi (-)
Tanala (— )
Thai (-)
Tiv (-)

Tubatulabal (— )
Yoruba (-)

Burmese (— )
Callinago (— )
Ganda (-)
Karen (— )

anxiety suffered by women does not affect this use of dreams. Per-
haps this is because reHgion is more frequently a man's affair, or
perhaps because women may turn to their spouses in order to reheve
the anxiety of loss of parental support in a way that men may not.
In order to check on these findings, Murdock's residence and
family classification has been used. From the findings presented
above, nonpatrilocal societies should have more uses of dreams to

324

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

seek and control supernatural powers than patrilocal societies, and
independent families should have more uses for dreams than ex-
tended families. Both these conditions have effects in the predicted
direction and are statistically significant when considered together.

TABLE 2

Relation of Subsistence Economy to Use of Dreams to Seek and Control
Supernatural Powers
The societies are grouped in columns on the basis of economy in descending degree of extensive-
iiess of use of dreams to seek and control supernatural pwwers. The letters in parentheses after
I'ach society designate the traits reported present. (See page 321 for definition of traits.)

Agriculture

Agriculture

Hunting, Fishing, and

plus

without

Animal Husbandry

Animal

Animal

without

Husbandry

Husbandry

Agriculture

Comanche {a,b,c,d)

Crow (a,b,c,d)

Naskapi {a,b,c,d)

Ojibwa {a,b,c,d)

Omaha (a,b,c,d)

Paiute {a,b,c,d)

Semang {a,b,c,d)

Andaman {a,b,c)

Iroquois {a,b,c,d)

Copper Eskimo {a,b,c)

Jivaro (a,b,c,d)

Kaska {a,c,d)

Papago {a,b,c,d)

Pukapuka (a,b,c)

Cuna {a,b,c)

*Chukchee (a,b)

Carib {a,b)

''Lapps ia,b)

Azande {d)

*Rwala {b,d)

Chagga {b,c)

Bemba {b)

Wishram (a,d)

Kapauku {a,b)

Fang {a)

Yaruro {b,d)

Araucanians {b)

Ifugao (r)

Caingang (d)

Nyakusa {b)

Mundurucu {a)

Tlingit (^)

Wolof {b)

Trobriands (c)

* Yakut (a)

Aymara (-)

Ashanti (-)

Callinago (-)

Bhil (-)

Ifaluk (-)

Mataco (-)

Burmese (— )

Kurtatchi (-)

=^Nama (-)

Ganda (-)

Marquesas (-)

Siriono (-)

Iban (-)

Samoa (— )

"Somali (— )

Karen (-)

Subanum (— )

Tubatulabal (-)

Lepcha (— )

Tupinamba (-)

MinChia (-)

Yoruba (-)

Mossi (-)

Riffians (-)

Tallensi (-)

Tanala (-)

Thai (-)

Thonga (-)

Tiv (-)

Animal husbandry societies.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 3 25

A second possible source of anxiety about being isolated and on
one's own involves the subsistence economy. The relation of the sub-
sistence economy to adult roles which demand independent and self-
reliant behavior has been discussed by Barry, Child, and Bacon in
a study of economy and child-rearing practices ( 1959) . They find
that child-rearing practices stressing independence, self-reliance,
and achievement are most typical of hunting and fishing societies,
while child-rearing practices stressing obedience, responsibility, and
nurturance are typical of societies with both agricultural and ani-
mal husbandry. Societies with agriculture, and without animal hus-
bandry, fall between these extremes. The correlation between the
form of economy and a combined child-training measure of rela-
tive "pressure for compliance" (composed of scores for obedience,
responsibility, and nurturance training) versus "pressure for as-
sertiveness" (composed of scores for independence, self-reliance,
and achievement training) yields exceptionally strong coefficients
of association of +.94 and +.93 for extreme and intermediate com-
parisons (1959:59). This very high degree of association is thought
to be due to the functional adjustment of child-rearing practices to
the type of adult roles necessary to maintain food production. That
is, societies with both agriculture and animal husbandry can best
assure future food supply by "faithful adherence to routine" and
therefore train children to be obedient and responsible, while in
hunting and fishing societies individual initiative and skill is more
adaptive, along with child-rearing practices stressing independence
and self-reliance (1959:52).

It is expected, then, that hunting and fishing societies will be
likely to use dreams to seek and control supernatural powers, while
societies with both agriculture and animal husbandry will be less
likely to use dreams in this fashion. Societies with either agriculture
or animal husbandry, but not both, should fall between these two
extremes.^ This result is predicted for two reasons. First, according
to Barry and co-workers, hunting and fishing societies place greater
pressure on the adult to be independent and self-reliant. Second,

■" Barry, Child, and Bacon group together both nomadic pastoral societies and societies with
a combination of animal husbandry and agriculture, evidently considering the use of animals to
be the crucial determinant in accumulation of food resources. However, the combination of
agriculture with animal husbandry would be more likely to produce a stable and high food
output than either economy separately. For this reason the groupings of categories of economy
used by Barry and his co-workers have been altered slightly in this paper, and societies with
animal husbandry and no agriculture have been put in the intermediate hunting and fishing group.

326 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

hunting and fishing societies also place relatively greater pressure
on the child to be independent and self-reliant.

Table 2 presents the association between type of economy and
the use of dreams to seek and control supernatural powers. The
ratings on economy have been taken from Murdock ( 1957) .

The results indicate that there is a strong and significant relation
between the type of economy and the use of dreams. Approximately
80 per cent of the hunting and fishing societies use dreams to seek
and control supernatural powers, while only 20 per cent of the
societies with both agriculture and animal husbandry use dreams
this way. The intermediate societies, which have either agriculture
or animal husbandry, but not both, fall between the two extremes,
with 60 per cent of these societies using dreams to seek and control
supernatural powers.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to decide whether this association
is due to the effect of child rearing, or to the effect of role pressures
on adults. A separate test, using the child-training measure of pres-
sure for compliance versus assertiveness, results in a significant cor-
relation of assertiveness with an extensive use of dreams. However,
attempting to control the effect of economy reduces this correlation
drastically, although no firm conclusion can be drawn because of
the large amount of overlap between type of economy and child-
rearing practices. Attempts to use other measures of child rearing
involving independence training, taken from Whiting and Child
(1953), and unpublished scores rated by Barry and his associates,
reveal a nonsignificant tendency for early indulgence of dependency
and later severe socialization of dependency to go with extensive use
of dreams to seek and control supernatural powers.

Although economic conditions are related to the typical distance
a son moves at marriage with the son moving further in hunting and
fishing society, these two conditions seem to have clearly assessable
independent effects. Within agricultural societies, the greater the
distance between son and parent, the more likely a society is to use
dreams to seek and control supernatural powers. The same relations
hold within hunting, fishing, and pastoral societies.

In general, the findings of this cross-cultural study support the
notion that anxiety about being isolated and under pressure to be
self-reliant may create an involvement with a type of fantasy about
magical helpers. Both the use of fantasy and dreams, rather than
ritual as the means of contact with the supernatural, and the use of
personal helpers, rather than impersonal forces, seem to be involved

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 327

in this complex. The type of economy and the degree of isolation of
the married son from his parents have been found to affect this com-
plex strongly, with hunting and fishing societies, and societies in
which the son moves far away from his parents being more likely to
use dreams to seek and control supernatural powers. Based on the
rather weak correlations with child-training practices, and the lack
of association with the isolation of the married daughter. I suspect
that this effect is mediated by what happens to adults rather than
children, and what happens to men rather than women.^

As a final summary, the following general conclusions about the
relations between dreams, personality, and culture are tentatively
advanced.

1. There is a close association between dreams and the super-
natural. This association consists of similarities between dream
images and the conceptions of the supernatural, and also of the use
of dreams to see and interact with the supernatural. This association
does not necessarily indicate that dreams gave rise in the distant past
to various conceptions of the supernatural, but would seem to indi-
cate that similar psychological mechanisms may underlie both.

2. There are a number of small bits of evidence to support the
thesis that symbolism in dreams is a universal phenomena. If true,
this means that man either innately or due to experience establishes
a set of identities or equivalences without cultural tuition, and with-
out awareness, and that these equivalences are in constant use.

3. Dreams, it is assumed, can be used to reveal the dreamer's mo-
tives. Further, the relation between the dream content and these
motives may be more or less indirect and disguised. The most basic
(and usually the most disguised) motives involve obtaining direct
physical gratification from members of the nuclear family. These
motives can be found in the dreams of people from all societies.
The modal ways in which these motives are represented and de-
fended against, however, vary culturally.

4. It is also assumed that dreams have a cognitive as well as moti-
vational component. The dreamer's waking life and, hence, his
culture are represented in dreams. This representation is always dis-

^ There is some evidence that early childhood conditions involving the identification process,
whereby a young child comes to admire and wish to be like his or her parent of the same sex,
also affects the use of dreams. It is thought that strong parental same-sex identification leads
to fantasy about parent-like guardian spirits, and to the use of fantasy rather than ritual or
acting out to relieve anxiety. This formulation is at present still tentative, and dependent
upon further research. It may be that strong early same-sex parental identification is a neces-
sary but not sufficient cause for a strong degree of cultural emphasis on dreams, with adult
role stress involving isolation and independence a later "eliciting" factor.

32 8 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

torted, however. Sometimes the distortion is mild, involving minor
editing of material and bias in selection. At other times the dis-
tortion may be drastic, involving complete reversal of normal ex-
perience. Such distortion is probably due in part to the press of
motivation, and especially conflicts in motivation.

5. Culture may also specify the content which is appropriate to
dreams under certain conditions. Where the individual is supposed
to dream a certain dream, the retelling of these dreams is probably
influenced by some degree of later elaboration. Acculturation may
bring foreign material into such dreams, or completely break the
pattern. The emotional reaction to dreams may be affected by the
cultural definition of what is likely to take place in dreams, and in
turn the cultural definition of the self may be affected by the kinds
of events which occur in dreams.

6. Dreams have numerous cultural uses. Prediction of the future
and contact with supernaturals are the most common of these uses.
Dreams are also used in native psychotherapies and as a means of
selecting and rejecting personnel for various roles. One special use of
dreams, to seek and control supernatural powers, seems to be caused
by anxiety about being alone and needing to be able to be self-
reliant. Societies in which the economy demands self-reliant be-
havior on the part of the men, as in hunting, and societies in which
the married son must move away from his natal family into another
village are more likely to use dreams to seek and control supernatural
powers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adelson, Joseph

i960 Creativity and the dream. Merrill Palmer Quarterly 6:92-97.

Barry, H., I. Child and M. Bacon

1959 Relation of child training to subsistence economy. American Anthro-
pologist 61:51—63.

Benedict, Ruth

1923 The concept of the guardian spirit in North America. Memoirs of the
American Anthropological Association 29.

Bourguigon, Erika E.

1954 Dreams and dream interpretation in Haiti. American Anthropologist
56:262—268.

Dement, William

1955 Dream recall and eye movement during sleep in schizophrenics and
normals. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 122:263-269.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 3 29

Dement, William and N. Kleitman

1957 The relation of eye movements during sleep to dream activity. Journal
of Experimental Psychology 53:339—346.

Devereux, George

195 1 Reality and dream. New York, International Universities Press.

1957 Dream learning and individual ritual differences in Mohave Shamanism.
American Anthropologist 59:1036—1045.

DiTTMANN, Allen and Harvey Moore

1957 Disturbance in dreams as related to peyotism among the Navaho. Amer-
ican Anthropologist 59:642—649.

Eggan, Dorothy

1949 The significance of dreams for anthropological research. American
Anthropologist 51:171 — 198.

1952 The manifest content of dreams: a challenge to social sciences. Amer-
ican Anthropologist 54:469—485.

1955 The personal use of myth in dreams. In Myth: a symposium, T. Sebeok,
ed. Journal of American Folklore 68:445—453.

196 1 Dream analysis. In Studying personality cross-culturally, Bert Kaplan,
ed. Row, Peterson and Co., Evanston, III.

Elwin, Verrxer

1939 The Baiga. London, John Murray.

Erikson, Erik H.

1950 Childhood and society. New York, Norton.

1954 The dream specimen in psychoanalysis. In Psychoanalytic psychiatry and
psychology. Knight and Friedman eds., pp. 1 31-170. New York, In-
ternational Universities Press.

Firth, Raymond

1934 The meaning of dreams in Tikopia. In Essays presented to C. G. Selig-
man, Evans-Pritchard, Firth, Malinowski, and Schapera, eds., pp. 63-74.
London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.

Freud, Sigmund

1900 The interpretation of dreams, transl. New York, Basic Books, 1958.
1920 A general introduction to psychoanalysis, transl. New York, Doubleday,
Permabook edition, 1953.

Goodenough, D., a. Shapiro, M. Holden, and L. Steinschriber

1959 A comparison of "dreamers" and "nondreamers." Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology 59:295-302.

Griffith, R., O. Miyagi, and A. Tago

1958 The university of typical dreams: Japanese versus American. American
Anthropologist 60:1173-1179.

Hall, Calvin S.

1 95 I What people dream about. Scientific American, May.

1953 The meaning of dreams, New York, Harper.

1956 Current trends in research on dreams. In Progress in clinical psychology.
New York, Grune and Stratton.

33 0 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Hallo WELL, A. Irving

1938 Freudian symbolism in the dream of a Salteaux Indian. Man., 38:47—48,
1955 The self and its behavioral environment. In Culture and experience.
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

HoBBEs, Thomas

165 1 Leviathan. Reprint of ist Ed. Cambridge, England, University Press
1904.
HoLMBERG, Allan R.

1950 Nomads of the long bow: the Siriono of Eastern Bolivia. Smithsonian
Institution: Institute of Social Anthropology Publication No. 10.

HoNiGMANN, John J.

1954 Culture and personaUty. New York, Harper.

1 96 1 The interpretation of dreams in anthropological field work: a case
study. In Studying personality cross-culturally, Bert Kaplan, ed. pp.
579—585. Row, Peterson and Co., Evanston, 111.
Hsu, Francis K.

1959 Structure, function, content, and process. American Anthropologist
61:790—805.
Jacobs, Melville

1959 The content and style of an oral literature; Clackamas Chinook myths
and tales. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 26, New York,
"Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc.
Jones, Ernest

193 I On the nightmare. New York, Grove Press. Evergreen edition, 1959.
King, Arden R.

1943 The dream biography of a mountain Maidu. Character and Personality
1 1:227—234.
Kluckhohn, Clyde and "William Morgan

195 1 Some notes on Navaho dreams. In Essays in honor of Geza Roheim,
Wilbur and Muensterger eds. pp. 120-13 i. New York, International
Universities Press.

Lee, S. G.

1958 Social influences in Zulu dreaming. Journal of Social Psychology, 47:
265—283.
Lincoln, Jackson S.

1935 The dream in primitive cultures. London, Cresset Press.
LowiE, Robert H.

1924 Primitive religion. New York, Liveright. Black and Gold edition re-
print, 1948.
1922 The religion of the Crow Indians. Anthropological Papers of the Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History 25:309-444.
Mead, Margaret

1932 An investigation of the thought of primitive children with special refer-
ence to animism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 62:
173-189.
Murdoch, George P.

1957 World ethnographic sample. American Anthropologist 59:664-687.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF DREAMS 331

Offenkrantz, W. and A. Rechtschaffen

1960a Dream sequences of a patient in psychotherapy. Paper presented at the
47th Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, At-
lantic City, New Jersey, May.
1960b Clinical studies of dreams in sequence. II Papers presented at meeting
of American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, December.
Radin, Paul

1936 Ojibwa and Ottawa puberty dreams. In Essays presented to A. L.
Kroeber. University of California Press.

ROFFENSTEIN, GaSTON

195 1 Experiments on symbolism in dreams. In The organization and pathol-
ogy of thought, David Rapaport, ed. and translator, pp. 249-256,
New York, Columbia University Press.
RoHEiM, Geza

1932 Psychoanalysis of primitive cultural types. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 13:2—224.

1938 The nescience of the Aranda. British Journal of Medical Psychology
17:343-360.

1946 The Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. Psychoanalytic Quarterly
15:503-508.

1947 Dream analysis and field work in anthropology. Psychoanalysis and the
Social Sciences 1:87—130.

1949 The technique of dream analysis and field work in anthropology. Psy-
choanalytic Quarterly 18:471—479.

1950 Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York, International Universities
Press.

ScHNEroER, David

1 94 1 Aboriginal dreams. Masters thesis, Cornell University.
Schneider, D. M. and R. L. Sharp

(n.d.) Yir-yoront dreams. In manuscript.
Sears, Walter E.

1948 The Navaho and Yir-Yoront, their primitive dreams. Undergraduate
honors thesis, Harvard University.

Seligman, C. G.

1924 Anthropology and psychology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological

Institute 54:13—46.
1927 Appendix. Religion and Art in Ashanti, Rattray, R. S. pp. 197—204.

Oxford, Clarendon Press.
1932 Anthropological perspective and psychological theory. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 62:193-228.
Stewart, Kilton

195 1 Dream theory in Malaya. Complex 6:21-33.
1954 Pygmies and dream giants. New York, Norton.

TOFFELMIER, G., and K. LUOMALA

1936 Dreams and dream interpretation of the Diegueno Indians of Southern
California. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2:195—225.

3 32 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Tresman, H., a. Rechtschaffen, W. Oefenkrantz, and E. A. Wolpert
1 96 1? Studies in psychophysiology of dreams III. Relation among dreams in
sequence. Archives of General Psychiatry (in press) .
Wallace, Anthony

1958 Dreams and the wishes of the soul: a type of psychoanalytic theory
among the seventeenth century Iroquois. American Anthropologist
60:234—248.

Whiting, J. W. M. and I. L. Child

1953 Child Training and personality; a cross-cultural study. New Haven,
Yale University Press.
Whiting, J. W. M. and R. G. D'Andrade

1959 Sleeping arrangements and social structure: a cross-cultural study.
Presented at American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings,
Mexico City, December.

chapter 1 1

THE MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL
RELEVANCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
AND PSYCHOLOGY

DONALD T. CAMPBELL

Northwestern University

Rather than report upon a specific technique, this chapter will
deal with some general methodological problems in relating theory
to data. Rather than deal solely with an interdisciplinary specialty
of "culture and personality," this chapter will emphasize the mu-
tual relevance — at a methodological level — of anthropology and
psychology for each other. This relevance is believed to hold even
when each discipline is focused upon its own pure problems, as well
as when they enter into interdisciplinary collaboration. This mutual
methodological relevance is emphasized as a mode of contact sepa-
rate from the inevitable mutual relevance of their substantive
theories. The latter, while more important, has also received more
repeated attention, and is in any event not the topic treated here.

Anthropology os a Source of Discipline for Psychological Theory

There is no need to reiterate or to document here the tremendous
influence which anthropology's culture-personality studies have
had upon social psychology since the 1930's. From the tenor of
some of the papers of this volume and from other professional stock-
takings by anthropologists (for example, Bennett 1946, Kluckhohn
1954b, Honigmann 1954), it can be gathered that many anthro-
pologists feel somewhat uneasy about this very great popularity of
what may be a not-too-dependable product; that many might ex-
plain the rapid diffusion of this trait complex more as due to the
extreme needs of the new converts than to the efficacy of the in-

333

334 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

vention, that is, an acceptance phenomena more akin to the diffu-
sion of the Ghost Dance Rehgion than to the spread of the com-
pound bow, barbed fishhook or better mousetrap. As an academic,
experimentally oriented, and methodologically anxious social psy-
chologist, I, of course, share these misgivings. However, even when
in an incomplete and fragmentary form, anthropological evidence
has served as a source of discipline, as well as a source of inspiration
to psychological theory.

The first, and perhaps still most needed influence is at a very gen-
eral level. This is the message of cultural relativism. While recog-
nizing that anthropologists themselves are not too happy with this
slogan, and that the perspective may not be adequate for anthro-
pology's theoretical purposes, the message it has to offer is still very
much needed by academic psychologists. Implicitly, the laboratory
psychologist still assumes that his college sophomores provide an
adequate base for a general psychology of man. (Such assumptions
of universality are automatic for any provincially enculturated
ethnocentric.) For social psychology these tendencies have been
very substantially curbed through confrontation with the anthro-
pological literature. Continued confrontation, however, will be
required to prevent relapse. For the general psychologist, most of the
message is yet to be learned.

The message of cultural relativism is very general and nonspecific.
Often it is merely a general caution against intemperate generali-
zation. (And often it takes the extreme of a negativistic denial of
the possibility of any generalization.) The central purpose of this
paper is to call attention to more concrete and specific methodologi-
cal relevance. As Flonigmann (1952, 1954), Whiting (1954), and
Child (1954) have pointed out, anthropological evidence has been,
and can continue to be, of invaluable service as a crucible in which
to put to more rigorous test psychology's tentative theories, enabling
one to edit them and select among alternatives in ways which labora-
tory experiments and correlational studies within our own culture
might never make possible.

While this can never be anthropology's central role, what is here
argued is that anthropology provides an important part of the scien-
tific apparatus of psychology, particularly for personality theory.
This is said within a perspective upon the strategy of science which
sees experimentation and the other methods of science as having es-
sentially an editorial function. That is, scientific data serve to choose
among, prune out, and in this sense, edit theories. Essential to build-

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 3 35

ing a science are such laboratories. Where all are lacking, no science
is possible. In the absence of the possibility of experimentation with
modes of child rearing and personality formation, a science of per-
sonality would be all but impossible were it not for the "laboratory"
of cross-cultural comparison opened up by the anthropologist.

To illustrate this role, several condensed and oversimplified exam-
ples are offered. Note that these are organized around problems in
psychological theory. (That such problems are not central to an-
thropology should not distract us from this important service.)
Though the "facts" in the illustrations may in fact be controversial,
it is hoped that they exemplify the possibility, if not the actuality,
of the editing role of anthropological data.

1. Freud validly observed that boys in late Hapsburgian Vienna had hostile
feelings toward their fathers. Two possible explanations offered themselves — the
hostility could be due to the father's role as the disciplinarian, or to the father's
role as the mother's lover. For reasons that can be neglected here (but see Bakan
1958) Freud chose to emphasize the role of the mother's lover. However, work-
ing only with his patient population there was no adequate basis for making the
choice. The two rival explanations were experimentally confounded, for among
the parents of Freud's patients the disciplinarian of little boys was usually the
mother's lover, (Remember that in Freud's day it was the morality of one's par-
ents more often than their immorality that drove one to choose the analyst's
couch over other couches, so that Freud got a biased sample.) Malinowski (1927)
studied a society in which these two paternal roles were experimentally disen-
tangled, in which the disciplinarian of young boys and the mother's lover were
not one-and-the-same person. And in this society, the boys' hostility was addressed
to the disciplinarian, not to the mother's lover. This outcome makes the Oedipal
hostility more easily encompassed within the framework of a simple hedonistic
learning theory such as that of Thorndike or Hull. While the love-jealousy and
the punishment Oedipal theories are no doubt both appropriate to some extent,
Malinowski's work helps to integrate personality theory within learning theory
and gives us a firmer base upon which to predict the Oedipal complex of the
son of a commuting suburban father where the mother is the only source of
discipline.

2. Pettitt's (1946) monograph on educational practices among North Ameri-
can Indian tribes serves the purpose of calling attention to the fact that our
theories of learning and cognition predict trouble for the modern emancipated
American family. According to learning experiments, conditioned fear and con-
ditioned hostility are the unrational product of temporal contiguity between
stimulus and pain, or between stimulus and frustration. And if we go to cognitive
psychology, we find that the perception of causality, and with this the phenomenon
of blaming, are likewise functions of temporal and spatial contiguity (Heider
1944, Michotte 1946). From these theories it follows that in a society such as
intellectual suburbia, where the parents stand alone in representing the restraints
which society passes on to children, the parents will become the stimuli for condi-
tioned hostility on the part of the children, the children will perceive the parents

33 6 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

as causing, as to blame for, their frustrations. Thus, the conditioning and/or the
causal perception processes predict a chronic divisive force within the modern
family.

With the inevitable selective process in which, among the countless customs
that are tried, some are preserved more readily than others (e.g., Keller 193 i),
one can expect that in stable societies preventive customs will have grown up
around this inevitable parental-resentment problem. Pettitt's (1946) analysis
spells out the role of shamans and kachina dancers as disciplinarians, of the
avunculate, of age grade systems, all as devices serving to deflect the discipline-
induced hostility of the child away from the parent, and, thus as preserving
intrafamilial solidarity. Reading his monograph gives one both a greater apprecia-
tion of the relevance of learning theory for predicting intrafamilial attitudes, and
parenthetically a greater sympathy for those unsophisticated parents in our own
culture who attempt a similar deflection of childish hostility away from them-
selves through invoking the sanctions of the policeman, the boogeyman, Santa
Claus, or a reified God. (On the other hand, perhaps it is well that in our cul-
ture the socialization-induced hostilities are associated with parents, for our occu-
pational structure requires new entrants to the labor force who are willing and
eager to leave home permanently. Just such a labor force is lacking in some of
the underdeveloped countries, perhaps in part because of the greater "wisdom"
of their intrafamilial relationships.)

3. Every practicing psychoanalyst doing therapy with parents has probably
recognized that the parent contributes much of the irrational and projected
attitudes that comprise the intergenerational Oedipal interaction — yet this recog-
nition is little represented in the literature, although not totally absent (e.g., Hsu
1940, Wellisch 1954). Recently the Herskovitses (1958a, b) have not only called
attention to the ubiquity of the theme of the father's hostility toward his first
born son in the Oedipus-type myths of Africa and Eurasia, but have in addition
hypothesized that this paternal hostility to the newborn represents a reactivation
of the father's sibling-rivalry hostility, acquired in his childhood in reaction to
a younger sibling who abruptly displaced him in the total attention of the mother.
The Herskovitses came to this hypothesis working with the mythology of Da-
homey, a polygynous society in which each wife has her own hut, and in which
a newborn child is continually with the mother, at work during the day and on
the sleeping mat at night, until at around the age of two or three it is displaced
by a younger sibling. Corresponding to this familial pattern is a mythology
exceptionally full of strife between brothers and between generations, and in
which the older brother or the older generation is portrayed as the initiator of
the hostihty.

Once pointed out, this seems exactly what one would expect from considera-
tions of stimulus equivalence and habit transfer. Certainly in many cultures be-
sides Dahomey (e.g., Levy 1935, Paul 1950, Henry 1944, Spiro 1953) hostility
toward younger siblings is among the most characteristic and strongest learnings
of childhood. When later as an adult an older sibling is presented with the new
stimulus that his own child constitutes, this novel stimulus can be expected to
elicit the strongest of the response tendencies learned in the past toward a similar
stimulus, that is, the responses learned toward the younger sibling as an infant.
The degree of this projected hostility would presumably be correlated with the

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 3 37

degree to which the child in its first years had the undivided attention of the
mother, and, hence, was the more frustratingly displaced at the end of the infancy
period. If initiation rites be taken as symptomatic of the hostility of the older
generation toward the younger (as Wellisch 1954 has plausibly interpreted in-
fanticide and the sacrificing of children to be), then one might expect the high
correlation between length and degree of infant monopoly of the mother's atten-
tion and the hostility of initiation rites, which Whiting and co-workers (1958)
report. (Initiation rites could also, on the basis of the same theory, represent the
still more direct expression of the hostility of the older already initiated brothers
toward the younger.) It can be noted that Dahomey is included in Whiting's sam-
ple, and is scored in the very highest category for severity of initiation rites. In
Kwoma, the child's displacement may be through the father's return to the sleeping
mat, but this is not the pattern in Dahomey. In general, displacement by a younger
sibling is probably the more usual mechanism. If the projected sibling hostility
is a relevant part of the explanation, then upon examination we should find both
actual and mythological sibling strife more prevalent both in cultures with the
harsher initiation rites and in the cultures with the longer infant monopoly of
the mother's attention in infancy.

I have recently confirmed the stimulus equivalence of offspring and younger
siblings assumed in this derivation in an unpublished study of the types of con-
fusions of names that occur on the part of parents of college sophomores: When a
parent mistakenly calls a child by the name of one of the parent's own siblings,
the name of a younger sibling (of the same sex as the child) is most frequently
involved. This study can not, of course, confirm the hostility aspects of the inter-
pretation. Note also that this theory predicts a relative absence of parent-
originated hostility for parents who were only children or youngest in their
families, except insofar as the newborn is a genuine displacer of the parent in the
attentions of the spouse.

4. Freud presented psychology with an insightful, but doubly double-jointed
theory relating drive fixation in childhood and adult behavior. On the one hand,
the fixation could be produced by overindulgence of the drive in childhood, or
by its opposite, underindulgence. As to expression in adult life, fixation could
express itself in excessive preoccupation with drive-relevant things or by its
opposite, a counterphobic avoidance. Such a prediction is somewhat more specific
than no prediction at all, but when combined with the inevitable errors of clas-
sification, the polar-cross scatter diagram which it predicts may not be distin-
guishable from a zero correlation. And whereas on many points, psychoanalysis
and hedonistic-associationistic learning theories agree, the learning theories predict
most easily a parallelism between conditions of acquisition and those of expression
and transfer, rather than compensatory or complementary relationships, since
memory but not energy storage is expected to persist. Whiting and Child's ( 1953 )
study may be interpreted as confirming those aspects of the Freudian hypothesis
which thus agree with the learning theory interpretation. Persons for whom a
given drive had been associated with frustration in childhood show phobic re-
actions regarding it in adult life (negative fixation). And insofar as infantile
indulgence and gratification had adult symptoms, those who found a given drive
a source of gratification in childhood sought it out as a source of cure in adult
life. Here, again, the result has been in the direction of integrating personality

338 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

theory with learning theory. Here, again, the anthropological data have been
efficacious in selecting among alternative psychological hypotheses. And as Child
(1954) shows, insofar as relationships, Freudian or otherwise, have been estab-
lished between early child training and adult behavior, the confirmations have
come primarily from the studies of cross-cultural breadth, rather than from
studies making use of the small range of differences within our own culture.

5. Other studies using the cross-cultural method seem to confirm the positive
transfer of attitudes between childhood reinforcement conditions and adult per-
sonality, the assumptions of stimulus equivalence, transfer, displacement in
approach-avoidance conflicts, and so forth. Spiro's (1953, 1958) demonstration
of the parallel between infant training by parents and attitudes toward spirits
is interpreted as confirmatory in this regard. This may seem contradictory, since
in his 1953 paper, Spiro takes his evidence as justifying a choice in favor of a
perceptual rather than a learning theory. As I understand it, learning theories
are silent as to the nature of conscious contents. Hence, evidence regarding con-
scious contents are not contradictory to learning theory. In particular, evidence
regarding "perceptions of" objects cannot be interpreted as corresponding to the
stimulus terms of learning theory. Usually a better translation of "perceived as"
is "responded to as to." On this ground, learning theory expects the authority
symbols of adult life to be responded to as (to be perceived as) were the au-
thority figures of childhood to which the responses (perceptions) were originally
learned. For more details on this mode of integrating theoretical terminologies,
see Campbell ( 1961 ) . For more evidence on the parallels between attitudes toward
parents and toward spiritual beings, see Lambert and co-workers (1959).

In general, the evidence of social anthropology is seen as having
a salutary and disciplining effect upon personality psychology, serv-
ing, paradoxically, to make personality theory more clearly a part
of the learning theory of general psychology.

Some Psychological Comments on Anthropological Method

It is probably true that the testing of psychological theories must
remain a very minor part of the research agenda of the anthropolo-
gist. In addition, the great difference in task must be recognized be-
tween the descriptive, humanistic task of one who seeks to record
all aspects of a specific cultural instance and the task of the abstrac-
tive and generalizing "scientist" who wants to test the concomitant
variation of two isolated factors across instances in general. Co-
operation between these orientations is often difficult — but is helped
rather than hindered by the explicit recognition of the great differ-
ence in goals: Too often those in one camp regard those in the other
as the willful practitioners of a wrongheaded approach, implicitly
assuming a common goal. Both orientations are represented in the
present volume, in some instances both within a single person. The
descriptive-humanistic rather than abstractive approach has in the

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 3 39

past been typical of much of anthropology. On the other hand,
Honigmann (1952), Whiting (1954), and Spiro (1953, 1958)
have presented the abstractive, hypothesis-testing commitment.
Murray (1949) and Gillin ( 1954) have called for such an orienta-
tion in previous symposia on culture and personality. My interests
are wholly of this sort, and some of the methodological comments to
follow are thus irrelevant to the more typically descriptive anthro-
pological undertaking. Many of these comments come from an in-
terest in a potential psychology of induction (Campbell 1958a,
1959) , and in particular from an application of knowledge about
human perception, learning, and biases to the calibration of the hu-
man observer as a scientific measuring instrument (for example,
Campbell, Hunt, and Lewis 1957, 1958, Campbell 1958b) .

Before going into these details, it may be well to note a common
cause joining the abstractive-generalizing orientation central to this
paper and the descriptive-humanistic orientation as it has been
modally represented in anthropological research training. Both
stand in opposition to the undisciplined generalizations often found
in the more dramatic efforts to interpret man and culture. Both
look askance at the sweeping generalizations of a Spencer, a Speng-
ler, a Toynbee, or a Nietzsche when offered as established scientific
truth. This common ground is not always noted, and, indeed, each
orientation tends to attribute undisciplined generalization to the
other.

In the major departments of anthropology of the 1920's and
1930's the theoretical excesses of a previous generation of anthro-
pologists led to an emphasis upon objectivity in field work which
was antitheoretical insofar as adherence to theory had in the past
served to reduce the objectivity of field work. Herskovits (i960)
has recently called attention to a superior objectivity for the hu-
manistic aspects of anthropological study. Both the descriptive-
humanistic orientation and the abstractive, hypothesis-testing
orientation wish to avoid self-deception and bias in the data collec-
tion process. Both call for reliable, intersubjectively communicable
observations. Both are ideally hardheaded, skeptical, modest, and
conservative in their orientation to factual knowledge. For these
reasons, many of the topics covered in what follows are of joint
relevance. This point is made without weakening the appeal for the
mutual recognition and respect for a separateness of task and divi-
sion of labor between the two orientations, both of which are essen-
tial in the complete study of man.

340 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The Relation of Intersubjective-Verifiability to Directness
of Sense Receptor Access

It goes without saying that a science of either type cannot be built
without intersubjective verifiabihty of observations. Psychological
research on the accuracy and person-to-person agreement in inde-
pendent reporting seems summarizable by the statement that the
greater the direct accessibility of the stimuli to the sense receptors,
the greater the intersubjective verifiabihty of the observation. The
weaker or the more intangible, indirect, or abstract the stimulus
attribute, the more the observations are subject to distortion.

It is quite conceivable that there are some aspects of culture, in-
cluding its over-all pattern or ethos, that are so abstract or indirectly
inferred that intersubjective verifiabihty is lost. If this is so, then
until corrected, these aspects cannot become a part of science, and
we, as scientists, should concentrate on those aspects upon which we
can get agreement. Recently Holmes (1957, 1958) has reported a
restudy of some of Mead's work on Samoan society, which along
with the other restudies of recent years (such as Li An-Che 1937,
Bennett 1946, and Lewis 195 1) supports the methodological ex-
pectation of greater verifiabihty to the more palpable and visible.
As far as the great bulk of Mead's ethnology. Holmes confirms her
findings, stating "the reliability of Mead's account is remarkably
high." While he reports some differences in the description of tradi-
tional political systems and other matters, on matters of material
culture and observable custom, there is general agreement. This ex-
tends also to the observed absence of an adolescent disturbance on
the part of the girls, and the easy transition from childhood to adult
life. But upon several of the broader aspects of ethos, his findings
are in complete disagreement, for example, upon the lack of special-
ized feeling in human relations, the lack of competitive spirit, the
lack of crisis in human relations, and the importance of "Mafau-
fau," or the gift of wise judgment. In the context of his presenta-
tion, one cannot easily interpret these differences as due to culture
change in the intervening years, but rather one must interpret them
as disagreement in the description of aspects of "the same" culture.
If, as Mead has said, "in the matter of ethos, the surest and most
perfect instrument of understanding is our own emotional response"
( Mead and McGregor 1951:300), then ethos may indeed be beyond
the realm of scientific study. This lack of intersubjective verifiabil-
ity is not inevitable however. In the methodological pattern of
Whiting and Child (1953) some of the relevant data are made

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 341

much more directly accessible to the senses; in addition, the integra-
tive patterning is made a matter of explicit public combinational
formulas. Through the use of methodological procedures developed
to control the demonstrated biases of human observers, judgments
of the intangibles of ethos may be made intersubjectively confirm-
able, demonstrable in reliability studies.

Adaptation Level and Contrast Effects

In considering the faults of our laboratory experiments in social
psychology, we have come up with a list of recurrent flaws, some of
which also apply to other types of data collection. One of these has
been called infelicitously "instrument decay" (Campbell 1957) :
When human observers are used as the measuring device their judg-
mental standards often change in ways that may be misinterpreted
as experimental effects. A major source of such "instrument decay"
is a set of phenomena in human judgment summarized by Helson
(1947) under the concept of "level of adaptation." Its role in social
science field work may be illustrated by the anecdote in the follow-
ing paragraph.^

In the last several years, considerable numbers of Russian experts
from American universities have been sent on visits to the U.S.S.R.
In part, they have had different itineraries, some going first to Len-
ingrad, others first to Moscow, and so forth. In comparing notes
later they have found themselves in disagreement as to which Rus-
sian city (Leningrad or Moscow) was the more drab and which the
more lively. These differences in opinion have turned out to be
correlated with the differences in itinerary: which ever city one
visited first seemed the more drab. Against the adaptation level
based upon experience with familiar United States cities, the first
Russian city seemed drab and cold indeed. But a stay in Russia modi-
fied the adaptation level, changed the implicit standard of reference
so that the second city was judged against a more lenient standard.
Such a process is what would be predicted by extrapolation from
laboratory and field studies of the effect of context upon clinical
psychology judgments (e.g., Campbell, Hunt, and Lewis 1957,
1958). Of course, other processes were also involved — familiarity
with the Russian vernacular, sensitivity to the expressive compo-
nents of voice tone and gesture, and other skills facilitating warm
social contacts were increasing. All such effects were operating,
however, to change the calibration of the human observer, and thus
to bias his reports in a systematic way.

^ I am indebted to Professors Derning Brown and Raymond Mack for this information.

342 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

How can we learn of, and correct, such bias? The anecdote is in-
structive in this regard. This bias would not have been noted if all of
the visitors had had the same itinerary. Their actual pattern consti-
tuted a counterbalanced, observational schedule, and could have
been analyzed as a crossover design (Cochran and Cox 1950) to
determine the main effects of firstness versus secondness, of city,
and of observer. Essential in the control were multiple observers and
multiple sequences.

Today many anthropologists, as in Africa, are combining basic
ethnography with acculturation studies, and are faced with the de-
cision as to whether to study first the members of the tribe who re-
main in the bush, or the members living in the westernized city.
Combining the principles of adaptation level with other principles
of bias, particularly those involving assimilation errors or transfer
(see Campbell 1958b for a survey of such biases) some predictions
can perhaps be made: (i) If one compares anthropologist's impres-
sion of the indigenous bush culture under the two orders (bush-city
versus city-bush) , this indigenous culture would probably appear
more strange and exotic under the bush-city order. This is because,
under that order, the bush culture is perceived with a more diver-
gent adaptation level than that provided when the partially west-
ernized members of the culture have been previously studied in the
city. (2) The bush data might be better in detail and intimacy of
records for the city-bush order than for the bush-city order. This
might be expected insofar as rapport is increased by the familiarity
with the culture and the friendship bonds acquired through the
city fieldwork with the partially acculturated members of the eth-
nic group. (3) The observation of "survivals" of the indigenous
culture among the westernized urban descendents is no doubt en-
hanced by detailed knowledge of the relatively untouched bush cul-
ture. Thus, such "survivals" might be noted in greater number in
the bush-city order. These predictions cannot, of course, be made
unequivocally. But whatever the direction predicted, there are ade-
quate grounds to expect the two sequences to produce different
results, particularly on those intangible matters most relevant to the
culture-personality problem.

The source of error is great enough, and a considerable remedy is
near enough at hand, so that we are morally bound to request from
our sources of financial support the funds to implement them — par-
ticularly since all concerned should now recognize how precious to
the social sciences is our rapidly dwindling supply of novel and

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 343

independent social systems. The cheapest remedy would be to
schedule the field work so that it was broken up into several alter-
nating visits to each location, bush and urban, allowing boih con-
ditions to be recompared several times, and both to be judged against
the end-of-field-trip adaptation level. This could probably be ac-
complished with lo per cent increases in the travel budgets and 50
per cent increases in the field residence budgets — certainly not im-
possible to promote once the importance is recognized. A more
complete control would double field costs by having the field-
workers work in pairs, one starting in the bush and one in the city,
and trading locations from time to time. This approach would also
offer an important control over the "personal equations" or idio-
syncratic predilections of the observers, biases of a more permanent
and less predictable sort than those due to adaptation level. There
would seem no doubt but that this additional cost would be justified.

Adaptation Level and Usable Vocabulary
in Cross-Cultural lntervie\/ing

One of the emphases of the present paper is upon the desirability
of some studies which collect data on a limited set of topics from
many cultural units. This is advocated not as a substitute for the
intensive ethnography of single peoples, but rather as a needed addi-
tional mode of data collection, particularly for those correlational
types of analysis in which dozens of cultures are needed. In such
multiple-culture studies the field work would be particularly de-
pendent upon interviews with informants, the anthropologist him-
self not having time to observe directly all of the customs about
which he inquired. In such studies the phenomenon of adaptation
level creates for a class of descriptive words "translation" problems
over and above the troublesome fact of language differences. That
is to say, these adaptation-level problems would remain even if the
heterogeneous cultures were to "speak the same language" as the
anthropologist.

The words or concepts in question are those used to characterize
the tribe as a whole which imply degrees of departure from a usual
norm or adaptation level, this norm being itself provided by the
average behavior or experience of the tribe itself. Such words are
usable to denote individual differences within the tribe, but not to
characterize over-all attributes of the culture. Thus, for a hypo-
thetical "wholly isolated" tribe, lacking a range of other peoples
for comparison, one could not interpret for cross-cultural compari-

344 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

sons answers to questions such as: "Are your people happy, intelH-
gent, hard working, strict with children, warm, friendly, prudish,
joking, able to endure pain, and so forth?"

Anthropologists, experienced with many cultures and having a
common base in European cultures, may be able to make such ob-
servations and judgments reliably, particularly if the fluctuations
of their own adaptation levels, as described above, be compensated
for. But a completely isolated tribe would have no "lingua franca,"
no intertribal measuring stick against which to calibrate their use
of the terms. And even though informants might reliably employ
the frame of reference provided by the several adjacent tribes, given
the ubiquitous tendencies toward regional similarity, this would not
entirely eliminate the problem.

For some of these topics, modes of questioning are available which
may avoid this problem. Such questioning may make use of in-
ternal comparisons within the tribe ("Are children happier than
adults?") . More typically, the problem may be solved by reducing
the question to sample behaviors from the implied syndrome, em-
ploying terms referring to qualitatively discrete and universal be-
haviors: "Upon what occasions do women smile and laugh." "What
does a mother do when her child cries?" "What are the times during
the day when a man works — or rests?" These suggestions, however,
do more to raise the problem than to suggest a solution.

The Uninterprefabllity of Comparisons between
But Two Noturol Instances

In view of the importance of Malinowski's challenge to the love-
jealousy interpretation of the Oedipal conflict, it is unforgivable
that his observations have not been replicated. However thorough
his field work on other points, his published evidence on this point
is very thin indeed. While he alludes to evidence from manifest
dream content, of the type that Dorothy Eggan (1952) has dis-
cussed, what we need are substantial samples of detailed records of
the dreams of boys and girls and men and women.

But while there is a crying need for verifying and extending
Malinowski's evidence on Trobriand intraf amilial attitudes, such a
replication is of minor importance for testing the Freudian hy-
pothesis. We who are interested in using such data for delineating
process rather than exhaustively describing single instances must
accept this rule: No comparison of a single pair of natural objects
is interpretable. Between Trobriand and Vienna there are many

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 345

dimensions of differences which could constitute potential rival
explanations and which we have no means of ruling out. For com-
parisons of this pair, the ceteris paribus requirement becomes un-
tenable. But data collection need not stop here. Both the avunculate
and the European arrangement are so widely distributed over the
world that if testing Oedipal theories were our purpose, we could
select a dozen matched pairs of tribes from widely varying culture
areas, each pair differing with regard to which male educates and
disciplines the boy, but as similar as possible in other respects. As-
suming that collections of dreams from boys showed the expected
differences between each pair, then the more such pairs we had, the
fewer tenable rival hypotheses would be available and, thus, the
more certain would be our confirmation.

There is an analogous ceteris paribus problem with the use of a
single measuring instrument. An established difference between two
matched populations on a single questionnaire item is likewise un-
interpretable because there are so many rival hypotheses to explain
the difference — the groups may differ because of their reactions to
the first word, or to the second word, or to the grammatical features
of the wording rather than the semantic features, and so forth.
However, if there are multiple indicators which vary in their irrele-
vant attributes, and if these all agree as to the direction of the dif-
ference on the theoretically intended aspects, then the number of
tenable rival explanations becomes greatly reduced and the confir-
mation of theory more nearly certain (Campbell 1957:3 lo, Camp-
bell 1959, Campbell and Fiske 1959). Doob (1958) has recently
demonstrated the seriousness of this problem in cross-cultural stud-
ies, in an important paper which should be read by every graduate
student planning to do research on culture and personality. On this
point, it has been psychologists studying college sophomores and not
anthropologists who have been most guilty of a naive overdepend-
ence upon single instruments, and our critical literature on "re-
sponse sets" (e.g.,Cronbach 1946, 1950, Chapman and Bock 1958)
shows how misleading this can be.

The Whiting and Child Studies

From this sample of content interests and methodological biases,
it will come as no surprise to learn that I regard studies of the Whit-
ing and Child type (Horton 1943; B. B. Whiting 1950; Murdock
and Whiting 195 1; McClelland and Friedman 1952; Whiting and
Child 1953; Whiting 1954; Wright 1954; Barry 1957; Barry,

346 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Bacon and Child 1957; Freeman and Winch 1957; Rose and Wil-
loughby 1958; Whiting, Kluckhohn and Albert 1958; Spiro and
D'Andrade 1958; Lambert, Triandis and Wolf 1959; Barry, Child
and Bacon 1959; Whiting 1959) as very important steps toward a
science of personality and culture, as well as one of the major events
in the social sciences of the past twenty years. It can be seen why,
from this perspective, the earlier studies of individual cultures such
as Trobriand, Dobu, Kwakiutl, Kwoma, If aluk, and Brobdingnag,
can be regarded more as sources of hypotheses than as confirming
evidence for the purposes of a science of culture and personality.

This is stated so strongly because it is felt that until very recently
anthropology has in general both rejected and neglected these stud-
ies, and that the reasons for this rejection might well be discussed.
These reasons have been given little attention in the anthropological
journals. The neglect has been so great that it is difficult to docu-
ment the rejection. The few published references in anthropological
publications are in general favorable (Gladwin 1954, Kluckhohn
1954, Honigmann 1952, Spiro 1958) . The neglect is perhaps indi-
cated by the fact that until Spiro 's (1958) study appeared, none of
the dozen or so prior studies had been presented in an anthropologi-
cal journal. Thus, for the details of the rejection, the writer will
have to depend for the most part upon informal sampling of the
opinions of anthropology graduate students and faculty members
at some seven universities, relying primarily on their reports as to
how "anthropologists in general" felt. These are the objections heard
most frequently (Gladwin 1954 and Spiro 1958 mention several
of them):

1. This is not anthropology. This objection can be, of course, an entirely legiti-
mate expression of differences in goals. It may reflect upon the fact that problems
of psychological theory rather than anthropological theory are under test. It can
express a commitment to anthropology's task, comparable to that of the historian,
of documenting in detail the full complexity of single instances. But this objec-
tion is usually a concomitant of other objections which reject the studies for the
abstracting-generalizing purpose also.

2. Taking fragments of a culttire and attempting to interpret them apart from
the tvhole cultural complex is impossible or illegitimate. Spiro (1958) has cited
this widespread objection, and has correctly called it an empirical question to be
answered by the final outcomes of trying the approach. Such criticisms may be
right. It may be that none of the findings will stand up under cross-validation,
that no correlational laws relating aspects of cultural phenomena can be estab-
lished. Such laws cannot be ruled out on a priori grounds, however.

From the standpoint of an empirical science of induction (Campbell 1959),
it must be expected that there may be many problem areas in which a science

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 347

cannot be established. In the terminology of the analysis-of-variance statistics
of experimentation, if in a given area one always finds significant highest-order
interactions, and never finds significant main effects or lower order interactions,
then a science probably never can be developed. The healthy infancy of the suc-
cessful sciences seems to have been predicated upon the stimulating nourishment
of crude but effective ceteris paribus laws. For example, the force fields of atomic
nuclei extend in infinite distance in all directions. However, they decay so rapidly
as a function of distance that they can be disregarded in the statement of many
crude laws, such as those embodied in Archimedes' mechanics. Were this not so,
were Archimedes to have had to Umit himself to statements about each particular
instance, then physics never could have developed. The critics of the generalizing
social scientists are right in cautioning against claiming effective ceteris paribus
laws when one hasn't got them, but pointing to the obvious idiosyncracy of every
person, tribe, or swinging cathedral chandelier provides no a priori basis for re-
jecting the enterprise.

3. The data in the Hziman Relations Area Files and in the research monographs
available are inadequate to the purpose. While it is obvious to every one, "Whiting
and Child first of all, that better data would be desirable, the incompleteness and
the inaccuracy of the files cannot explain away the striking correlations obtained.
Error of this sort loivers correlations, rather than raises them. Significant high
correlations can be explained away as due to the incompetence of the ethnography
only if a systematic source of error be found to be confounded with the classifica-
tions used — if, for example, all of the indulgent cultures turned out to have been
described by French anthropologists and all of the high socialization anxiety cul-
tures by German ethnologists. Such systematic sources of error have not been
suggested and are extremely unlikely.

4. A specific tribe has been misclassified, or there is another tribe which they
don't report upon which doesn't fit. The abstractive-generalizing social scientist
knows that in dealing with natural groups ceteris are not in fact paribus, and he
therefore expects exceptions which represent the operation of many other laws
which he as yet knows nothing of. Such exceptions are repeatedly found in the law-
confirming scatter diagrams of biology and psychology. If the over-all significant
relationship still persists when the specific errors are corrected and the new cases
plotted, the exceptions are not invalidating.

5. The process of coding qtialitative data into numerical categories offers op-
portunities for a subjective bias tchich generates the correlations. This criticism
is certainly occasionally valid, and may explain away the results of one striking
relationship (McClelland and Friedman 1952, as restudied by Child et al. 1958).
The basic Whiting and Child studies have been, however, scrupulously careful
about this. They may have more trouble on this score in their new studies with
their specially trained fieldworkers who can hardly remain in ignorance of the
hypotheses under test.

6. Many correlation possibilities have been inspected and only those that are
high reported; thus, high valties may be due to chance even if apparently sta-
tistically significant. This criticism is in some degree appropriate to most ex-
ploratory studies that admit of reformulating hypotheses in the course of the
investigation. It can be answered only by testing the relationships on new sam-
ples, and this, of course, should be done. (The social sciences differ from the

348 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

physical sciences in lacking the voluminous replication research that validates
and revalidates every important new discovery. )

7. Since cultures are not independent, the usual tests of significance are not
appropriate. I am not competent to enter into the abstruse statistical considera-
tions that are involved here, but do want to point out some more common sense
considerations. The criticism applies equally to samplings of persons and their
response dispositions, where we normally use tests of significance without qualms.
Cluster-sampling techniques (e.g., Kish 1956) are appropriate for computing a
more accurate and larger error term. The criticism would be particularly damning
if it turned out that regional areas were confounded with theoretical classifica-
tions: if, for example, most of the indulgent cultures came from the South Seas
and most of the high socialization-anxiety cultures from Africa. This has not
been the case, however. Furthermore, when Whiting and Child (1953:168)
analyze their data so as to show that a given relationship holds within each of five
major culture areas, the use of a number of tribes from each of several culture
areas becomes a strength rather than a weakness, and if analyzed in terms of the
logic of analysis of variance, would result in a smaller error term rather than a
larger one.

SUMMARY

In the first part of this paper, the role of anthropological data in
editing among the competing theories of psychology has been em-
phasized. Such research can never be central among the anthro-
pologist's tasks, but can be invaluable in the consolidation of
psychological theory. Anthropology is in this fashion of great meth-
odological importance to psychology.

In the second part of the paper, the roles are reversed. Since an-
thropology depends upon enculturated human beings as its measur-
ing instruments, the psychology of bias in human judgment becomes
relevant to choices among methodological alternatives open to an-
thropologists. Several such points are discussed, as are methodologi-
cal strengths and weaknesses of the statistical cross-cultural studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakan, David

1958 Sigmund Freud and the Jewish mystical tradition. Princeton, Van
Nostrand.
Barry, Herbert

1957 Relationships between child training and the pictorial arts. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 54:380-383.
Barry, Herbert, Margaret K. Bacon and Irvin L. Child

1957 A cross-cultural survey of some sex differences in socialization. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 55:3 27—3 3 2 .

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 349

Barry, Herbert, Irvin L. Child and Margaret K. Bacon

1959 Relation of child training to subsistence economy. American Anthro-
pologist 61:51-63.
Bennett, John W.

1946 The interpretation of pueblo culture. Southwestern Journal of Anthro-
pology 2:361-374.

Campbell, Donald T.

1955 The informant in quantitative research. American Journal of Sociology
60:339-342.

1957 Factors relevant to the vaHdity of experiments in social settings. Psycho-
logical Bulletin 54:297-312.

1958a Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of
persons as social entities. Behavioral Science 3:14-25.

1958b Systematic error on the part of human Hnks in communication systems.
Information and Control 1:334-369.

1959 Methodological suggestions from a comparative psychology of knowl-
edge processes. Inquiry (Univ. Oslo Press) 2:152-182.

1 96 1 Social attitudes and other acquired behavioral dispositions. In Psy-
chology: a study of a science. Vol. 6. Investigations of man as socius:
their place in psychology and the social sciences. Sigmund Koch ed. New
York, McGraw Hill (in press; dupHcated draft 1957).
Campbell, Donald T. and Donald W. Fiske

1959 Convergent and discriminant vaHdation by the multitrait-multimethod
matrix. Psychological Bulletin 56:81-105.
Campbell, Donald T., William A. Hunt and Nan A. Lewis

1957 The effects of assimilation and contrast in judgments of cHnical ma-
terials. American Journal of Psychology 70:347-360.

1958 The relative susceptibiHty of two rating scales to disturbances resulting
from shifts in stimulus context. Journal of Applied Psychology 42:
213-217.

Chapman, Loren J. and R. Darrell Bock

1958 Components of variance due to acquiescence and content in the F scale
measure of authoritarianism. Psychological Bulletin 55:328-333.
Child, Irvin L.

1954 SociaUzation. In Handbook of social psychology, Gardner Lindzey, ed.
Cambridge, Mass., Addison-Wesley.
Child, Irvin L., Thomas Storm and Joseph Veroff

1958 Achievement themes in folk tales related to sociahzation practice. In
Motives in fantasy, action, and society. John W. Atkinson, ed. New
York, Van Nostrand.
Cochran, William G. and Gertrude M. Cox

1950 Experimental designs. New York, Wiley.
Cronbach, Lee J.

1946 Response sets and test vaHdity. Educational and Psychological Measure-
ment 6:475—494.

1950 Further evidence on response sets and test design. Educational and
Psychological Measurement 10:3-31.

350 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

DooB, Leonard W.

1957 An introduction to the psychology of acculturation. Journal of Social
Psychology 45 : 143-1 60.

1958 The use of different test items in nonUterate societies. Public Opinion
Quarterly 21:499-504.

Eggan, Dorothy

1952 The manifest content of dreams: a challenge to social science. Ameri-
can Anthropologist 54:469-485.
Freeman, Linton C. and Robert F. "Winch

1957 Societal complexity: an empirical test of a typology of societies. Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology 62:461-466.
Gladwin, Thomas

1954 Review of "Whiting and Child, Child training and personality. American
Anthropologist 56:893-897.
GiLLEN, John

1954 Methods of approach to the study of human behavior. In Aspects of
culture and personality, Francis L. K. Hsu, ed. New York, Abelard-
Schuman.
Heider, Fritz

1944 Social perception and phenomenal causality. Psychological Review 51:

358-374-
Helson, Harry

1947 Adaptation-level as frame of reference for prediction of psycho-
physical data. American Journal of Psychology 60:1—29.
Henry, Jules and Zunia

1944 Doll play of Pilage Indian children. Research Monographs No. 4, Ameri-
can Orthopsychiatric Association.
Herskovits, Melville J.

i960 Humanism in anthropological science. Yl International Congress of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Paris, August 4, i960.
Herskovits, Melville J. and Frances S.

1958a Sibling rivalry, the Oedipus complex, and myth. Journal of American

Folklore 71:1-15.
1958b Dahomean narrative: a cross-cultural analysis. Evanston, 111., North-
western University Press.
Holmes, Lowell Don

1957 The restudy of Manu'an culture: a problem in methodology. Unpub-
lished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.

1958 Ta'u: Stability and change in a Samoan village, "Wellington, New Zea-
land, Polynesian Society, Reprint No. 7.

Honigmann, John J.

1952 The testing of hypotheses in anthropology. American Anthropologist

54:429-432.
1954 Culture and personality. New York, Harper.

HoRTON, Donald

1943 The functions of alcohol in primitive societies: a cross-cultural study.
Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 4: 199-320.

MUTUAL METHODOLOGICAL RELEVANCE 351

Hsu, Francis L. K.

1940 The English wife. Chapter VI, Mother and children, Section 5, A non-
Freudian explanation. Unpublished manuscript.
1954 Aspects of culture and personality. New York, Abelard-Schuman.
Keller, Albert Galloway

193 I Societal evolution (rev. ed.), New Haven, Yale University Press.
Kish, Leslie

1956 Confidence intervals for clustered samples. American Sociological Re-
view 22:154-165.
Kluckhohn, Clyde

1954a Culture and behavior. In Handbook of social psychology, Gardner

Lindzey, ed. Cambridge, Mass. Addison-Wesley.
1954b Southwestern studies of culture and personaHty. American Anthro-
pologist 56:685-697.

Lambert, "William "W., Leigh Minturn Triandis and Margery Wolf
1959 Some correlates of beliefs in the malevolence and benevolence of super-
natural beings: a cross-cultural study. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology 58:162-169.
Lasswell, Harold D.

193 I A hypothesis rooted in the preconceptions of a single civilization tested
by Bronislaw Malinowski. In Methods in social science, Stuart A. Rice,
ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Levy, David M.

1935 Sibling rivalry studies in children of primitive groups. American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry 9:205—214.
Lewis, Oscar

195 1 Life in a Mexican village: Tepoztlan restudied. Urbana, University
of Illinois Press.

Li An-Che

1937 Zuni: some observations and queries. American Anthropologist 39:
62-76.
Malinowski, Bronislaw

1927 Sex and repression in savage society. London, Humanities Press.
McClelland, David C. and G. A. Friedman

1952 A cross-cultural study of the relationship between child-training prac-
tices and achievement motivation appearing in folk tales. In Readings
in social psychology, Guy E, Swanson, Theodore M. Newcomb, and
Eugene L. Hartley, eds. New York, Holt.

Mead, Margaret and F. M. C. MacGregor

195 1 Growth and culture: a photographic study of Balinese childhood. New
York, Putnam.

MiCHOTTE, A. E.

1946 La perception de la causalite. Louvain, Institute superior de Philosophic,
Etudes Psychologiques vol. 6.

MuRDOcK, George Peter, and John "W. M. Whiting

195 1 Cultural determination of parental attitudes: the relationship between

3 52 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the social structure, particularly family structure, and parental be-
havior. In Problems of infancy and childhood. Transactions of the
Fourth Conference March 6—y, 1950, Milton J. E. Senn, ed. New York,
Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 195 1.
Murray, Henry A.

1949 Research planning: a few proposals. In Culture and Personality, S.
Stansfeld Sargent and Marian W. Smith, eds. New York, Viking Fund,
1949.

Paul, Benjamin D.

1950 Symbolic sibling rivalry in a Guatemalan Indian village. American
Anthropologist 52:205—217.

Pettitt, George A.

1946 Primitive education in North America. Berkeley, University of Cali-
fornia Press, University of California Publications in American Archae-
ology and Ethnology Vol. 43, No. i.
Rose, Edward and Gary Willoughby

1958 Culture profiles and emphases. American Journal of Sociology 63:
476-490.
Sargent, S. Stansfeld and Marian W. Smith

1949 Culture and Personality. New York, Viking Fund.
Spiro, Melford E.

1953 Ghosts: an anthropological inquiry into learning and perception. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 48:376—382.

Spiro, Melford D. and Roy G. D'Andrade

1958 A cross-cultural study of some supernatural beliefs. American Anthro-
pologist 60:456—466.

Wellisch, E.

1954 Isaac and Oedipus: a study in Biblical psychology of the sacrifice of
Isaac, the Akedah. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Whiting, Beatrice B.

1950 A cross-cultural study of sorcery and social control. In Paiute Sorcery.
New York, Viking Fund (Publications in Anthropology No. 15).

Whiting, John W. M.

1954 The cross-cultural method. In Handbook of social psychology, Gardner
Lindzey, ed. Cambridge. Mass., Addison-Wesley.

1959 Sorcery, sin and the superego: a cross-cultural study of some mecha-
nisms of social control. In Nebraska symposium on motivation: 1959,
Marshall R. Jones, ed., pp 174-195. Lincoln, University of Nebraska
Press, 1959.

Whiting, John W. M. and Irvin L. Child

1953 Child training and personality. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Whiting, John W. M., Richard Kluckhohn and Albert Anthony

1958 The function of male initiation ceremonies at puberty. In Readings in
social psychology, 3d ed,, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Theodore M. Newcomb,
and Eugene L. Hartley, eds. New York, Holt.
Wright, George O.

1954 Projection and displacement: a cross-cultural study of folk-tale ag-
gression. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:523-529.

INTRODUCTION TO PART III
SOCIALIZATION. CULTURE, AND
FEEDBACK

If psychological characteristics of the individual, whether iden-
tified with his total personality or with the socially functioning part
of it, are dependent upon the culturally conditioned child-rearing
practices or socialization processes, what are the factors which de-
termine or at least shape the patterns of culture, which in turn
condition the child-rearing practices or socialization processes? If
human societies are as stable and unchanging as those of ants and
bees, the latter type of question, though not wholly irrelevant,
would not have been important. But human societies are highly
dynamic entities with extreme variability in their rates of change,
just as human individuals in any society are quite capable of, and
often given to, deviation.

Jules Henry, a well-known psychological anthropologist, puts it
this way: "As I see it, the crucial difference between insect societies
and human ones is that whereas the former are organized to achieve
homeostasis, the organization of the latter seems always to guarantee
and specifically provide for instability" ("Homeostasis, Society
and Evolution: A Critique." Scientific Monthly, LXXXI, 1955:
308). While this may be an overstatement, the plain fact is that
all human societies do undergo change, rapidly or slowly.

The question of individual deviation was discussed by Kaplan in
Chapter 8; the question of social and cultural change was briefly
touched upon by Hsu in Chapter 7. The best accepted view at pres-
ent is that the individual and society-culture relationship is a two-
way traffic in spiral progression. The individual's psychological
characteristics are results of his socialization processes, but his psy-
chological characteristics are, in turn, at the root of the patterns of
culture, in change or in stability, which govern the socialization
processes.

The three chapters in this section of the book have some impor-

353

354 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

tant differences which the reader will do well to keep in mind. The
first difference concerns approach. Whiting's approach and that of
Aberle are more rigorous in methodology, with emphasis on ascer-
taining cross-culturally the interrelationship between a few specific
variables (such as "exclusive mother-infant sleeping arrangement"
and "cross sex identity," or "economic organization" and "ethics") .
Hsu's approach, while likewise attempting cross-cultural generali-
zation, is still at a more qualitative or speculative stage. The gen-
eralization attempted is perhaps for this reason more "ambitious,"
in that it hypothesizes the existence of a single socio-psychological
axis that generates or integrates a wide range of more specific cul-
tural features. While the Whiting and Aberle chapters in this sec-
tion, as well as the other chapters of the entire book, are primarily
critical appraisals of works already carried out or well under way,
Hsu's chapter is launched more or less as a trial balloon, an explora-
tion of a hypothesis which will stand or fall depending upon in-
tensive research yet to come.

chapter 12

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND
PERSONALITY

JOHN W. M. WHITING
Harvard University

The use of the comparative or cross-cultural method in studies of
culture and personality has served two quite different purposes.
Psychologists have tended to view this method as one by which cer-
tain assumptions about personality development may be tested.
Anthropologists, on the other hand, are more likely to view such
studies as a test of hypotheses concerning the way in which elements
of culture can be integrated by underlying psychological processes.
It is to the latter aim that this chapter will be devoted.

Most of the early studies concerned with culture and personality
were intensive case studies of a single society such as Mead's Coining
of Age in Samoa (1928) or comparisons of a series of case studies
such as Ruth Benedict's Vat terns of Culture (1934), Margaret
Mead's Sex and Temperament (1935) , Linton and Kardiner's The
Individual and His Society (1939) and The Psychological Fron-
tiers of Society (1945). This review, however, will not consider
such case studies, but will be restricted to cross-cultural studies
which have used a large sample of societies presumed to be in some
way representative of the cultures of the world.

The studies under review can be classified essentially into two
types: those which have made some assumptions about the psycho-
logical effect of certain child-rearing practices on personality as re-
flected in some other aspect of culture such as magic, art, or religion;
and those which have concerned themselves with the effect of fea-
tures of the basic economy or social structure on child-rearing prac-
tices. Fortunately, in many instances studies in these two categories
may be linked by virtue of the fact that they share the same scores

355

3 56 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

on child-rearing practices. In the first type of study these Unking
child-rearing scores have the theoretical status of independent or
antecedent variables; that is, they have been assumed to be deter-
minants of personality which is assumed to be a mediating psycho-
logical process reflected in magic and religion. In the second type
of study, child-rearing scores have the theoretical status of de-
pendent or consequent variables; that is, they have been assumed to
be determined by economic and social structural aspects of the cul-
ture.

The conjunction of these two kinds of studies described above
permits the testing of the general hypothesis suggested by Whiting
and Child (1953:310) concerning the way in which personality or
psychological process may serve to integrate culture. This hypothe-
sis was summarized by the following diagram:

Maintenance Child Training Personality Projective

Systems Practices Variables Systems

Maintenance systems were defined as ''the economic, political,
and social organizations of a society — the basic customs surrounding
the nourishment, sheltering, and protection of its members." Per-
sonality was defined as "a set of hypothetical intervening variables."
Projective systems include customs which are for the most part
magical and unrealistic. The term "projective system" suggested
by Kardiner (1945) is perhaps unfortunate since it suggests that
the psychological process of projection is necessarily involved. Since
"acting out," "distortion," "ritualization," "displacement," "fixa-
tion," or any other psychological process relating to personality
is implied, a term such as "systems of psychological defense" or of
"psychological security" might have been more appropriate. The
cultural systems which reflect such processes most directly are those
of magic, religion, art or any other feature that is not immediately
and practically involved in the satisfaction of basic biological needs.
In sum, the hypothesis implies that personality is an intervening
hypothetical variable determined by child rearing which is in turn
determined by maintenance systems and which finally is reflected
in projective systems.

This paper, then, will review the evidence for and against this
general hypothesis. The evidence will be drawn from cross-cultural
studies of the two types specified above. This review could be or-
ganized by maintenance systems, child-rearing variables, interven-
ing psychological processes, or projective variables. I have rather

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 357

arbitrarily chosen to organize it by child-rearing practices which
have been ordered in terms of the life line from early infancy to
later childhood. I will begin, therefore, with those studies related
to the treatment of infants.

Parental Image and the Nature of the Gods

For a long time psychologists, particularly those of Freudian per-
suasion, have assumed that the nature of the gods and their relation
to man is a reflection of the parental image and, hence, could be
predicted from the relation between parent and child during in-
fancy and early childhood. Several cross-cultural studies have re-
cently attempted to put this hypothesis to the test (Spiro and
D'Andrade 1958; Lambert, Triandis, and Wolf 1959; and Whiting
1959a) . Each of these studies tends to support the general hypothe-
sis that harsh parental treatment during infancy leads to the cul-
tural belief that the spirit world is harsh and aggressive.

Spiro and D'Andrade (1958), using the Whiting and Child
(1953) "initial satisfaction of dependence" as a score ^ for esti-
mating the degree to which infants are indulged, found that socie-
ties that were judged to be relatively high on the above score tended
to believe that the behavior of the gods was contingent upon the
behavior of humans and that gods could be controlled by the per-
formance of compulsive rituals.^ Such societies did nof propitiate
the gods. The authors argue that the adults' treatment of the gods
is, therefore, a reflection of an infant's relation to his parents. In
other words, infants who are treated indulgently by their parents,
that is, whose parents respond to them when they cry or show dis-
comfort, when they grow up feel they can be equally successful in
controlling the supernaturals.

Lambert, Triandis, and Wolf (1959) used a score taken from
Barry, Bacon, and Child (1957) for estimating the relation be-
tween an infant and his caretakers, consisting of a judgment of the
degree to which they treated him harshly or painfully. They found
that societies in which infants were treated relatively painfully be-
lieved in gods which were judged to be more aggressive than benevo-
lent toward human beings. Again the gods seem to reflect the par-
ental treatment of infants.

This score includes such items as the encouragement of the infant's dependence, his freedom
to be dependent, and the duration of this freedom. For a more complete description of this
score see Whiting and Child (1953), pp. 50, 91.

^ Unless specified the 5 per cent level of confidence or better has been used as a criterion to
report a relationship. To simplify presentation p values will not ordinarily be reported.

358 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Finally, Whiting (1959a) , using still a different score for infant
indulgence, reports a finding consistent with this hypothesis. The
score in this study was also from Barry, Bacon, and Child (1957)
and was an over-all judgment of the degree to which an infant was
indulged by his caretakers.^ It was reported that societies high in
the over- all indulgence of infants tended not to fear ghosts at
funerals. The assumption here is that funereal ghosts are, like the
gods in the previous studies, a projection of the parental image.

In order to test the general hypothesis of personality as a medi-
ator, the next problem is to discover whether or not there is any
relationship between maintenance systems of a culture and the de-
gree to which infants are indulged. It was suggested by Murdock
and Whiting (1951) that the economic and ceremonial duties of
the mother might have some bearing on the amount of time she
could spend in caring for her child, and tentative results based on
a small number of cases tended to confirm this hypothesis. They
report (pp. 33—35) that societies in which mothers have few eco-
nomic responsibilities and are little involved in the ceremonial life
of the tribe tend to be more indulgent with their infants than in
societies where mothers have such responsibilities. These results
were based on a very small sample of societies and were not statis-
tically significant and, therefore, must be judged as highly tenta-
tive. They also reported that there was a tendency for large extended
families where there were many hands to care for the infant, to treat
him more indulgently. Again this relationship was not strong and
reached only the 10 per cent level of statistical significance. Mur-
dock (1957), however, has recently published judgments on the
family and household structure for a large number of societies.
This, taken together with the ratings by Barry, Bacon, and Child
(1957) on the degree of over-all indulgence described above, en-
ables us to make a more adequate test of this hypothesis than was
possible in 195 1. Since household membership rather than family
structure should be most relevant to our hypothesis, this has been
used as our independent variable. The results of the test are pre-
sented in Table i .

It will be seen from this table that the degree of infant indul-
gence is roughly proportional to the number of adults living in the
household. Extended and polygynous families where there are more

^This score took account of the following items: display of affection, degree of drive reduction,
immediacy of drive reduction, constancy of the presence of caretakers, and the absence of pain
induced by caretakers.

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY

359

Households

Over-all

Infant

Indulgence

Extended

Polygynous

Nuclear

Mother-Child

Araucanians

(lO

Cuna

(I^)

Hopi

(13)

Jivaro

(II)

Aranda

(II)

Lepcha

(12)

Arapesh

(13)

Maori

(II)

Cheyenne

(II)

High

Nauru
Ontong Java

(II)

(12)

Chiricahua
Comanche

(12)

(II)

Papago

(14)

Crow

(II)

Chamorro

(12)

Samoans

(12)

Kwoma

(II)

Chenchu

(II)

Lesu (11)

Tupinamba

(12)

Omaha

(12)

Kaska

(12)

Kurtachi (12)

Winnebago

(12)

Teton

(12)

Manus

(12)

Bena (13)

Zuni

(12)

Wogeo

(13)

Tikopia

(12)

Chukchee (11)

Klamath

(10)

Ojibwa

(10)

Alcrese

(4)

Ainu ( 5 )

Tenetehara

(lo)

Paiute

(lo)

Aymara
Balinese
Ifugao
Lamba

(6)

(9)

(8)

(10)

Ashanti (10)
Azande (10)
Chagga (7)
Dahomeans (7)

Low

Navaho

(10)

Ganda (9)

Pukapukans (9)

Masai (10)

Mbundu (9)

Tanala (9)

Thonga (7)

Venda (9)

W.Apache (10)

Table i. The relation between household structure and the over-all indulgence of infants.
The numbers following the names of the societies indicates the Barry, Bacon, and Child (1957)
score on over-all infant indulgence. Extended households include lineal and stem as well as large
extended categories of Murdock. The two communal households in the sample — Siriono (10) and
Yagua (11) — are omitted from the table.

than two adults living in the household tend to be predominantly
indulgent with their infants. Nuclear households with two adults
are unpredictable. Finally, in the mother-child household where one
woman alone has to care for her children the probability of high in-
dulgence is slight. The percentage of societies with high infant in-
dulgence is as follows: extended, 87 per cent; polygynous, 83 per
cent; nuclear, 42 per cent; and mother-child, 25 per cent. The
probability that both extended and polygynous households will be
high on infant indulgence is statistically significant at better than
the 5 per cent level of confidence. Societies with nuclear house-
holds are unpredictable in this respect. Although only 25 per cent
of societies with mother-child households are indulgent, this rela-
tionship does not quite reach an acceptable level of confidence.

360 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Before we can accept the thesis that infant indulgence creates a
parental image which is reflected in the gods and thus forms a link
between household structure and religious beliefs, we must meet
the argument that household structure and the nature of the gods
are related to one another for some other reason and that they
jointly affect the treatment of children. If this latter hypothesis
were true, the gods could be predicted from a knowledge of the
household structure when the child-rearing factors were held con-
stant. This is not, in fact, the case. Thus, for example, the Tenete-
hara who, although they have an extended household, are excep-
tional in being rated low in the indulgence of infants, have
aggressive gods, a fact which would have been predicted from their
child rearing rather than from their household arrangements. Con-
versely, the Chukchee who, although they have mother-child
households, are high in the indulgence of their children — an excep-
tion to the rule that mother-child households are low in infant in-
dulgence— have benevolent gods.

Thus, child rearing rather than household structure seems to be
the determinant of the nature of the gods. Statistically, household
structure can be shown to be unrelated to the gods if infant indul-
gence is not taken into account.^ Thus, although 87 per cent of ex-
tended family households are high on infant indulgence and 80 per
cent of the societies with high indulgence are below average on the
fear of ghosts at funerals, only 6y per cent of the extended families
in the samprle are below average on fear of ghosts. The relation be-
tween household and indulgence and that between indulgence and
ghost fear are statistically significant at better than the i per cent
level of confidence. Thus, it seems that the nature of the gods can-
not be predicted from a knowledge of household structure alone.
Child rearing with its influence on personality seems to be prerequi-
site.

Exclusive Sleeping Arrangements and Cross Sex Identify

The over- all indulgence of infants discussed above is concerned
with how a child is treated during the day. The relation of a child
to his parents at night has also been shown (Whiting et al. 1958)
to be an important child-rearing variable. In most societies over
the world infants sleep in the same bed or on the same sleeping mat

^This methed of analysis is similar to that suggested by Blalock (i960). Confidence limits
(Hald 1952) rather than correlation coefficients have been used to establish the relative degree
relationship between the three variables.

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 361

with their mothers. Even where an infant has a cradle or cot of his
own, this is generally placed next to the mother's bed within easy
reach. The sleeping distance between a mother with a nursing in-
fant and her husband, however, is more varied. In slightly over
half of the societies of the world the husband sleeps either in a bed
in the same room but at some distance from his wife, or in another
room. This may be called an "exclusive mother-infant sleeping ar-
rangement."

Whiting and co-workers (1958) showed that exclusive mother-
infant sleeping arrangements are strongly associated with male initi-
ation rites at puberty. They offered three different interpretations
of this association. They assumed that such sleeping arrangements
( I ) increased the Oedipal rivalry between son and father and that
initiation rites served to prevent open and violent revolt against
parental authority at a time when physical maturity would make
such revolt dangerous and socially disruptive, (2) lead to exces-
sively strong dependence upon the mother which initiation rites
serve to break, and (3) produced strong identification with the
mother which the rites serve to counteract.

Although the first interpretation was favored by these authors,
later research (Whiting 1960a; Burton and Whiting i960;
Stephens, ms.) has favored either the third or a modification of the
second, the incest hypothesis to be discussed below. The first inter-
pretation has been rejected for a number of reasons. The assump-
tion made by Whiting and his associates (1958) that exclusive
mother-infant sleeping arrangements exacerbate rivalry between
father and son is not supported if one looks more closely at the
facts. In the first place, since such sleeping arrangements usually
occur in polygynous societies, the father has sexual access to his
other wife and, hence, should not be particularly frustrated by the
infant or see him as a rival. In the second place, at the time of wean-
ing when the exclusive sleeping arrangements terminate, the father
usually does not move in to sleep with the mother, since in more
than half such societies a man never sleeps with his wife and in most
of the remaining societies he sleeps with each wife in turn and,
thus, sleeps with any one wife at most but half the time.

Campbell has in this volume suggested another version of the
rivalry hypothesis, namely, that a younger sibling may be seen as
the person responsible for the infant's fall from grace at the time
of weaning. Although this hypothesis has considerable plausibility,
the fact that in societies with exclusive mother-infant sleeping

362 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

arrangements the mother is under a sex taboo during the nursing
period should mean that the younger sibhng would ordinarily not
appear until at least nine months after the previous child's dis-
placement. The mother, herself, therefore, seems to be the best
candidate as the person who is perceived by the child as the one
responsible for the termination of his exclusive relationship with
her. It is she who at the same time both weans him and refuses to let
him sleep with her.

In a recent theoretical paper Whiting (1960b) has formulated a
series of hypotheses concerning identification as it relates to the con-
trol and mediation of resources. One hypothesis in this formulation
has bearing upon the analysis in the preceding paragraph. This, the
so-called "status-envy hypothesis," is stated by Whiting (1960b:
18) as follows: "If a child perceives that another has more efficient
control over resources than he has; if, for example, he sees another
person enjoying resources of high value to him when he is deprived
of them, he will envy such a person and attempt to emulate him."

If the status-envy hypothesis be applied to sleeping arrange-
ments, the father should be seen to occupy an envied position if he
sleeps with the mother, particularly if the infant is in a cradle.
Contrariwise with the exclusive mother-infant arrangements, when
the mother withdraws this exclusive privilege at the time of wean-
ing, she should be seen as the most envied person. This should lead a
boy to see his mother's status, and that of women in general, as
being all important and powerful, and, hence, lead to cross sex
identification.

A preliminary test of this hypothesis was presented by Whiting
(1960a) and has been summarized by Burton and Whiting (i960).
A more detailed report is in preparation and will be published un-
der the joint authorship of Whiting, Fischer, D'Andrade, and
Munroe. In this study the following evidence is presented in sup-
port of the status-envy hypothesis.

First, members of the societies in which male initiation rites oc-
cur often define these rites as death and rebirth — the death of a
person in a "woman-child" status and rebirth into the status of an
"adult male." This suggests that an initial cross sex identification in
boys is recognized.

Second, exclusive mother-infant sleeping arrangements are as-
sociated with the couvade as well as male initiation rites. The
couvade can be interpreted as a cultural device which permits the
acting out of the female role. Since initiation rites and couvade

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 36 3

rarely occur in the same society, some reason must account for the
choice between counteracting and permitting the expression of
cross sex identity. Residence patterns serve this purpose. Societies
with exclusive mother-infant sleeping arrangements and patrilocal
residence tend to have initiation rites, whereas those with exclusive
sleeping and matrilocal residence generally have the couvade. It has
not been settled as to whether residence operates as another factor
relating to status envy and identification or whether it requires a
differential role for adult males.

Third, totemism was also shown to be associated with exclusive
mother-infant sleeping arrangements. This fact leads to the inter-
pretation that totemism serves to establish a male's relationship to
his male progenitors where his early life creates some doubt about it.

Finally, in a recent study Bacon, Child, and Barry (ms.) showed
that the rate of personal crime (assault, murder, rape, suicide,
sorcery, and the making of false accusation) is highest in societies
with exclusive mother-infant sleeping arrangements. They in-
terpreted this as an attempt, in part at least, to express masculinity
in societies where there is a need to deny an underlying feminine
identity.

As has already been suggested, polygyny is the maintenance sys-
tem variable most strongly associated with exclusive sleeping ar-
rangements. In nearly 80 per cent of societies with strict monogamy
the mother and father sleep in the same or adjacent beds, whereas
this is only true of 3 per cent of those households where a husband
has more than one wife. Whether polygyny has an influence upon
the various projective consequences of exclusive mother-infant
sleeping arrangements is now under investigation and cannot be
reported upon here. Residence, however, as was reported above does,
in interaction with sleeping arrangements, have a direct association
with both male initiation rites and the couvade.

Infant Seduction and Mother-Son Incest

Whiting and his co-workers (1958) found that another child-
rearing practice relating to infancy was strongly associated with
male initiation rites at puberty. This practice consists of a prolonged
postpartum sex taboo lasting for at least a year. This practice is
often associated with the belief that sexual intercourse will sour or
alter the mother's milk in a manner that would be dangerous to a
nursing infant. The taboo is generally coterminous with the nurs-
ing period which often lasts in these societies for nearly three years.

364 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Whiting's group (1958) interpreted this factor as having much the
same effect as that of an exclusive mother-infant sleeping arrange-
ment. Stephens (ms.), however, assumed that a mother, deprived
of her normal sex life during such a prolonged period, will gain some
indirect sexual satisfaction from her infant, particularly during the
act of nursing. If this interpretation is correct, a strong incestuous
bond between mother and son should be established in societies with
a prolonged postpartum sex taboo.

Stephens (ms.) argued that since the expression of mother-son
incest is not permitted in adult life in any society, this early tend-
ency must be strongly opposed and that strong sex conflict and
anxiety should be induced. As a projective index of such conflict,
he chose the degree to which menstrual taboos were elaborated in a
society. He established a scale which indicated the degree to which
women were isolated from men while they were menstruating and
argued that this measured castration anxiety in the males. He then
showed that societies with a prolonged postpartum sex taboo tended
to have elaborate menstrual taboos as measured by this scale. The
fact that the Whiting and Child ( 1953 ) measure of the severity of
sex training in later childhood was also related to Stephen's men-
struation scale lends support to the interpretation that it is an in-
dicator of sex anxiety.

These results suggest that male initiation rites serve to oppose
mother-son incest as well as to counteract cross sex identification.
The fact that severe menstrual taboos were not found by Stephens
to be independently related to male initiation rites is puzzling, how-
ever.

Stephens and D'Andrade (Stephens, ms.) report still another
consequence of a prolonged postpartum sex taboo. They showed
that societies with this practice tend to have formal avoidance pat-
terns between a woman and her daughter's husband, between a man
and his son's wife, and between a brother and a sister. They argue
that these avoidances result from sexual conflict produced by the
seductive and incestuous relationship between mother and infant
consequent upon the prolonged postpartum sex taboo.

Polygyny is again the aspect of the maintenance system which is
highly predictive of a prolonged postpartum sex taboo. Stephens
(ms.) , however, found that polygyny alone is not significantly re-
lated to the degree of elaboration of menstrual taboos. Thus, a pat-
tern similar to that reported for the nature of the gods emerges,
where a maintenance system variable is related to a projective sys-

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 365

tern variable by common linkage with a personality variable implied
by a child-rearing practice.

The Age of Sodolizotlon— Guilt

Proceeding along the life line of the child, the next item that has
been used in cross-cultural research concerns variations in the age
at which societies begin the serious training of their children. This
has in general been shown to affect the projective systems which
reflect guilt. Whiting and Child (1953), taking as a measure of
guilt the degree to which a patient was believed to be responsible
for causing his own illness, presumably indicating his readiness to
accept blame, found that societies with early weaning, early inde-
pendence training, and early training in modesty and the inhibition
of heterosexual play were those which tended to have high guilt.
The age of toilet training was not related.

Whiting and Child (1953) tentatively concluded that this rela-
tionship was due to identification. Anticipating the status-envy
hypothesis, they argued that parents should seem more powerful
to a very young child than to an older one who has already learned,
to a degree at least, to cope with the environment by himself. Thus,
early socialization should produce stronger identification and,
hence, guilt over contravening parental values.

It is again possible to relate this association to the maintenance
systems. Whiting (1959b) reports that household structure is a
significant determinant of the age of sociahzation. Nuclear house-
holds are earliest for both weaning (median age 2 years) and inde-
pendence training (median age 2 years, 9 months) and mother-
child households are the latest.^ On the average they do not begin
to wean their children until they are three years old nor start train-
ing them in independence until they are four and one half. Extended
and polygynous households fall in between these two extremes for
both weaning and independence training.

To test our hypothesis we have to ask whether nuclear households
independently of child rearing have higher guilt than mother-child
households. This is in fact what is reported by Whiting (1959a) ;
86 per cent of the nuclear households in the sample reported had
high scores on patient responsibility whereas but 14 per cent of the
mother-child households were high in this regard.

Although it is difficult to be sure with the relatively small num-

' The age of independence training should not be confused with the degree of infant indulgence
referred to above (p. 358). Mother-child households are both low and late.

366 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ber of cases on which data are available, it seems that in this instance
households have some effect on guilt independent of child rearing.
Thus, whereas it seems as if the nature of the gods is directly de-
pendent on child-rearing practices and only indirectly upon house-
hold structure, guilt is produced by an interaction of both social
structure and child rearing. Thus, Whiting (1959a) showed that
the age of weaning was correlated with patient responsibility for
monogamous societies. This was not true of polygynous societies.
They tended to have a low score on guilt whether weaning was
early or late. From this we may conclude that, while the age of so-
cialization may be a mediating factor between social structure and
magical theories of disease, it is clearly not the only one.

It was assumed above that strong identification with the mother
should be induced by exclusive mother-infant sleeping arrange-
ments which is in turn strongly associated with polygyny. But
polygynous societies are low in guilt. To get around this contradic-
tion. Whiting (1959c) has argued that guilt is derived from identi-
fication with the male rather than the female role. The basis of
argument consisted of the assumption that "the role of the father
and of males in general in any society tends to be more punitive,
rigid and unforgiving than that of the mother and of women in
general .... A woman could scarcely bring up a child unless, when
he deviates from the familial rules, she made exceptions if the child
were sick or tired or upset."

Severity of Socialization and Negative Fixation

Estimates of the severity of socialization in early childhood pro-
vide the next set of child-rearing variables to be considered. Such
estimates were made by Whiting and Child (1953) with respect to
five systems of behavior: oral, anal, sexual, aggression, and de-
pendence. The presumed effect of severe training was that of "nega-
tive fixation" or the anxious preoccupation with the type of be-
havior or behavior system which is severely punished. The theory
of negative fixation was based upon the effect of conflict rather
than on the stages of psychosexual development. The hypothesis
which they put forward is that conflict between habits learned in
infancy and then punished during the socialization process pro-
duces persistent motivation which activates behavior in adulthood
in some way related to the conflict and presumably is functionally
defensive in nature.

Explanations for illness and therapeutic techniques were chosen
by Whiting and Child (1953) as aspects of the projective system

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY }67

which might reflect fixation. A content analysis of magical beliefs
and practices relating to illness was made for each society with the
five behavior systems in mind. In judging the severity of socializa-
tion for each system, the following factors were taken into con-
sideration: intensity and frequency of punishment, suddenness of
the transition from behavior appropriate to infancy and that to
later childhood, and signs of emotional disturbance on the part of
the child.^

In general the fixation hypothesis was supported. The severity of
weaning (oral anxiety) was strongly related to "oral explanations
for illness." Such oral explanations include the belief that sickness
is caused by eating or drinking magically poisoned food or by the
verbal spells and incantations of sorcerers. The severity of aggres-
sion training (aggression socialization anxiety) which includes the
treatment of temper tantrums, physical and verbal aggression,
damage to property, and disobedience was related to explanations
for illness involving aggression. These include hostility toward or
disobedience to spirits, poison if it is introjected into the patient
rather than being ingested, and the use of magical weapons by a
sorcerer. The severity of independence training was shown to be
related to dependence explanations for illness, a measure which in-
cludes the belief that illness could be caused by "soul stealing" or
by "spirit possession." The negative fixation hypothesis was not
confirmed in the other two systems of behavior. Toilet training did
not predict the Whiting and Child score on anal explanations for
illness nor did the severity of sex training predict sexual explana-
tions for illness. However, there was some indication that relevant
avoidance in these behavior systems was used as a therapeutic prac-
tice. Thus, societies with severe toilet training tend to have thera-
peutic practices involving washing or cleansing, the adherence to
cleanliness taboos, or the retention of feces, and societies with severe
sex training tended to believe that abstention from sexual inter-
course by the patient would have a therapeutic effect.

In addition, as was reported above, Stephens (ms.) found that
severe sex training is associated with elaborate menstrual taboos, and
Ayres (1954) showed this child-rearing measure to be related to
prolonged sex taboos during pregnancy. Each of these may be
viewed as an index of negative fixation.

The following maintenance system variables have been reported

It should be noted that the age of socialization was conceptually distinguished from the
severity of socialization. Although in general these measures were negatively correlated (Whiting
and Child 1953, p. no), they were empirically distinct as well. In other words late socialization
is not necessarily mild.

368 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

to be associated with severity of socialization in the various systems.
Murdock and Whiting (1951) report that societies with sororal
polygyny are significantly less severe in weaning their children than
are societies with nonsororal polygyny. Monogamous societies, ac-
cording to their findings, stand between these two extremes and are
not significantly different from either. They explained mild wean-
ing in sororal-polygynous societies as a consequence of the co-opera-
tion between co-wives who are sisters. The severity of sex training
is associated with polygyny. Only 1 5 per cent of the societies which
are monogamous, or in which not more than 10 per cent of the
women are polygynously married, are above the median on the
severity of sex training, whereas 73 per cent of the societies with a
higher proportion of polygynous marriages are severe in this regard.

Finally, a strong association between the severity of aggression
training and household structure has been reported by Whiting
(1959b). Ninety-two per cent of the extended families in the
sample used are above the median on the punishment for aggres-
sion. Nuclear households were least severe in this respect — only
25 per cent of the cases being severe. Polygynous and mother-child
households were 61 per cent and 46 per cent respectively. Whiting
(ms.) in an analysis of the Zuni extended family households sug-
gests that the expression of aggression cannot be tolerated in cir-
cumstances where so many people are living in such crowded quar-
ters. No maintenance system variable has as yet been reported to
predict the severity of either toilet training or independence train-
ing. An item of interest, however, that should be followed up was
reported to me by C. S. Ford. An undergraduate paper in one of his
classes showed that toilet training was more severe in societies that
had wooden floors and rugs than in societies with dirt floors and no
rugs.

Factor analysis provides another method of estimating the effect
of child-rearing practices upon projective systems. Prothro (i960)
subjected the Whiting and Child (1953) fixation hypothesis to
such an analysis. The first factor, which he names the "aggression-
hypochondriasis factor" had high positive loadings for the severity
of aggression training, and all explanations for illness and tech-
niques of therapy save those relating to dependence. This factor was
also positively loaded on sorcery and negatively on the fear of
spirits. The second factor, named "orality-sexuality," had heavy
negative loadings on initial indulgence for dependent and oral sys-

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY i69

terns, and on the severity of sex training. It also had heavy positive
loadings on oral and dependent explanations for illness and the fear
of spirits. The third and final factor, "independence-anality," had
a high positive loading on the severity and earliness of toilet training,
and a strong negative loading on the severity and earliness of inde-
pendence training. A negative loading dependence avoidance
therapy was the only projective measure which seemed related to
this factor.

Seventy of Socialization: Projection and Displacement

Cross-cultural studies involving the importance of sorcery and
witchcraft have generally interpreted this belief as one involving
the psychological mechanism of projection and/or displacement.
Two views of this mechanism have been put forth. One, derived
essentially from behavior theory, assumes that the fear of sorcerers
occurs in societies where the direct expression of aggression is
strongly inhibited and, hence, must be either attributed to others
or justified by being directed against criminal sorcerers. The other
view is derived from psychoanalytic theory and involves the hy-
pothesis that sorcery implies paranoia, a personality variable which
is derived from sexual inhibition and involves homosexuality. Whit-
ing and Child (1953) were unable to decide between these two
hypotheses. On the basis of their evidence, sorcery was found to
be an important explanation for illness both in societies where chil-
dren were punished severely either for sex or aggression during
childhood. The fact that severity of socialization in these two be-
havior systems are positively related to one another makes it difficult
to disentangle their influence.

Whiting (1959a) presents some evidence in favor of the sex
anxiety hypothesis, but the data are not very convincing. The most
likely interpretation of the results so far is that there are in effect
two kinds of projection. The distinction between these may corre-
spond to that which has been made between sorcery and witch-
craft, the former being a result of the inhibition of aggression, the
latter being associated with conflict in the area of sex. That sor-
cerers are more often male and witches female is suggestive in this
regard.

That aggression may be projected has been shown by Wright
(1954) using a content analysis of folktales as an index. He showed
that in societies with severe training in the control of aggression

370 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

during childhood the hero in folktales does not direct his aggres-
sion toward friends but rather toward strangers or enemies, that a
stranger rather than the hero was more likely to be the agent of
aggression, and finally that the hero was less likely to be triumphant.
Whiting and Child (1953) report a similar finding. Societies with
severe training in the control of aggression which believe that spirits
can cause illness, tend to define the spirits as animal rather than
human.

The maintenance system variables relating to severe socialization
for sex and aggression have already been reported — the former is
associated with polygyny, the latter with the extended family
household. Direct relationships between maintenance system vari-
ables and sorcery were reported in two studies. Beatrice Whiting
(1950) , assuming that sorcery functions as a mechanism of social
control, showed that a strong belief in sorcery occurs in societies
lacking in mechanisms of social control that involve the delegation
of authority for the judging and punishing of crime. She also
showed that this pattern tended to occur in small rather than in
large societies. LeVine (i960) showed that sorcery tends to occur
in societies that maximize jealousy between co-wives. In three East
African societies similar in other respects, the preoccupation with
sorcery was greatest among the Luo where co-wives lived in ad-
jacent houses and virtually absent among the Kipsigis where the
co-wives ordinarily live miles apart. He also reports that, cross-cul-
turally, sorcery is a major cause of illness in 93 per cent of the so-
cieties with polygynous households, 60 per cent of the societies with
mother-child households, 5 3 per cent of the societies with extended
family households, and only 3 6 per cent of the societies with nuclear
households. The total pattern for predicting sorcery thus seems to
be small societies with no formal systems of social control with
either polygynous households and severe sex training or extended
family households and severe training in the control of aggression.

Independence Training and Achievement Motivation

McClelland and Friedman (1952) report cross-cultural findings
supporting the hypothesis that achievement motivation is produced
by early and severe training in independence. Achievement motiva-
tion was measured by applying to folktales a modification of the
method used to score need achievement imagery in thematic apper-
ception tests. Such scores were related to Whiting and Child's
( 1953 ) measures of the age and severity of independence training.

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 371

Societies with early and severe socialization of independence tended
to have more achievement imagery in their folktales.

Child, Storm, and Veroff (1958) also investigated the relation
of child-rearing variables to achievement imagery in folktales. They
used a larger sample of societies (the McClelland and Friedman
study was restricted to North American tribes) and reported es-
sentially negative results. Scoring reliability was low and different
myth episodes from a single society showed wide variation in
achievement imagery. They report the curious finding that socie-
ties which are both generally severe in socialization and who punish
achievement have more achievement imagery in their folktales than
societies with any other combination of these child-rearing factors.
They also report that positive training for achievement in later
childhood is related to their folktale score if, and only if, training
in self-reliance is held constant. Their score on achievement imagery
was not significantly related to the Whiting and Child measures
used in the McClelland and Friedman study.

Over-All Early Soc/a//zaf/on, Decorative Art, and Asceticism

Certain consequences are reported for over- all socialization anx-
iety, a measure obtained by combining the scores for the five be-
havior systems (Whiting and Child 1953). Barry (1957) reports
that the decorative art forms of societies that are generally severe
in training their children tend to be complex, and Friendly (1956)
shows that such societies tended to have ascetic mourning customs.
The relation of maintenance systems to over-all socialization anx-
iety has not as yet been investigated. Fischer (1959) , however, re-
ports that complexity in social structure is reflected in the com-
plexity of decorative art. He used the Barry (1957) score on
complexity of art design and Murdock (1957) scores of com-
plexity of social organization. The presense of status distinctions
based on wealth, social class membership, or heredity tends to result
in complex designs in contrast with those from no rank distinctions
or those based on age alone.

Another over-all measure of the severity of socialization in early
childhood is provided by the Barry, Bacon, and Child study ( 1957) .
This measure, which they call "transition anxiety," is an estimate
of the degree of pressure exerted upon the child during his change
of status from infancy to childhood. This measure, although not
statistically significant, is positively related to the Whiting and
Child (1953) measure of over-all socialization anxiety. Whiting

372 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

and his co-workers (ms.) show it to be related to household struc-
ture. They report that societies with nuclear households are sig-
nificantly more severe on this score than are societies with extended
family households. It has already been pointed out that societies with
nuclear family households begin independence training early. It
now seems that they are generally severe as well, suggesting that
strong pressures in child-rearing toward independence are required
to enable a couple to set up an independent establishment.

Socialization in Later Childhood

An elaborate set of judgments about socialization during later
childhood is provided by the Barry, Bacon, and Child study ( 1957) •
These judgments concern the manner in which a child is trained to
be obedient, responsible, self-reliant, nurturant, and generally in-
dependent, as well as his training in achievement. For each of these
behavior systems a separate judgment was made for the general
pressure exerted upon the child, the severity of punishment for non-
compliance, the difficulty of performance, the amount of conflict,
and the frequency of the response.

Separate judgments on the above scales were made for the treat-
ment of boys and girls by Barry, Bacon, and Child (1957). Sig-
nificant differences in training were reported. These involved more
stress upon nurturance, obedience, and responsibility for the girls
and upon achievement and self-reliance for the boys. Although
they did not relate these differences to any projective system, they
did report that large differences in the training of the sexes occur
in societies where large animals are hunted, where grain rather than
root crops are grown, where large or milking animals are kept,
where fishing is unimportant or absent, where the settlement is
nomadic rather than sedentary, and where polygyny is high. They
interpreted those results as implying that differential training for
boys and girls is required where superior strength and motor skill
is involved or where a large family with a high degree of co-opera-
tion is required.

Lambert, Triandis, and Wolf ( 1959) , in the study discussed pre-
viously (see page 357) concerning the nature of the gods, report
that the supernatural are more aggressive in societies which put
strong pressure upon the boys for self-reliance and independence.
They also report an even stronger relationship in the same direction
with a score which combines the pressures exerted in all six systems;
that is, nurturance, obedience, self-reliance, achievement, responsi-

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 373

bility, and general independence. It is interesting that they assume
a reverse direction of causation to explain this relationship; that is,
the belief in aggressive gods requires training a child to be inde-
pendent and self-reliant so that he can cope with a hostile world as
an adult.

Bacon, Child, and Barry (ms.) show that societies which severely
punish their older children for disobedience, irresponsibility, lack of
self-reliance, and lack of achievement are high in the frequency of
theft. Since they also find that a high frequency of theft is found in
societies with low infant indulgence and severe weaning, they in-
terpret these findings as a reaction to emotional deprivation during
infancy and childhood. Such anxieties, except for severe weaning,
interestingly enough, are not related to the frequency of personal
crime.

Barry, Child, and Bacon (1959) report some interesting relation-
ships between socialization pressures in later childhood and various
aspects of the maintenance system, in this case the basic economy.
They state, "In considering the relation of economy to adult role,
and hence to child training, we felt that perhaps a variable of great
significance is the extent to which food is accumulated and must
be cared for," To test this hypothesis they classified societies into
four categories on the basis of their subsistence activities which rep-
resent the degree to which this implies an accumulation of food.
Assuming that food "on the hoof" requires the greatest amount of
care, societies that were mainly dependent upon animal husbandry
were judged to be highest on the scale. The lowest point was rep-
resented by hunting and fishing societies. Between these extremes a
distinction was made between those societies depending upon agri-
culture only for subsistence and those depending upon a combina-
tion of agriculture, hunting, and fishing. The former were assumed
to be higher in food accumulation than the latter.

Contrasting the extremes on the scale, that is, animal husbandry
versus hunting and fishing, they showed that societies with high
accumulation of food put strong pressure upon their children to be
responsible and obedient and were low in stressing achievement and
independence in their boys and also low in stressing achievement
and self-reliance in girls. They then constructed a general score
which they called "pressure toward compliance versus assertion"
by adding the scores on obedience and responsibility and subtract-
ing from this sum the combined score on achievement and self-
reliance. The relation of this over-all pressure toward compliance

374 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Percentage

above

Subsistence Economy

Median

on Compliance

N

Animal Husbandry

83%

(m)

Agriculture only

93

(15)

Agriculture, hunting

and fishing

33

(18)

Hunting and fishing

14

(22)

Table 2. Relation between pressure toward compliance versus assertive-
ness as indicated by a subsistence economy scale. Numbers in parentheses
represent the number of societies in each category. This table is adapted from
Barry, Child, and Bacon 1959, P. 60.

to food accumulation is striking and shown in Table 2.

It should be noted that high points on the subsistence scale — ani-
mal husbandry and agriculture — are rather heavily weighted with
cases from Africa and that perhaps pressure toward compliance is
an African culture trait and, thus, the association is spurious. If,
however, all African cases are omitted from the sample, the asso-
ciation between subsistence and pressure toward compliance is still
strong. When this is done, high compliance is represented by the
following percentages in order of the degree of accumulation: 70
per cent, 90 per cent, 33 per cent, and 14 per cent. Thus, the re-
lationship, although somewhat less strong, is still substantial.

Although the direct relationship between subsistence economy
and aggressive gods is not reported, Bacon, Child, and Barry (ms.)
indicate that this scale is not related to the frequency of theft. Thus,
here again a child-rearing factor seems to be a necessary link be-
tween an aspect of the maintenance system and a projective con-
sequence. It should be noted that D'Andrade in this volume, using
a scale for measuring subsistence economy essentially similar to the
one described above, found this aspect of the maintenance system
directly predicts a projective measure — a preoccupation with
dreams — but that neither were related to child rearing.

Discussion

The general hypothesis that personality can serve as a mediator
between the maintenance and projective systems of a culture has
been supported by a fairly substantial amount of cross-cultural re-
search. It should be pointed out, however, that a substantial num-
ber of specific hypotheses failed to be confirmed. Many of these
have not been reported in the studies under review; furthermore,
those negative findings which were reported have usually been
omitted from this review. To have included them would have been

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 375

too cumbersome. This decision, however, may give an exaggerated
view of the importance as an integrating factor of those personahty
processes which are determined by child rearing. It should be noted
that both Wallace and D'Andrade report in this volume cultural
responses relevant to personality which are not related to child
rearing, but rather to either physiological process or to social struc-
ture. Despite these cautions, it seems clear that economics and social
structure do often have a determining influence upon the way in
which children are brought up, and the child rearing in turn often
has a predictable and determining effect upon magical belief, rit-
uals, art forms, taboos, and even crime rates.

The direction of causation is, of course, an ever-present problem
in cross-cultural research. Why cannot it be assumed that projective
systems determine child rearing and that child rearing determines
the maintenance systems? Such may, in fact, be the case in some or
even many of the instances reported above. Although this is an
important question, it is beyond the scope of this review. The posi-
tion taken here has been to accept the assumptions as to the direc-
tion of causation made by the authors of the works considered.

In reviewing the relationships reported above, certain patterns
or types emerge which should be noted. First, where a certain aspect
of the maintenance system may be classed into discreet categories,
such as household, marriage form, residence, basic subsistence econ-
omy, and so forth, some of these categories may be determining
with respect to child rearing, whereas other categories in the same
maintenance system may be nondetermining. A number of exam-
ples of this contrast could be drawn from the results reported above,
but the relation between household structure and over-all infant in-
dulgence shown in Table i will serve to illustrate this contrast. It
will be seen from this table that extended and polygynous family
households determine high infant indulgence but that nuclear
households are nondetermining as to indulgence. Mother-child
households are, by a confidence limits test (Hald 1952), almost
determining of low indulgence, but the proportion does not quite
reach the 5 per cent level of confidence. Thus, if a person were told
that a society had an extended family or polygynous household,
he could make money, even if he gave odds, that infants were
treated indulgently, but if he were told that a society had nuclear
households, he should not bet on how infants are treated. It is be-
lieved that this distinction between cultural categories which are
determining and those which are nondetermining may apply to

576 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Other features of cultural integration than child rearing and may
be a distinction useful to keep in mind in describing cultural pat-
terns.

A second general conclusion may be drawn from this review.
This consists of a typology of various ways in which personality
factors can serve to integrate culture. These types can perhaps best
be shown in the following diagrammatic models. In these diagrams
M will stand for a maintenance system variable, C for a child-rear-
ing practice presumed to influence personality, and P for a projec-
tive system variable. The arrows stand for the assumed direction of
causation.

The most common type is shown in Figure i . Here it is assumed

M P

C

Figure 1. The mediation type.

that a certain feature of maintenance systems determines a child-
training practice and that this practice determines a feature in the
projective systems, but that the given feature of the maintenance
systems has no directly determining influence with respect to the
projective system feature. This type can be illustrated by the rela-
tion between household structure, infant indulgence, and the na-
ture of the gods as described above: that is, extended family house-
holds predict high infant indulgence, and high infant indulgence
predicts a low fear of ghosts, but household structure is unrelated
to the fear of ghosts (see p. 360) .

Another important type is shown in Figure 2. Here it is assumed
that neither a feature of the maintenance system nor a child-rearing
practice alone will determine a given feature in the projective sys-
tem but that taken together they will. As an example, the age of
weaning predicts guilt in monogamous but not polygynous societies
(see p. 370).

M

\/

c

Figure 2. The interaction type.

It is more likely that many more examples of this type will be dis-
covered as research in this area becomes more sophisticated.

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 377

The third type, shown in Figure 3, assumes a direct effect of pres-
sures from the maintenance system upon some aspect of the projec-
tive system.

M >F

C

Figure 3. Adult pressure type.

Although this type was not considered in this review, a recent study
(Field i960) showing heavy drinking to be associated with bilateral
descent, but to none of the child-rearing variables discussed above,
is a good example of this type.

Figure 4 indicates the assumption of causation between a child-
rearing and a projective feature in a direction opposite to that which

M P

C

Figure 4. "Reverse" Causation.

has usually been assumed in the studies under review. The only
case of this type noted is from the study by Lambert and his group
(1959) where training in self-reliance and independence was inter-
preted as being a consequence rather than the cause of a belief in
aggressive gods (see p. 357).

As a final comment it would seem to this reviewer that the cross-
cultural study of personality as a mediating factor in the integration
of culture is off to a good start, but still has a long way to go. The
measurement of child rearing is far from satisfactory partly because
ethnographic reports are often inadequate and partly because it is
highly unlikely that the variables selected by Whiting and Child
(1953) and by Barry, Bacon, and Child (1957) will turn out in
the long run to be more than first approximations of the dimen-
sions most crucial to personality development. Furthermore, as has
been shown in this review, cross-cultural research has just begun to
attack the complex problem of the effects of the interaction of sev-
eral variables operating jointly — an approach which should yield
interesting results in the near future if it is pursued.

378 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayres, Barbara C.

1954 Personality determinants of food and sex taboos during pregnancy.
(Typescript, Doctoral dissertation.) Cambridge, Radcliffe College.

Anthony, Albert S.

1955 A cross-cultural study of factors relating to male initiation rites and
genital operations. (Typescript, doctoral thesis. Harvard Graduate
School of Education.) Cambridge.

Bacon, Margaret K., I. L. Child, and Herbert Barry, III

A cross-cultural study of crime in pre-literate societies. (Typescript).

Barry, Herbert A.

1957 Relationships between child training and the pictorial arts. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 54:380-383.

Barry, Herbert A., Margaret K. Bacon, and Irvin L. Child

1957 A cross-cultural survey of some sex differences in socialization. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 55:327—332.

Barry, Herbert A., Irvin L. Child, and Margaret K. Bacon

1959 Relation of child training to subsistence economy. American Anthro-
pologist 61:1.
Benedict, Ruth

1934 Patterns of culture. Boston, Houghton-Mifflin Co.
Blalock, H. M., Jr.

i960 Correlational analysis and causal inferences. American Anthropologist
62:4.

Burton, Roger V. and J. W. M. Whiting

i960 The absent father: effects on the developing child. Paper presented at
A. P. A. Meeting, September, i960.

Child, Irvin L., T. Storm, and J. Veroff

1958 Achievement themes in folktales related to socialization practices. In
Motives in fantasy, action and society, J. W. Atkinson, ed. New York,
Van Nostrand.

Field, Peter B.

A new cross-cultural study of drunkenness. In Society, culture and
drinking patterns, D. J. Pittman and C. R. Snyder, eds. New York,
Wiley. In press.

Fischer, John L.

1959 Art styles and cultural cognitive maps. Paper presented at American
Anthropological Association Meeting, Mexico City, December, 1959.

Friendly, Joan P.

1956 A cross-cultural study of ascetic mourning behavior. (Typescript,
Honors Thesis) Cambridge, Radcliffe College.

Ford, Clellan S.

1945 A comparative study of human reproduction, Yale University Publica-
tions in Anthropology, No. 32. New Haven.

SOCIALIZATION PROCESS AND PERSONALITY 579

Hald, a.

1952 Statistical tables and formulas. New York, Wiley.
Kardiner, Abram and Ralph Linton

1939 The individual and his society. New York, Columbia University Press.
Kardiner, Abram et al.

1945 The psychological frontiers of society. New York, Columbia University
Press.

Lambert, W. W., Leigh Triandis, and Margery "Wolf

1959 Some correlates of beliefs in the malevolence and benevolence of
supernatural beings: A cross-cultural study. Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology 58:2.

LeVine, Robert A.

i960 Witchcraft and marital relations in East Africa: a controlled compar-
ison. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association
Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

McClelland, D. C. and G. A. Friedman

1952 A cross-cultural study of the relationship between child-training prac-
tices and achievement motivation appearing in folk tales. In Readings in
social psychology (rev. ed.), G. E. Swanson, T. M. Newcomb, and
E. H. Hartley, eds., pp. 243-249. New York, Henry Holt.
Mead, Margaret

1928 Coming of age in Samoa. New York, Morrow.

1935 Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. New York, Morrow.
MuRDocK, George P.

1957 World ethnographic sample. American Anthropologist 59:664-687.
MuRDOCK, George P. and J. W. M. Whiting

195 1 Cultural determination of parental attitudes: the relationship between
the social structure, particularly family structure and parental behavior.
In Problems of infancy and childhood, Milton J. E. Senn, ed. New York,
Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation.

Prothro, E. Terry

i960 Patterns of permissiveness among preliterate peoples. Journal of Ab-
normal and Social Psychology 61:151—154.

Roberts, John M., Robert R. Bush, and Malcolm Arth.

1957 Dimensions of mastery in games. Stanford, California, Ford Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. (Mimeographed.)

Spiro, Melford E. and Roy G. D'Andrade

195 8 A cross-cultural study of some supernatural beliefs. American Anthro-
pologist 60:456—466.

Stephens, William N.

The oedipus complex: cross-cultural evidence. Glencoe, Illinois, The
Free Press. (In press.)

Whiting, Beatrice B.

1950 Paiute sorcery. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology No. 15,
New York.

3 80 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Whiting, Marjorie Grant

1958 A cross-cultural nutrition survey of 118 societies representing the
major culture areas of the world. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard
School of Public Health.
Whiting, J. W. M.

1959a Sorcery, sin and the superego: a cross-cultural study of some mechanisms
of social control. In Symposium on motivation, pp. 174—195. University
of Nebraska Press.

1959b Cultural and sociological influences on development. In Maryland child
growth and development institute, June 1-5, 1959, pp. 5—9.

1959c The male and female conscience. Paper presented at American Psycho-
logical Association Meeting, September. Cincinnati.

1960a Social structure and identification. Mona Bronfman Sheckman Lectures
delivered at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

1960b Resource mediation and learning by identification. In Personality de-
velopment in children, L Iscoe and M. Stevenson, eds. Austin, Texas,
University of Texas Press.
Whiting, J. W. M., M. F. Antonovsky, E. M. Chasdi, and B. C. Ayres

The learning of values. In Peoples of Rimrock (Vol. L), E. Z. Vogt
and J. M. Roberts, eds. Final Report of the Harvard Values Study,
manuscript.

Whiting, J. W. M. and Irvin L. Child

1953 Child training and personality. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale Uni-
versity Press.

Whiting, J. W. M., Richard Kluckhohn, and Albert S. Anthony

1958 The function of male initiation ceremonies at puberty. In Readings in
social psychology, Eleanor E. Maccoby, T. Newcomb, and E. Hartley,
eds., pp. 359-370. New York, Henry Holt,

Wright, George O.

1954 Projection and displacement: a cross-cultural study of folk-tale ag-
gression. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:523-528. ■

chapter i^

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION^

DAVID F. ABERLE

Brand e is University

Historical Perspeciive

It would be fair to say that in the field of culture and personality,
child-rearing practices have been studied primarily from the point
of view of their effects on the development of personality, rather
than as products of other features of the culture (cf. Child 1954) .
Sometimes the inquiry about the effects of socialization stops with
the attempt to demonstrate the impact of child rearing on person-
ality. Sometimes it goes on to attempt to show that various cultural
features are derived from imputed or known personality character-
istics present in a given group. In either case, the child-rearing prac-
tices are viewed as causes, and personality or features of culture as
effects.

* This essay owes a great deal to a series of graduate seminars on the topic of the causes of
socialization which I have conducted at the University of Michigan from 1954 to the present.
I am indebted to many students for discussions, research results, and papers on theoretical prob-
lems— so many that it would be invidious to select a few for mention and impossible to list them
all. I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council for funds which provided me with a
research assistant for one of these seminars, and to Mrs. Eviva Menkes for her able work in that
capacity. I benefited by several years' stimulating meetings of a Social Science Research Council
Committee on Personality Development, the other members of which were Alfred L. Baldwin,
William E. Henry, Robert R. Sears, M. Brewster Smith (stafF), and John W. M. Whiting. An
earlier version of this essay was prepared for a conference on cross-cultural research on personality
development sponsored by the SSRC committee just mentioned and held in Kansas City on May
20—22, 1955. I profited by discussions of that earlier version at the conference. I am indebted for
helpful criticism and discussion to John W. Atkinson, Thomas Gladwin, my wife, E. Kathleen
Gough, Francis L. K. Hsu, Alex Inkeles, the late Clyde Kluckhohn, Robert LeVine, Daniel R.
Miller, Kaspar D. Naegele, and G. E. Swanson, some of whom have read one or another draft of
this paper, and some of whom have discussed the general problem with me. The University of
Michigan provided travel funds which made it possible for me to attend a conference with the
editor of this volume and some of the authors of other chapters.

I am especially grateful to Irvin L. Child, who provided me with ratings on the socialization
practices of 1 1 1 cultures, prepared by him and his co-workers, and as yet unpublished. These
ratings have been used in many of the University of Michigan seminars mentioned above. Some
results of this work are mentioned below.

381

3 82 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Less effort has been made to determine the causes of the socializa-
tion practices themselves. Sometimes these causes are treated as
self-evident; sometimes the problem is disregarded. This essay at-
tempts to set forth an approach oriented to systematic inquiry into
the causes of socialization patterns. It will discuss the theoretical
utility of such an approach, and will outline some of the features
of cultural systems which seem to be important causes of socializa-
tion patterns. It will make some mention of field techniques and
comparative techniques and will allude to some results now avail-
able.

The Problem

Anthropologists have been willing to treat joking and respect
relationships as the outgrowth of other features of kinship relation-
ships (Radcliffe-Brown 1952; Eggan 1955), to examine kinship
terms as reflexes of kinship groupings (Murdock 1949) , to see po-
litical structure and social complexity as functions of level of pro-
ductivity (White 1949) , but by and large they have not been in-
terested in accounting for socialization practices.

There are points of view in culture and personality which make
attention to the causes of socialization seem unnecessary or un-
profitable. One of these sees socialization as the prime cause of major
features of different cultural systems, but pays no heed to the ques-
tion of why the members of a particular system show uniformities
in socialization, rather than randomness. A second point of view,
which confines itself to relations between socialization and per-
sonality, is one or another version of the "chicken-and-egg" ap-
proach. In its simplest form, this theory would hold that people who
grow up under a given socialization regime reproduce the same
regime that they experienced, because the personalities they de-
veloped make it congenial to do so. In this version, antecedent and
consequent pursue each other in a small circle forever, and the an-
swer as to why the socialization pattern is as it is can only be because
the socializers were reared as they were. There is no room in this
system for change. A more sophisticated chicken-and-egg approach
asserts that strains engendered under one socialization regime give
rise to efforts by those who experienced the strains to alter the
regime in rearing their own children. Presumably the result is either
a new stability or a perpetual series of changes, but in this version,
too, socialization and personality chase each other forever.

When we find, however, as Child and his co-workers have done,

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 383

in studies discussed below, that there is sizable variation in socializa-
tion aims in different types of subsistence economies, none of these
views seems particularly satisfactory. For now we see that the eco-
logical niche of a culture affects its socialization practices. Thus
factors not themselves the results of socialization can be seen to
affect socialization practices and through them (as well as directly)
the personalities of constituent members of the society. The task
ahead is that of tracing the impact not only of ecological and tech-
nological factors, but of economic and political factors on units in
which the bulk of childhood socialization occurs — the family in
almost all societies, age groups where they are present, and schools
in literate societies. Through their impact on social relationships in
the socializing units, and on the aims of the socializers, these factors
can probably be shown to account for a very large amount of the
variance in socialization patterns from one society, or segment of a
society, to another. It remains possible that some features of sociali-
zation cannot be so explained, but it seems heuristically valuable to
treat socialization as a dependent variable, with the same close at-
tention that has been given to a number of other cultural variables.

Previous Work

In a great deal of anthropological work quite simple explana-
tions of socialization practices are proffered, but these fall short of
what is needed. Thus it may be asserted that the Cheyenne are
warlike and raise their children to be warriors, or that the Hopi
are nonaggressive and trammel aggressive manifestations in their
children. This is simply a special version of the chicken-and-egg
formula, although it is easily converted to another point of view.
Thus, if, as in Kardiner's work on the Comanche (1945) , it is as-
serted that warfare is a necessary ingredient of Plains life, and there-
fore the induction of warrior skills and attitudes is required for the
system to exist in its setting, we are closer to what I mean by an
explanation. The simpler explanation treats the warlike character-
istics of the Plains Indians as a historical happenstance, so that we
might equally well find that the Cheyenne are peaceful and raise
their children to be pacific. I will therefore pass over the large num-
ber of explanations to be found in the literature which treat sociali-
zation simply as a reflex of (or congruent with, or the cause of)
adult values and orientations taken as given factors.

Another class of explanation takes certain important institutions
of the culture as given factors and proceeds from there. This is

384 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

common in the treatment of ethnic groups on the American scene.
The values, family structure, and outlook of these groups as they
existed in Europe are set forth, with relatively little attention to the
sources of these factors; the carry-over and change on the American
scene are described; and socialization is treated as a reflex of this
historical continuity, with greater or less sophistication in the analy-
sis of the position of the groups in contemporary America. Since
the interest, in most such cases, is not in the causes of the socializa-
tion practices, but in having two contrasting sets of practices and
in examining the results, such research cannot be criticized for
failing to do what it never intended to do. Nevertheless, it must be
mentioned as falling short of the goal I have in mind.

Such work merges imperceptibly with work on social class. In
most of this work there is an awareness of the hard facts of strati-
fication— of differential opportunity, differential income, differ-
ential security, and differential power, but the work runs the gamut
from treating these differences almost as historically accidental
variations in subcultures to a clear analysis of the class structure
itself.

Rather than make invidious comments about the many studies of
social class, ethnicity, and child rearing which do not meet my
requirements — a procedure which would lead some social scientists
to protest that their aims are not mine, and others to protest that
they did a better job of explanation than this essay recognized —
I would like to mention some research which does attempt an ex-
planation of socialization practices along the lines I have in mind,
even though there are doubtless other suitable examples as well.
In The Changing American Parent (1958), Miller and Swanson
deal with a change in the organization of the society, from small-
scale firms and small government to large-scale firms and big gov-
ernment, and show how the role requirements for adults in the new
large-scale organizations (bureaucratic) differ from those in the
older (entrepreneurial) units. They then hypothesize that differ-
ences in orientation toward adult social life will lead to differences
in child-rearing patterns and demonstrate that the "bureaucratic"
portion of their sample is more permissive, more oriented to inter-
personal skills and adjustment for their children, as compared with
the stricter and more achievement-oriented "entrepreneurial" por-
tion of the sample. (In this and in other illustrative cases I am not
concerned with the adequacy of the theory or of the methods, but
with the type of approach to the explanation of child rearing that

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 385

is employed.) Here the authors have proceeded from major institu-
tions of the society to reflections of participation in these institu-
tions in the outlook of adults, to reflexes of parental outlook in child
rearing. Furthermore, the shift from "entrepreneurial" to "bureau-
cratic" is itself accounted for by reference to certain general or-
ganizational and economic problems in the society at large, rather
than being left as a spontaneous movement.

I shall not be concerned here with the various efforts to explain
socialization patterns or contexts by reference to the idiosyncratic
structures of particular families within a generally homogeneous
group, since we are here concerned with fairly widespread modali-
ties of child rearing common in groups.

Much of the work alluded to above concerns American society
or other complex societies, and the bulk of it has been carried on by
sociologists and psychologists, rather than by anthropologists or by
psychologists interested in the primitive and the non-Western
world. Some of the most interesting work on primitive and other
non- Western cultures has been done by Whiting and Child and
their various co-workers. I refer here not to Child-Training and
'Personality (1958) , which treats child rearing primarily as a cause
and is little concerned with its antecedents, but to four other pieces
of research (Murdock and Whiting 195 1; Whiting, Kluckhohn,
and Anthony 1958; Barry, Bacon, and Child 1957; and Barry,
Child, and Bacon 1959). The first of these deals, among other
things, with relative indulgence as a correlate of monogamy, sororal
polygyny, and nonsororal polygyny. The second deals with the re-
lationship between prolonged nursing and polygyny, and, in addi-
tion, discusses male initiation rites as a socialization practice arising
where male children are attached to the mother to an unusual de-
gree and for an unusually long period of time. The third deals with
differences between the socialization of boys and of girls, finding
that in general boys are trained more for achievement, self-reli-
ance, and independence, and girls more for obedience, responsibil-
ity, and nurturance, in a large sample of cultures. Furthermore,
these differences are maximized in cultures where big game is
hunted, or large animals are herded, or grain agriculture is found
because of the particular demands these activities place on males.
The fourth is concerned with the balance between socialization
toward compliance and that toward assertion in the child-rearing
practices of a similar large sample, relating this balance to what is
termed "surplus" — a technical base likely to produce a generous and

386 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

predictable output, rather than a meager and unpredictable output.
Compliant pressures are found in the more productive group, pre-
sumably because of its greater demands for co-ordinated work,
planning, and subordination of immediate gratification for long-
range family goals. In all these papers a variety of other issues are
considered.

Again, without reference to my own views as to the adequacy of
the explanations, we find fundamental features of technology or of
kinship organization used as a basis for explaining socialization.
Furthermore, unlike the studies of caste, class, and ethnicity, the
explanations are general and apply to a wide range of societies.

Dr. Child has provided me with copies of the ratings on various
features of socialization which he and his co-workers have developed
for III cultures, and in seminars my students and I have used these
for preliminary studies illustrative of the general point of view of
this essay. Thus we have found that in general there is an association
between the severity of obedience training and the number of levels
of political organization above the community level, the severity of
the sanctions utilized by authoritative figures (other than parents
disciplining their immature children) , the scope of regulation im-
posed by authority, and so on. Unfortunately this finding cannot
be disentangled from the findings of Barry, Child, and Bacon
(1959) regarding surplus, since there is a close association between
their measures of surplus and our measures of political organiza-
tion. We have also found a simple association between age of first
serious economic activity for boys, and the nature of the tasks im-
posed by the technology. A boy's serious economic activities are
likely to begin late (often after 10 years of age) where the tasks
are dangerous, where they must be performed far from home, or
where they require considerable strength. In other words, when the
risk to the child is great and his contribution is small, or when the
nuisance value of the child is great and his contribution small, he
begins his serious tasks late. This is so even when there is women's
productive work which he could easily perform. This finding would
seem obvious, but perhaps its corollary is less self-evident. It means
that in many highly productive horticultural societies children be-
gin work early, whereas in many hunting and gathering and some
herding societies, where the supply of food is more meager and un-
certain, they begin late. This, in turn, is likely to influence judg-
ments like those made by Child and his co-workers as regards re-
sponsibility, obedience, self-reliance, and independence, so that this

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 387

finding, too, overlaps with their conclusions regarding surplus.

Our work, it should be said, has been with extreme cases, using
no more than 40 at a time of the cultures utilized by Child, and there
has been no reliability check of the type employed in all his ratings.
Hence, the findings are tentative.

This review of previous work is spotty and capricious, lighting
on a few studies which are useful for present purposes and omitting
many major studies of socialization antecedents. But our primary
purpose here is to focus attention on the problem rather than to re-
view findings in an effort to arrive at answers.

Socialization as a Dependent Variable

Heretofore we have used such terms as socialization and child
rearing, without defining terms. Now, however, somewhat greater
explicitness seems needed. In any society or subsystem of a society,
socialization consists of those patterns of action, or aspects of ac-
tion, which inculcate in individuals the skills (including knowl-
edge) , motives, and attitudes necessary for the performance of
present or anticipated roles. As such, socialization continues
throughout normal human life, insofar as new roles must be learned,
but our interest here is in socialization in infancy, childhood, and
early adolescence, on the assumption that what is learned in these
early periods is more general and more fixed than what is learned
later. This assumption is not vital, so long as it is possible to assume
that what is learned early is at least important. Socialization clearly
has latent as well as manifest qualities, since the definition is made
from the point of view of the observer. Hence, the inculcation may
be unconscious from the point of view of the socializer. As Bene-
dict ( 1953 ) has pointed out, what is required for a present role may
have to be unlearned in the future; conceivably what is learned
for the future may constitute a difficulty for the present. In addi-
tion, socializers' miscalculations regarding future roles — due, for
example, to major changes in the social system — can involve the
learning of nonadaptive or maladaptive qualities. For all these rea-
sons, the definition proposed does not commit us to the view that
all practices labeled socialization are adaptive in character, either
immediately or in the long run. On balance, however, in a society
not undergoing rapid change, it can probably be assumed that the
bulk of socialization is adaptive.

Child care consists of the biological maintenance of the develop-
ing human being, until the time when older generations no longer

388 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

take care of his physiological needs. Hence, in childhood a concrete
act performed by a parent may often have aspects of child care
and of socialization. When a child is fed on a schedule so as not to
spoil it, the patterns of feeding involve both care and socialization.
Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. The complex of child
care and socialization will be referred to as child rearing, a term
which will be used in many contexts simply to avoid repeated use
of the term socialization. Child training will be used as a synonym
for early socialization.

There is a large number of ways of classifying socialization prac-
tices. For present purposes a simple classification will be used, one
adapted from a mimeographed manual on the study of socializa-
tion, prepared by Whiting and his co-workers (1953) • It specifies
the who, why, how, and when of child rearing: the agent — who
performs the activity; the aim — with what end in mind; the tech-
nique— what is done; and the timing — at what point or points in
the child's life the action is performed. No theoretical justification
for this classification will be attempted, except to say that these are
things we normally need to know about any social act, and to say
that the literature of psychology would certainly lead us to believe
that variation in any one of these factors should have significance
for personality development. Nevertheless, many other conceivable
modes of classification and additional variables have been over-
looked.

There are two different perspectives for the study of child rear-
ing, in the context of the present discussion. One of these is an
examination of particular child-rearing patterns or the total com-
plex of such patterns, in an effort to discern its organization and
the causes of that organization or parts thereof. From this perspec-
tive, for example, we might examine socialization in the American
school, referring the fact that the agents of socialization in early
school years are likely to be women teachers rather than men to
various features of the sexual division of labor in the professional
world, but referring the time-consciousness instilled in the child to
the specialization and interdependence of a complex social organi-
zation— both the school and the world into which the child will
later emerge. Thus the totality of agents, aims, techniques, and
timing in school might be parceled out to various social antecedents,
in the course of a coherent discussion of the school program. The
result of this approach is to maintain a clear view of child rearing,
or items thereof, but a piecemeal view of the larger social order.

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 3 89

The second perspective begins with a coherent analysis of the
cultural order and adduces therefrom certain consequences of that
order for socialization. In the course of this, although the general
orientations of socialization may emerge with some clarity, the
sequence is likely to be lost. It is probable that both perspectives
are necessary, even though the use of both involves some repetition
of data. We will use both procedures in this essay, beginning with
a discussion of sources of variation of agent, aim, technique, and
timing, and proceeding thereafter to show how certain segments of
cultural systems affect agent, aim, technique, or timing. Thus the
first section is divided by aspects of socialization, and the second
by aspects or parts of the cultural system.

ASPECTS OF SOCIALIZATION
Agent

It is self-evident that the agents of socialization are products of
the wider social order: that mother's brothers play a different role in
socialization in matrilineal than in patrilineal societies, that schools
are found in complex, literate cultures, and so on. The importance
of variation in agents is generally accepted, yet relatively little work
has been done to show this, except for studies in Western cultures
which deal with the differential impact of mothers versus fathers
trying to teach their children the same things. A number of prob-
lems in accounting for variation in agents have not been explored,
or have only recently been systematically explored. Thus, for exam-
ple, we do not understand the conditions under which elder siblings
have relatively great autonomous authority over younger ones, in
childhood, and those under which their authority is delegated,
temporary, and limited. Eisenstadt's From Generation to Genera-
tion (1956) is an interesting attempt to account for the importance
of structured peer groups in socialization, dealing, as it does, with
types of societies in which age groups do and do not occur.

Methods for case study in this area are the usual observational,
descriptive, and analytic techniques of ethnology; this is a topic
which involves essentially the same skills as the description and
analysis of work groups, kinship units, political systems, and so on.
Eisenstadt's work bears witness to the possibility of hypothesis-test-
ing comparative studies of problems in this area.

Aim

However large may be the area of child rearing that does not

390 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

involve conscious planning and decisions on the part of the agent,
another large area remains that does. Agents, although sometimes
siblings and peers, are often members of the society occupying
roles like those the children will later occupy. As Riesman (1950)
and Mead (1953a and 1953b) have pointed out, agents may have
important aims even when precise future roles for the child are
unpredictable. Agents may aim at any given time at ( i ) making
an immediate alteration in the child's behavior necessary in a given
situation (getting the child off the floor of the supermarket and
making him walk out the door) ; (2) training the child in the role
he is now occupying; (3) training the child for the next role in a
sequence; (4) training the child for more remote roles.

In the training for remote roles, the linkages with the present
can be simple or complex. In some cultures where accumulation
of herds by adults is important, the child is encouraged to prepare
for this by being given small quantities of livestock, being told how
to tend them, and being permitted to enjoy the rewards of his sur-
plus. The relationship between long-range aim and practice here is
simple and direct. On the other hand, in a group of middle-class
fathers I interviewed, a number were pleased by, or anxious about
their male childrens' athletic performance. It became clear that
none of them expected professional athletes among their adult sons,
but that all of them felt that success in athletics implied a future
capacity to engage in the competitive rough and tumble of adult
occupational life, in spite of the very different character of that
later competition (Aberle and Naegele 1952) .

An emphasis solely on socialization practices at the behavioral
level is insufficient unless it is accompanied by the study of the type
of adult, and the type of child the agents hope to create. Anthro-
pological literature abounds in sensitive descriptions of these aims,
yet the topic is sometimes omitted in the very monographs which
deal most intensively with socialization practices. There must be
wide variations in the clarity and generality with which such goals
are formulated. We know from life histories that in some primitive
cultures, children are given quite broad and general descriptions by
members of the older generation of what constitutes a "good"
Navaho or Hopi (Kluckhohn 1945; Dyk 1938; Simmons, 1942).
Yet Riesman (1950) has the impression that in many primitive
tribes what is taught is particular skills and behaviors. In still other
tribes the aims may be cloudy. Yet somehow the picture of these
aims must be built up. Traditional techniques of interviewing are

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 391

at least the starting point for field work in this area. Comparative
work has already begun, as manifested by the two papers by Barry,
Bacon, and Child cited earlier. The work indicates clearly that cer-
tain general aims are associated with subsistence patterns, whatever
the variables that intervene between subsistence techniques and
socialization aims.

The linkage of aims with the adult roles and values of the social-
izers is extraordinarily easy, in a certain sense, as I have pointed out
earlier in the discussion of training for the warrior role on the Plains.
But only when the nature of the wider system is understood, and
the adults' roles are seen not merely as cultural givens but themselves
as cultural products, can the requiredness of the aims of the social-
izers be adequately comprehended.

Technique

The literature of socialization is full of suggestions and demon-
strations that techniques, singly or in combination, are responsible
for major variations in personality: corporal punishment and non-
conditional love; conditional love and consistent behavior; capri-
cious indulgence and corporal punishment, and so forth. But in this
area, systematic efforts to relate the techniques of socialization to
cultural antecedents are few and far between, save for work on
Western societies, where the research of Riesman, and of Miller and
Swanson may stand as representative of vigorous efforts along these
lines. Generalizations of wider scope are rare, and we do not at pres-
ent know why one system emphasizes rewards, another punish-
ments, one loss of love, and another fear of beating. I will provide
one suggestive case and one example of cross-cultural comparative
work in this area. Among the Kalmuk Mongols, according to my
informants, it is thought that a father should bind his children to
him by ties of love and gratitude. Parents may be stern and authori-
tative, they may scold and reprove, but they use little physical pun-
ishment. When we note that the adult son may take his livestock
and leave the family group, and that support in old age is achieved
through children, this absence of harshness and use of affection
seems sensible. It would seem that the child's future independence
and the parents' subsequent dependence are foreshadowed by the
father's need to build a strong emotional bond with his child, and
hence to forego harshly authoritative discipline.

Two students at Michigan have used small samples of cultures
from the Human Relations Area Files (about 20) to examine the

392 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

relationship between the use of bogeymen, the use of physical pun-
ishment, and the level of political organization. They find that, in
general, use of bogeymen is more likely where physical punishment
is little used, and that bogeymen are used most heavily where there
is a low level of political integration. It is only fair to add that two
other students, using slightly different samples, found no such rela-
tionships, that there was no reliability check, and that the criteria
for "use of bogeymen" varied from term paper to term paper. As in
many other instances, however, the example is used mainly for
illustration of an approach. The theory underlying this is that where
parents are not themselves severely subordinated, they do not seem
to see their children as appropriate objects for severe subordination.
Whether they simply do not envisage this possibility, or whether
they envisage it and reject it, is unknown. Faced with the need to
control their children, they refer the sanction source to an outside
agency, the bogeymen, rather than attempting direct coercion of
the child.

A number of lines of inquiry as respects techniques suggest them-
selves; the two most obvious ones are the authoritative relationships
in which the parents are involved, and the future meaning of the
children to the parents. Inquiry in the field about the "why" of
techniques may yield little useful information on this score; it is at
least as likely to elicit valuable information regarding aims. Thus, if
we asked American parents of a few decades ago why they put their
childrens' arms in cardboard tubes to prevent thumbsucking we
would, I think, ultimately elicit anxiety about dependent, babyish
behavior and values respecting independence and maturity. We
would still be left with the problem of cardboard tube versus bitter
aloes versus slapping the hands, which would lead to still other con-
siderations.

Timing

Why there are changes in agents, aims, or techniques at particu-
lar times in different cultures constitutes a problem still largely un-
solved. We have mentioned the work of Whiting, Kluckhohn, and
Anthony, on delay of weaning and its association with general po-
lygyny and the spacing of births, Eisenstadt's regarding movement
into age groups, and my own seminars' work on age of first serious
economic responsibility. Due attention has been given to weaning,
toilet training, and various features of responsibility and independ-
ence training in various groups in Western society. But systematic

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 393

efforts in field work, or on a comparative basis to account for the
timing of various features of socialization, is still largely in the
future. The two most promising areas for work seem to be an ade-
quate analysis of age grading in childhood as a feature of social or-
ganization, and due attention to material conditions. Thus toddlers
may find their lives more circumscribed if they live surrounded by
dangers or valuables than under other conditions; women who work
in the fields may take unweaned children with them or leave them
behind, depending on the distance from home and the conditions
of life for children in the fields, and so on.

FEATURES OF CULTURES IN THEIR IMPACT
ON SOCIALIZATION

We have previously attempted to suggest that much work re-
mains to be done regarding the cultural variability of agent, aim,
technique, and timing in the process of socialization. We now turn
to take the perspective of the cultural system — or rather certain
features of it — as cause of this variability. In general, our analysis
of the causes of socialization cannot be much better than our un-
derstanding of the operation of cultural systems, since through this
understanding we come to see the requiredness of various features
of socialization for particular kinds of systems. I shall touch on some
major cultural features which seem promising antecedents for so-
cialization practices.

Tecfino/ogy

The specific demands of various technical operations in a culture
seem to afford one major, significant, and obvious source of varia-
bility in socialization. It has already been said that this may influence
the age of the assumption of major economic responsibility for
males. Barry, Bacon, and Child have shown that differences in the
socialization practices for boys and for girls are maximized (boys'
socialization stressing independence, achievement, and self-reliance
in such instances), where hunting, grain agriculture (there is no
separate consideration of plough agriculture), and care of large
herded animals are found. The authors consider the task itself as
imposing demands for this type of training; my own findings would
suggest that in some of these instances boys' training is delayed and
they are given a good deal of freedom — so that they spend much
time away from home in play groups where just these qualities are
enhanced. Both factors may be operative. Movement to serious eco-

394 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

nomic activities may result in a shift in the major agent of sociaKza-
tion from mother to father or mother's brother, and the nature of
the activities may determine the time of the shift. What associations
between task and technique there may be, I do not know. At any
rate, agent, aim, and timing are probably influenced directly by
task, if current findings are any guide.

It can also be assumed that the work groups dictated by the task
are significant matrices for socialization.

Economic Organization

Among the dominant types of extrafamilial systems of distribu-
tion of goods and services in premarket economies are reciprocity
and redistribution. Reciprocity involves an exchange where A gives
goods or services to B with the expectation of a subsequent return
from B. Haggling over the terms of the exchange is not found; in-
stead, A attempts by his generosity to make a future claim on B —
rather than attempting to sell his services as dearly as possible. As
a subtype of reciprocity, for present purposes, I will include cases
where a hunter who kills a large animal distributes it to his fellows,
rather than giving it to one person, expecting that when they, in
turn, kill large animals they will reciprocate.

Under redistribution I include cases where goods or services are
channeled upward to a central authority (individual or group),
which funnels the same or other goods downward to the followers
(cf. Sahlins 1958).

Market economies involve a relatively free market in land, labor,
and goods, with bargaining, a supply crowd and a demand crowd,
and the possibility of risk taking, profit making, and reinvestment
( cf. here and earlier Polanyi 1957, and Polanyi et al. 1957).

These three systems, only the first two of which are found in the
primitive world, have fundamentally different ethics. The ethic of
reciprocity is mutual generosity (however often it is transgressed) ;
the ethic of redistribution in its less exploitative forms is obligation
on the part of the follower and generosity in the form of noblesse
oblige on the part of the central authority; the ethic of the market
under various conditions has been delineated by Fromm (1947),
Riesman (1950), and Miller and Swanson (1958), among others,
and need not concern us here. These ethics are fundamental require-
ments of these systems — or at least are so under most conditions.
It must be assumed that they affect parental orientations, and hence
ultimately the socialization practices associated with these different

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 395

economies. This sort of chain affords the possibiUty of getting be-
yond values as primary causes, since it permits us to go from social
organizational antecedents to values to socialization. I have, in addi-
tion, an impression that under similar technical and environmental
conditions, the presence of a redistributive system in one case and
its absence in another increases the actual production of the group
in the redistributive case and hence makes it likely that children will
be pulled into the work group at an earlier age. (These remarks
should be qualified by noting that the scope of the redistributive
system — village-wide, chiefdom-wide, or kingdom-wide — is more
important than its mere presence or absence.)

Much of the work on achievement and affiliation, as well as on
other features of American child rearing by class and by time period
can probably be ultimately related to the nature of the market sys-
tem in the modern world, but our concern at present is with large-
scale comparisons and not merely with the present epoch of our own
culture.

I have here suggested, then, some connections between socializa-
tion aims and economic systems, without adverting to agents, tech-
niques, or (except in passing) timing.

Political Systems

Needless to say, there is a close connection between the type of
economic integration and the level of political integration. Bands,
which lack any clear-cut authoritative structure, and tribes, which
consist of sets of small territorial units cross-cut by sodalities or
clans, but lacking either strong local authority or overarching au-
thority above the local unit, are likely to have well-developed sys-
tems of reciprocity. Chiefdoms, where there is some centralized
authority but no ultimate central control of legitimate use of force,
and preindustrial states, where legitimate use of force is the prop-
erty of the government, are the domain of various kinds of redis-
tributive systems. Market-dominated societies, by contrast, seem to
belong par excellence to the period of mechanized industry. But
here we are concerned with the impact of authority or its absence
on socialization. In tribes and bands, two conditions normally pre-
vail: individuals are highly interdependent and leaving the group
is difficult, or family units are relatively autonomous and egress is
easy. With no central control of aggression, the former situation
seems to promote inhibition of aggression; the latter permits or en-
courages it. If this impression is correct, the aims of socialization

396 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

with respect to aggression should vary with these conditions. Weak
chiefdoms should resemble the first type of bands and tribes with
respect to aggression. Beyond that I cannot carry these assumptions.
I have already suggested that obedience training varies directly with
level of political integration, but the causes of this are not clear. Is
it the parents' anticipation of the authority the child must later
meet? Is it the parents' fear of being called to account for the child's
later behavior as a young adult? Is it simply automatic reflection of
the parents' own subordination? Is it association with level and
type of productivity and a demand imposed by day-to-day tasks, as
suggested by Barry, Child, and Bacon ( 1959) ?

General Comments

It would be possible to continue indefinitely with kinship units,
religious groupings, secret societies, age groups, types of community
structure, housing, crowding, and so on, as factors having influence
on socialization. I will stop at this point, however, since the examples
chosen do proceed from major cultural features to socialization,
even if the explanations and suggestions remain largely hypotheti-
cal. They remain so because we are so far from understanding the
causes of socialization.

METHODS OF RESEARCH

I have already suggested that the major methods available to us
for the study of socialization are the type of analysis of single cases
and the comparative techniques which permit us to demonstrate
covariation which have succeeded in other domains of ethnology
(cf. Whiting 1954). Field techniques include usual observation,
interviewing, and record keeping, but may have to be supplemented
by a large battery of special techniques. The publications to be ex-
pected from Whiting, Lambert, Child, and their co-workers on the
studies they have completed of six cultures can be expected to en-
rich our methodology, our substantive materials, and our systematic
understanding.

One special method deserves particular mention, however, if only
because it has received so little systematic attention for so long. That
is the detailed exploration of the transition rituals from birth to
marriage. It is hard to find a modern example of comparative work
in this area, except for the study of male initiation rituals by Whit-
ing, Kluckhohn and Anthony, and Eisenstadt's study of age group-
ing. Case studies are relatively perfunctory, on the whole, although

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 397

clues to many features of socialization and its attendant values are
to be found in these rituals.

There has been no discussion here of methods of the study of the
results of socialization. This is so for three reasons. First, this is not
the task I set myself. Second, it is my impression that personality
evaluation has become far too specialized a task for the anthropol-
ogist to expect to be both a competent clinical, personality, or social
psychologist and a competent anthropologist. Field teams seem to
be the answer here. Finally, accounting for socialization practices
does seem to me to be a task well within the province and compe-
tence of the anthropologist, interesting in its own right, and feasible
through the same techniques that permit us to understand other
cause and effect relationships in the cultural realm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AberlE; David F., and Kaspar D. Naegele

1952 Middle-class fathers' occupational role and attitudes toward children.
Amer. J. Orthopsychiatry 22:366—378.

Barry, Herbert III, Margaret K. Bacon, and Irvin L. Child

1957 A cross-cultural survey of some sex differences in socialization. J. Ab-
normal and Social Psych. 55:3 27—3 3 2.

Barry, Herbert III, Irvin L. Child, and Margaret K. Bacon

1959 Relation of child training to subsistence economy. Am. Anthropologist
61:51—63.

Benedict, Ruth F.

1953 Continuities and discontinuities in cultural conditioning. In Person-
ality in nature, society, and culture. Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A,
Murray, and David M. Schneider, eds., pp. 522-531. New York,
Alfred A. Knopf.

Child, Irvin L.

1954 Socialization. In Handbook of social psychology. Gardner Lindzey,
ed., pp. 655-692. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc.,
Vol. II.

Dyk, Walter, ed.

1938 Son of Old Man Hat. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Eggan, Fred

1955 The Cheyenne and Arapaho kinship system. In Social anthropology
of North American Tribes. Fred Eggan, ed., pp. 35-95. Chicago, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.

ElSENSTADT, S. N.

1956 From generation to generation: age groups and social structure. Glencoe,
The Free Press.

398 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Fromm, Erich

1947 Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York,
Rinehart and Company, Inc.
Kardiner, Abram, et ah

1945 The psychological frontiers of society, pp. 81—100. New York, Co-
lumbia University Press.
Kluckhohn, Clyde

1945 A Navaho personal document with a brief Paretian analysis. South-
western Journal of Anthropology 1:260—283.
Mead, Margaret

1953a Social change and cultural surrogates. In Personality in nature, society,
and culture. Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, and David M.
Schneider, eds., pp. 651-662. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Mead, Margaret

1953b Administrative contributions to democratic character formation at
the adolescent level. In Personality in nature, society, and culture.
Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, and David M. Schneider, eds.,
pp. 663-670. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Miller, Daniel R., and Guy E. Swanson

1958 The changing American parent. New York, Wiley and Co.
MuRDocK, George P.

1949 Social structure. New York, The MacMillan Company.
MuRDocK, George P., and John W. M. Whiting

195 1 Cultural determination of parental attitudes: the relationships between
the social structure, particularly family structure, and parental be-
havior. In Problems of infancy and childhood: transactions of the
fourth conference March 6—y, 1950, New York, sponsored by Josiah
Macy, Jr. Foundation, ed. Milton J. E. Senn. New York, Josiah Macy,
Jr. Foundation. Paper, pp. 13-34; discussion, pp. 34-80.

PoLANYi, Karl

1957 The great transformation. Boston, Beacon Press.
PoLANYi, Karl et al., eds.

1957 Trade and market in the early empires. Glencoe, the Free Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, a. R.

1952 On joking relationships. In Structure and function in primitive society,
by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, pp. 90-104. Glencoe, The Free Press.

RiESMAN, David

1950 The lonely crowd. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall D.

1958 Social stratification in Polynesia. Seattle, University of Washington
Press.

Simmons, Leo

1942 Sun Chief, the autobiography of a Hopi Indian. New Haven, Yale Uni-
versity Press.
White, Leslie A.

1949 Energy and the evolution of culture. In The science of culture, by Leslie
A. White, pp. 363-393. New York, Farrar, Straus and Co.

CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION 199

Whiting, John W. M.

1954 The cross-cultural method. In Handbook of social psychology, Gardner
Lindzey, ed., pp. 523-531. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Publish-
ing Co., Inc. Vol. I.

Whiting, John W. M. et al.

1953 Field manual for the cross cultural study of child rearing, prepared for
Committee on Social Behavior. New York, Social Science Research
Council. Mimeo.

Whiting, John W. M., and Irving L. Child

1953 Child training and personality. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Whiting, John W. M., Richard Kluckhohn, and Albert Anthony

1958 The function of male initiation ceremonies at puberty. In Readings in
Social Psychology, Eleanor E. Macoby, Theodore M. Newcomb, and
Eugene L. Hartley, eds., pp. 359-370. New York, Henry Holt and
Company.

chapter 14

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE
AN EXPLORATION*

FRANCIS L. K. HSU

Northwestern University

To THE individual in all societies the importance of other human
beings, as compared with that of nonhuman elements in his environ-
ment, is supreme. This factor can even overshadow his basic desire
for self-preservation, for it is not hard to find individuals in any
culture who will give their lives because of their parents, spouses,
tribe, or nation. Whether the custom is head-hunting or potlatch,
whether the economic activity is agriculture, nomadism, or mech-
anized industries, and whatever the individual's status or interest,
the prime mover of the individual's behavior lies in the nature of his
relationship with other members of his society. The extent to which
he will exert himself is in direct ratio to the degree to which he feels
he has attained a proper place among his fellow men. That is to say,
he tends to experience a greater urge to strive toward improvement
of his position if he pictures himself to be in a wrong or lower place
from where he ought to be, whereas he tends to be more satisfied
with the status quo if he feels the reverse. The specific methods he
resorts to are, of course, as varied as they are culturally given, but
the basic objects he strives for may be summarized into three cate-
gories: sociability, security, and status. The meanings of these basic
social needs of the individual, and how they compare with needs
postulated by other scholars, have been discussed elsewhere (Hsu

* In preparing this chapter, I am particularly indebted to Dr. Paul J. Bohannan for going over
the entire manuscript and making many valuable comments and suggestions, especially with reference
to the relationship between kinship structure and kinship content. I am also indebted to Dr. G. P.
Murdock for his constructive comments when the basic ideas of the paper were first presented at
the annual American Anthropological Association meetings at Tucson, Arizona, in 1953 and to
Drs. W. R. Bascom and Fred Eggan for going over the early version of the manuscript and
materially helping its birth.

400

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 401

1 96 1, Chapter VIII) . Suffice it to point out here that whether the
individual has achieved his proper place among his fellow human
beings is measured by two interrelated yardsticks: on the one hand,
by what Mead, Sullivan, and others, describe as the attitudes toward
himself (M. H. Kuhn 1954) ; on the other hand, the attitudes to-
ward him on the part of those fellow men to whom he is bound or
with whom he is identified.

Thus, whether the individual attempts to improve himself by
getting married, by conquest of air and sea, by acquisition of wealth,
or by elaboration of the imaginary, his primary concern is his place
among fellow men. The place of the individual among his fellow
men refers, of course, not only to the present. It could be keyed to
the past, so that this concern is chiefly centered in his elders and, by
extension, his departed ancestral spirits; or it could be keyed to the
future, so that this concern is primarily aimed at his descendants,
and, by extension, those yet to be born; or it could be keyed to both
past and future.

Nor is the place of the individual among his fellow men static. It
is subject to the changing circumstances in which the individual
finds himself. For example, in spite of the most serene childhood ex-
periences, a majority of individuals will not feel secure when faced
by later economic, social, or political uncertainty. Regardless of
early histories, a majority of human beings in any crowd escaping
from a fire will become panicky and trample one another.

The relative importance of early versus later experiences is imma-
terial to the arguments of this chapter. The crucial point here is the
great importance of kinship as the primary web of relationships
connecting every new-born individual with his fellow men and
through them, with the over-all pattern of thought and action pre-
vailing in the society of which he forms a part.

The connection between a kinship system and the over-all pattern
of thought and action of a people may be seen from two angles. On
the one hand, some kinship systems enable the individuals reared in
them to achieve their appropriate places in terms of sociability, se-
curity, and status with greater ease than do other kinship systems.
The inference is that the individuals who grow up and live in the
former type of kinship system may be expected to bestir themselves
far less than those who grow up and live in the latter type of kinship
systems. Hence, the societies with the former type of kinship
systems are likely to be more dynamic than those with the latter
type.

On the other hand, the individual can be expected to strive more

402 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

not only when his self-attitude is higher than accorded it by his fel-
low human beings but also when the people related to him cause
him to feel that he has some chance of success and much to gain
after his success. Conversely, he is unlikely to strive very hard when
the people related to him give him reason to believe that he has little
chance of success or little to gain even with success. Therefore, the
individual's tendency to adventure, conquest, and expansion no less
than his tenacity to face terrible disasters like epidemic, drought, or
foreign conquest depends greatly, in the first place, on whether or
not his society demands such heroic actions on his part in order for
him to keep his membership in it as a self-respecting man, and in the
second place, on whether or not his group provides him with social-
psychological support for prolonged efforts and concerted action.
This hypothesis makes no assumption on the uniformity of behavior
in any society. A few individuals may be aggressive where most
others in the same society are docile; a few may fight a last-ditch
battle where most others have given up ; but the behavior of the ma-
jority is strongly affected by the forces just described.

The Hypothesis

However, existing results of kinship studies would seem to show
that varieties of kinship have no connection with the diverse ways
of life in different societies.^ There does not seem to be any way of
avoiding this conclusion when we note that the Eskimo "type" of
"kinship organization" is also characteristic of the highly indus-
trialized Yankees of New England, the peasant Ruthenians of
eastern Europe, the simple agriculturalists of Taos Pueblo in the
southwestern United States, and the Andamese pygmies of the trop-
ical forest as well as many others (Murdock 1949:226-228) ; and
that the Dakota type of kinship organization is also characteristic
of such diverse peoples as the Fijians, the Tallensi, the Manchus, and
the Chinese (Murdock 1949:236-238) . For in spite of the similar-
ity or even the identity of the kinship structures in question, the
ways of life of the diverse societies in which they are found bear no
resemblance one to another.

What has happened so far is that most students of kinship from
Murdock, Steward (1937) , Spoehr (1947) , Goldschmidt (1948)

^ The term "way of life" is used to denote the characteristic manner in which the people of
a given society look at things and express their outlook in concrete actions. It is, therefore, the
same as "national character," a term used in Chapters 6 and 7, except that "national character,"
by custom, is applicable to large and literate societies, while "way of life" here applies to all
societies. For a fuller exposition of what the "way of life" means, see Hsu 1953:2-17.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 403

to Levi-Strauss ( 1949) , Eggan ( 1950) , Leach ( 1952) , and others
have concentrated on certain aspects of kinship structure. They at-
tempt to answer in one way or another the following questions:
What factors are correlated with the development of kinship groups
such as clan, phratry, dual organization, or their shift from one em-
phasis to another? What factors affect the change of kinship usages
such as relationship terms, mother-in-law avoidance, and forms of
marriage? But there has been little or no serious attempt to deal with
kinship content which can go far to help us with another question:
What effects do certain types of kinship organization have on the
pattern of thought and behavior of individuals reared in them?

Answers bearing on such a question have been sought by some
students of psychological anthropology with the central focus on
child-rearing practices (see Whiting in Chapter 12). But even
some students of kinship have not been completely oblivious of this
question. For example, it may have been implicit in parts of works
by Eggan when he spoke of the "sociological correlates" of the kin-
ship systems of the Western Pueblo (1950:292). It had been skirted
by Malinowski when he attempted to show the effect of matrilineal
inheritance in Trobriand Islands on the nature of father-son rela-
tionship (1929, 1933) , and by Fortune (whatever we think of his
conclusions) when he related the Dobuan world view with their
kinship usage of alternative residences ( 1932) . The only more ex-
tensive examination of this question is a work of Firth ( 195 1 ) , but
this volume, though sometimes stimulating and insightful, comes
to little more than the general observation that human behavior is
intimately intertwined with social organization.

However, armed by an untenable antithesis between psychologi-
cal and sociological explanations, students of kinship have not only
seen no necessary connection between their work and the culture-
and-personality studies but often reacted to them with frank hos-
tility. The task of a systematic exploration of the exact relationship
between kinship variation and specific ways of life in different socie-
ties remains to be attempted. This line of inquiry seems imperative
if the study of kinship is to attain a truly significant place in the
total perspective of the science of man. For if kinship is the web
through which human beings are woven together from birth to
death, it most certainly must, a priori, be related not only to matters
such as kinship terms or mother-in-law avoidance but also to the
formation, organization, and operation of the most essential pat-
terns of thought and behavior.

404 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The purpose of this chapter is to show that a very real correla-
tion exists between kinship and ways of life. This hypothesis is
based on three interrelated propositions : ( i ) The failure to perceive
this correlation thus far is due to concentration on structure to the
neglect of content, (2) kinship structure is less clearly related to
the thought and action patterns of the individual than kinship con-
tent, and ( 3 ) kinship content is, in the last analysis, rooted in kin-
ship structure.

Kinship Structure and Kinship Content Differentiated

Kinship structure describes those features which govern the for-
mal patterns of arrangement among individuals standing in re-
ciprocal categories of kinship. It comprehends rules of descent,
residence, inheritance; in-law avoidances; conjugal or joint fami-
lies; and so forth. Kinship content pertains to the characteristics
which govern the tenacity, intensity, or quality of interaction
among individuals related through kinship. It crystallizes itself into
such values as individualism and self-reliance, romantic love in mar-
riage, emphasis on youth, or on the importance of ancestors.

To illustrate, a new-born infant may have coming early into his
life only his parents or mother and mother's brothers plus a few
siblings and an occasional contact with others; or he may have com-
ing early into his life relatives including not only his parents or
mother and mother's brothers as well as siblings, but also a vast array
of other relatives and nonrelatives. These are matters of kinship
structure. They spell the differences between the conjugal family
and some larger unit, or between patrilocal or matrilocal residence.

However, two infants who have the same number and kind of
individuals come into their respective lives may be affected dif-
ferently because these individuals may act as though they each pos-
sess them and can order their lives separately; or these individuals
may act as though they are mere spectators and that their own
mothers are the real powers that lay down all laws. These are mat-
ters of kinship content. They are rooted in the difference between
mutual dependence and individualism, both terms to be explained
below.

The differences between structure and content have been ex-
plored in another publication (Hsu 1959). What needs to be
pointed out here, however, is that the content of a kinship system
is to a great extent determined by the emphasis given one or another
particular primary relationship in the kinship structure.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 405

Eight basic relationships are to be found in every kinship system.
They are those of husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, mother-
daughter, father-daughter, sister-sister, brother-brother, and
brother-sister. No matter how much more extensive the kinship
system is, the relationships between more remotely situated indi-
viduals in it (designated in this chapter as secondary relationships)
are, with few exceptions, extensions of one or another of these pri-
mary relationships. However, these eight primary relationships are
not given the same emphasis by different societies. Furthermore,
when a kinship system gives emphasis to one of these relationships,
it does so not only by reducing the importance of other relationships,
but also by modifying their contents, so that the resulting kinship
systems vary greatly in attributes and in their influences on the in-
dividuals reared in them.

To pursue this hypothesis I propose to examine, in the balance of
this chapter, four types of kinship systems, each dominated by one
structural relationship, and see how they may be related to many
outstanding characteristics in thought and behavior among the peo-
ples living in them. The hypothesis presupposes that each structural
relationship possesses inherent and distinctive attributes. When one
relationship is elevated over other relationships in a given kinship
system, the attributes of the dominating relationship tend to mod-
ify, eliminate, or at least reduce the importance of the attributes of
other structural relationships. The hypothesis further presumes that
the total effect of the dominance of the attributes of one structural
relationship leads to a particular kind of kinship content which in
turn strongly conditions the pattern of thought and behavior of
the individual reared in it. The four types of kinship content and
their structural connections are given below:

A. Mutual dependence among members of kin and community, which is rooted
in the emphasis on father-son axis at the expense of all other relationships.

B. Self-rehance on the part of the individual which is rooted in the supremacy
of husband-wife axis at the expense of all other relationships.

C. Supernatural reliance which is found where the mother-son axis tends to have
more primary importance over other relationships.

D. A degree of mutual dependence together with the emphasis on brother-brother
axis and practically no worship of the ancestors.

It is understood, of course, that no typology covers all the facts
or puts all of them into perfectly neat compartments (J. H. Stew-
ard 1954) . First, every typology is a matter of abstraction, and the
level of abstraction determines what facts must be included and

406 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

what must be excluded. Second, even the facts covered by any one
statement are never as uniform as the statement would indicate.
Consider such an observation as "American society is founded on
the ideas of equality, freedom and fair play." Surely any reader can
find many historical and contemporary facts as well as the outlook
of individual Americans which obviously negate the high-sounding
principles. Yet, to conclude that the American society is not
founded on these ideas is to be blind to the fundamental trend of
development of American society and culture and, therefore, to
be very wide of the mark. Even a statement such as "Universal edu-
cation prevails in American society" is not without exception. In
World War II, at least 2 per cent of American males were rejected
because of illiteracy. Yet, no one can dispute the fact that universal
education is firmly established in this society both as a matter of
conviction and as a matter of practice. Third, every type enumer-
ated below contains internal variations which, in more elaborate
treatments, may merit description as subtypes.

With these qualifications in mind let us, then, examine in some
detail the characteristics of behavior in the four types of societies
that are associated with the four different kinds of kinship content.^

TYPE A SOCIETIES

Included in this group are those of a majority of the Oriental peo-
ples, including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Siamese, and others, but
excluding the major inhabitants of India: the Hindus and the Mos-
lems.

Kinship

The structural characteristics of these kinship systems are simple:
they are patrilineal, patrilocal, and by and large patriarchal. The
basic unit in which the infant finds himself is generally the patri-
lineal extended family. Among the lower classes this unit is smaller,
approximating the individual family of parents and unmarried chil-
dren, but in higher classes, it is sometimes enormous. However, even
among the poor, the child's grandparents and in-laws are likely to
be much in evidence.

" The sequence of A, B, C, and D given the four types of society discussed in this chapter has
no ranking significance. It really follows the sequence of my academic acquaintance with these
societies. I began my studies of the Chinese culture as a student in 1934; then came my introduc-
tion to English culture in 1937; this was followed by my residence and work in the U.S. since
1945; and a period of 18 months' field work in India from 1955 to 1957. My serious reading and
reflection on Africa had only begun in 1959.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 407

The structural relationship most elevated is that of the father-
son. All other relationships are either extensions of this central axis,
or are subordinated to and modified by it. The boldest example of
this type is found among the Chinese and the weakest among the
Siamese. The first attribute of the father-son relationship is in-
clusiveness. There is only one father but there are usually many sons.
In fact, even when there is only one son the parents as a rule hope for
more. The other attribute of it is continuity. Every father-son rela-
tionship is a link in an endless chain of father-son relationships. For
every father is a son and every son, in the normal course of events,
will be a father.

The characteristic kinship content correlated with the emphasis
on father-son axis is mutual dependence. Enmeshed in a network
of continuous relationships, the individual is conditioned to orient
himself lineally, and, in a secondary way, laterally within a well-de-
fined group; he is naturally the product of his forebears before him
as he is automatically the progenitor of his descendants yet to some.
His place in that line is specific and inalienable. Superficially the
relationship seems to be one sided, namely, sons owe much more to
their fathers than their fathers do to them. The obligations are ac-
tually quite mutual. The son owes his father all services as desired,
unquestioned obedience, extreme respect, and complete support
in life as in death. But the father owes to the son marital arrange-
ment, protection, and all his inheritance. (In Japan the inheritance
rules are governed by primogeniture. ) The ideal son is sensitive to
every whim on the part of his father. The father's every wish is his
command. But the ideal father takes every precaution to see that
his sons are well married, well educated, well connected, and well
provided for. Death and torture are often endured willingly by sons
and fathers in fulfilling some of these obligations. The mother, by
virtue of her marriage to the father, her assumption of his clan
membership, and the biological relationship with the son, in an inte-
gral part of this core relationship: whatever is due to the father is
equally due to the mother, except that she is not expected to have
the means to support her son.

Starting from this basic father-son axis, similar relationships ex-
tend both vertically and horizontally. Vertically each father-son
axis is a necessary link in a chain connecting one's lineal forebears,
living or dead, with one's lineal descendants already born or yet to
be born. Horizontally it is the model against which are measured
one's attitudes, duties, and obligations toward all agnatic male kins-

408 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

men and their wives in the ascending or the descending generations.

In this web of kinship the individual has no freedom; he is hedged
in on all sides. But he also has little fear of being left out, for he can
count on help from all sides just as he is expected to give help. This
is at the root of the well-known Oriental nepotism, except in Japan
(Hsu 1954) . Symptomatic of this solidarity is the fact that ancestor
worship, going back for many generations, is the rule among them.
The living descendants have the duty of providing for the ancestors
who have departed and of glorifying them. In turn, the departed
members of the family as a matter of course look after the interests
of the living descendants. So great is this sense of solidarity that, un-
like the ancestor cult found in any other part of the world, these
peoples do not believe that the departed ancestors will do them harm
as spirits. There does not seem to be any Oriental society in which
ancestral spirits are prayed to for forgiveness during emergencies
such as sickness, floods, or epidemics.

The great importance given to the father-son axis reduces, modi-
fies, or dominates all other relationships, including that between
husband and wife. Indeed the married woman's primary duties are
not those to her husband but to her husband's parents or her sons.
Similarly the married man's duties to his parents and to his sons take
precedence over those to others. For this reason romantic love as an
ideal is absent and public expressions of intimacy, whether by a man
and his wife before his parents or by a man and his wife before their
children, are taboo. A son can be required by parents to divorce his
wife if she fails to please them, just as he is duty-bound to take a
concubine if his wife fails to provide a son. The need for vertical
continuity and horizontal solidarity within the kinship group prac-
tically eliminates individual privacy. Consequently, children are
raised to enter into the adult world as soon as they are physically
and mentally capable to do so. In fact, mutual dependence requires
that children share the vicissitudes of the adult world from infancy
onward. Discipline (punishment, reward, rules) tends to be incon-
sistent for it is never exclusively in the hands of mother or parents.
For not only grandparents, but in-laws, neighbors and friends can
actively interfere with it.

The clan is seen as an extension of the father-son axis to all male
agnates. Clan is usually present among most of these peoples. This
clan is not a mere device to regulate marriage. It is usually an organ-
ized body which regulates the members' behavior, settles their dis-
putes, and defends them against outside oppressors or enemies. So

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 409

Strong is the patrilineal emphasis in the clan that all women married
into it assume its identity, a trait not found elsewhere so far except
among the Gusii of Kenya (Mayer 1949) .

General Cbaracferistics

People living in this type of kinship pattern will be satisfied with
the status quo and are conservative. There is no urge within the so-
ciety toward fission. On the contrary, there are deep-seated centrip-
etal tendencies. Since the place of the individual in the web of
kinship is inalienable and perpetual, his need for striving to prove
himself is not great. And since the individual's growing up experi-
ences are multiple-centered, he tends to view the world not in abso-
lute terms of black and white but in relativistic fashion with many
compromises. Consequently, there are fewer chances for men to be
pulled asunder by abstract issues or by the desire for all or none. Even
faced with famine, they tend to tighten their belts and eat less in-
stead of moving to new lands. The small minority of them who do
emigrate tend to make up an elaborate duplication of the way of
life that they had known before, and/or maintain their solidarity
with the home society and/or return physically to the home society
at some later date. With few exceptions, they wish to die at the
places of their birth and to be buried in their ancestral graveyards.
Most of them do so.

From this point of view we may see the relation between language
and culture in a new light. Some scholars have tended, as did Whorf
later, to conclude that the Chinese had not developed science be-
cause Chinese thought would have been incongruous with Western
logic based upon Indo-European grammar (Granet 1934 and Chang
1939) . Our analysis here makes it clear that the Chinese lack an in-
terest in abstraction because their anchorage in the web of human
relations foredoomed the development of any scientific spirit and
inquiry, in spite of an early history of science and invention. Else-
where I have already detailed this point (Hsu 1953 ) . What we need
to point out here is that the Chinese language, especially the written
version, instead of being the cause of Chinese lack of science, was
probably shaped by the same restraining forces which limited the
development of Chinese science. Chinese is the only completely
nonalphabetical language in the modern world; it is more difficult
to learn and use than the alphabetical ones. What is more, while
Japan, Korea, and Annam of Indo-China (until the French con-
quest) each has its own separate set of alphabet, all have tenaciously

410 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

retained the Chinese characters which they borrowed before they
acquired their alphabets, to be concurrently used with their own
alphabetically derived words, even though this is not only unneces-
sary, but also a source of great inconvenience. Their conservatism
is, therefore, great. A final fact indicating that language does not
limit the development of science is that Japan, after her Meiji Res-
toration which propelled her to a position of world prominence, did
not even attempt to eliminate the parallel use of Chinese language.
After World War II the teaching of Chinese in Japanese schools was
suspended on order of General MacArthur, but was resumed after
the end of the American occupation.

Their literature is voluminous. And their art works, especially
those of China and Japan, are regarded as among the best in the
world. But because of the individual's security and submersion
among fellow human beings, their literature and art delve very little
into emotion or into the unseen. Their music is characterized by
melodious elaboration of a simple nature, albeit they have many
more kinds of musical instruments than most nonliterate peoples.
Yet no matter how many instruments are played together, the re-
sult is unison, not harmony of different chords or melodies. The
music is often functional, to be played on social, ceremonial and re-
ligious occasions and is at best tied to acting such as in operas.

Central Governmenf

These peoples tend to develop over-all national states with cen-
tralized governments. Submission to parental authority and to long
lines of ancestors is consistent with ties with the wider government.
Rank is ubiquitous and consciously acknowledged by the highly
placed as well as by those inferior in situation, much as that which
prevails in the kinship organization. The rulers, therefore, will be
frankly autocratic but not authoritarian. Their autocracy is ex-
pressed in their unconcealed claim to superiority over their subjects.
They and their subjects both admit that their decrees are, at least
in theory, absolute. They maintain their unabashed ranking distinc-
tions by their almost complete separation from their subjects. They
tend to have no direct contact with their subjects, either bodily or
even by sight. In fact, a majority of Orientals have been traditionally
forbidden to possess a likeness of their rulers.

But they cannot be authoritarian for two reasons. First, their
power, however absolute, is invariably hampered by their parents,
wives, concubines, or parents of their wives or concubines, or eu-

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 411

nuchs and their parents, or powerful ministers or their relatives,
or the ruler's relatives' relatives. The ruler cannot deal with these
and other related individuals effectively even if he objected to what
they do because, in a framework of mutual dependence, he is con-
sciously dependent upon them as much as they are upon him.

The other reason why the ruler cannot be authoritarian is that
while the ruler-subject relationship is a projection of the basic kin-
ship model, there is one difference. The latter lies in the fact that, in
the normal course of events, the security of the common man is
found in solidarity with his parents and other primary circles of
relatives. The ruler in such a situation does not easily achieve the
sort of determined and vehement following often achieved by many
of his counterparts in Type B societies (Western) . Consequently,
the function of the Oriental ruler is to maintain, by and large, the
status quo. (Even Japan is no real exception, to be noted below.) He
is less the leader of the people than the keeper of the existing tradi-
tion and social order. He cannot arouse his subjects easily to march
with him because their support of him lacks the necessary zeal.

This lack of zeal explains why, unless a ruler is grossly incom-
petent or has behaved contrary to the established customs and ways
of the people, he would have no trouble with the problem of dissen-
sion. Even when an established reign has tumbled and when many
war lords are fighting for supremacy some new dynastic founder
tends to emerge with relative ease within a short period of time. The
lack of positive zeal for the leader and the need for preserving the
kinship group taught Oriental lords to fight no battle of desperation
unless there was absolutely no escape from death. As soon as one
faction looked like a winner, the inclination of the other contenders
was to jump on the band wagon and find themselves a comfortable
but secondary place through subordination. This picture holds true
even if the new ruler happens to be alien. Unless the changes im-
posed by the alien rulers touch the fundamentals, peoples of this
type are not likely to resist subordination by violence. In fact, being
relativistic in their view of life, they will not be ashamed to adjust
by passive acquiescence to, and even by a degree of active coopera-
tion with, the enemy. They may try with amazing speed even to as-
sume the external patterns of action of the conqueror.

These are perhaps some of the reasons why Oriental states usually
were able to maintain unity for longer periods of time than those
of the West. The idea of an opposition as a normal feature to check
on the dominant power is unknown in Oriental tradition. But for

412 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the same reason the unity of Oriental states was generally without
the kind of active solidarity of strength characteristic of their coun-
terparts in the West. For the real solidarity lay in the kinship organi-
zation, so that changes in the wider political overlordship did not
concern the individual except when the new ruler actively inter-
fered too much with his private life and relations. Therefore, when
faced with modern Western states, the Oriental political organiza-
tions generally appear to be powerless.

Religion

Polytheistic. The core is usually ancestor worship. But, in addi-
tion, there are a multitude of personified gods. They have a large
number of gods. They will borrow "gods" from other peoples freely
so long as these gods can coexist with each other and with previously
established gods. The deities may be arranged hierarchically, and
there may be one supreme deity over all others. However, there is
no idea that one god only is true and others are false or that all deities
are diverse expressions of the same supreme being. This is perfectly
in harmony with their relativistic view of life based on the fact that
all males, and even females, will in due course achieve their greatness
in a continuum along the father-son axis of long lines of ancestors
and descendants. Their lack of concern for the unseen and the ab-
stract manifests itself clearly. The gods are worshipped by the peo-
ples for the express purpose of seeking solutions to specific problems
such as disease, longevity, fertility, epidemics, and so forth. Their
good will is maintained through offerings, sacrifices, verbal exalta-
tion, recitation of some portions of scriptures by the devotees them-
selves or hired priests, or good deeds among men. Their religious
dogma, in spite of their long written histories and literacy, tends
to be simple and matter-of-fact, similar to those found among non-
literate peoples, and usually offers common sense solutions to their
problems. Some of their faiths may have a systematic theology run-
ning into volumes. But these concern only a minority of the be-
lievers. Hence, followers of all cults tend to mix up with each other
in rituals and beliefs. In fact it is usually difficult to describe them
as followers of any particular cult. Religious "persecution" may
flare up on rare occasions with sudden impact of a foreign cult, but
such persecution is inevitably tied up with political insecurity and
is neither long lasting nor widespread. For they have no idea of an
all-or-none struggle between "good" and "evil." They know no
religious wars. Some of them may be "converted" to monotheistic

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 413

faiths, but few of the converts exhibit anything approaching the re-
Hgious fervor and devotion of many of their Western brethren. For
they have no missionary zeal and are not interested in converting
nonbeHevers. In keeping with the pattern of mutual dependence,
merits and demerits are transferable along kinship lines. Individuals
could soar to fame or fortune, or their souls could be rescued from
hell, by virtue of the deeds of their ancestors or descendants.

Impetus fo Change

The individual tends to be highly competitive for traditional
goals. A man can, and is in fact encouraged to, exhibit initiative in
getting up more costly and pompous funerals for his parents, or in
going to some extreme to please his parents in filial piety, to glorify
his ancestry, or, in Japan, to show devotion to the emperor. But he
is unlikely to exercise his imagination by doing things which are not
traditionally given, such as for a scholar to go into business. Internal
impetus to change within these societies is generally lacking. For the
individual can, in the main, reach his proper station among fellow
men through the kinship framework. But forces limiting change
have a snowballing effect on the aggrandizement of tradition. Thus,
a tradition, whether it be footbinding or the contempt for soldiers,
tends to become stronger and even goes to extremes as time goes on.
Footbinding in China began as a frivolity among some court danc-
ers who wrapped their bare feet with white satin to please the
emperor. By the early twentieth century, many women deformed
their feet into such small points that they could hardly walk. The
higher the social class, the greater the competitive tendency and the
smaller the feet.

Most individuals are automatically assured of honorable places in
the social organization, in life as well as after death. Ancestor wor-
ship provides a complete continuity between the dead and the liv-
ing, the past and the present. Therefore, while the tendency to excel
in glorification of the lineage and ancestry is great, the tendency
to preserve everything traditional, from duties and obligations to
mores and customs, is also great. The very close and permanent hu-
man ties serve as a drag on initiative so that people are prevented
from venturing out into untrodden paths, intellectually, emotion-
ally, and physically (except Japan; see Hsu 1954). The social
organization is such as softly but unremittingly to nip in the bud a
majority if not all internal efforts to change the scheme of things.
There is a general lack of interest in associations other than those

414 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

based on kinship, marriage, locality, and occupation. For the vast
majority there are not even age groups or hunting organizations
and rarely any sort of sport which requires the competition between
two organized bodies. Overthrow of the ruling dynasty was re-
ported (except Japan) , but revolution was unknown before impact
of the West. Since they have little urge to elaborate the unseen, their
Utopias, never numerous, tend to be close copies of the actual worlds
in which they live, minus such disturbing elements as war, banditry,
and dishonesty. There may be different indigenous philosophies, but
these have never become bases for contending factions in any ir-
reconcilable way for the simple reason that the majority of peoples
in this type of society have a tendency not to get actively involved
in ideologies which are abstract and remote from the immediately
accepted reality.

Over long periods of time there seem to be only two conditions
which are the mainsprings for change in these societies. One condi-
tion is the increase of population which precipitates some inevitable
expansion, even though the peoples entertain no great dream about
new frontiers. But, as pointed out before, the expansion is slow and
is not accompanied by any noticeable desire to cultural, political or
economic independence of the newly acquired territory. The other
condition for change is external pressure or invasion. Such societies
have successfully withstood external forces, military or cultural, by
their basic cohesion. But they may be overrun, although they seem
to have the ability to modify ultimately the alien forces in their
midst, and they usually recover by achieving new syntheses between
their traditional and the alien elements. They tend to render the
alien-imposed programs ineffective not by armed opposition
(though this occasionally occurs) but chiefly by emasculating them
through unobtrusive persistence. The strength of their way of life
lies in its permanent solidarity between the dead, the living, and the
unborn. This kinship relationship provides the individual with great
resilience toward environmental problems so that he is not easily
given to despair or loss of heart.

In the process of their persistence, they cannot but change a little.
But such changes, especially the more spectacular and speedier ones,
do not easily take deep root. It has been said that while China had
successfully absorbed her foreign conquerors in the past, she may
not be able to do it with Western powers. This remains to be seen.
From this analysis, it seems certain that neither China nor Japan will
be basically threatened or altered very easily by the West, even

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 415

though the West, including the Communist West, certainly has
caused them great disturbances.

No society in this type is likely either to die out physically through
conquest or loss of resources or even to lose the continuation of its
way of life such as is found in many parts of the nonliterate world
or the West.

TYPE B SOCIETIES

Type B includes the societies of a majority of the Western peo-
ples— Europeans and the peoples of European origin throughout
the world.

Kinship

The kinship structure of these peoples is usually patrilineal, patri-
local or neolocal, and in many instances, nominally patriarchal. The
basic unit in which the infant finds himself is the individual family,
consisting of parents and unmarried children. In some parts of
Europe, especially in premodern times, the joint family prevailed
more than the individual family, and even in modern times some
of these peoples have more affines living under the same roof than
others. Among the lower and upper classes, the number of children
is generally larger, while among the middle classes, the trend is in
reverse.

The structural relationship most elevated is that of the husband-
wife axis. All other relationships are either subordinated to this
central axis or are patterned after and modified by it. The strongest
example of this type is found among modern Americans of the
United States, and the weakest, among the eastern Europeans.

Unlike those of the father-son axis, the attributes of the husband-
wife axis are exclusiveness and discontinuity. It is discontinuous
over the generations because each husband-wife relationship is
ended when one or both of the partners die. It is exclusive of other
individuals because each husband-wife relationship is not only com-
plete by itself but is intolerant of intrusion by any third party. It
must, therefore, insist on monogamy as an absolute ideal. Among the
peoples constituting Type B there is, of course, variation in the
nature of the husband-wife axis. In Eastern Europe the husband-
wife axis is unquestionably husband-dominated, and in the United
States the wife so equals her husband in nearly every way that it
gives the impression of being wife-dominated. But whichever case
we refer to, the central and dominating position of the husband-

416 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

wife axis over all others in this type of kinship system is obvious.
In contrast to Type A societies, the husband-wife union is the only
relationship which is expressly and elaborately sanctioned, guar-
anteed and safeguarded by the church as well as by the law. It is so
elevated above all other relationships and so freed from their encum-
brances, that it is glorified by, and only supposed to be founded, on
romantic love, an expression which embodies unaccountableness of
the choice, exclusive possession between the partners of each other,
freedom from interference by other human beings, and complete
lack of definite ties with other relationships whether they be parent-
child or fraternal. In Type A societies the father-son axis symbolizes
all that is "forever." In Type B the husband-wife axis is the only
relationship which is "forever."

Given this central emphasis it is easy to see how the other relation-
ships in this type of system are either subordinate or thoroughly
unimportant. The parent-child relationship is given great impor-
tance only before the son or daughter reaches majority. Even during
this period, once the parental consent for marriage is given the
parents no longer have control over anything. Support of children
by parents is limited by the same factor. Support of parents by chil-
dren is, even where the law insists on it, highly conditional and no
child has to keep a parent under the same roof with his or her spouse.
Generally speaking, parents have complete freedom in bequest.

Polygamy of any variety is incongruous with the emphasis on
husband-wife axis. Mistresses and gigolos may be kept on the side
by men and women who have the means. They may be connived by
the public and in the church, but these relationships have never
been made truly legitimate as they have in Types A, C, and D.
Divorce rested at first with the church and has gradually been
shifted into the hands of the two married partners, but at no time
has it been a matter of the authority of the parents. Sibling rela-
tionships, uncle-niece relationships, uncle-nephew relationships,
mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships all are reduced
more or less to matters of friendship. If the parties concerned like
each other, they may develop very great solidarity with each other.
But if they do not happen to enjoy the sight of each other, one can
die without knowing where the others live. They have no definite
legal and social obligations to each other. Their economic relation-
ships are limited to voluntary gift making or certain claims on assets
left by the intestate dead. This is the only type of kinship system in
which all sorts of public display of erotic expressions between lovers

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 417

and spouses is encouraged, pictorialized, glorified as though they
could be separated from physical sex, and played up so that they can
almost stop traffic in the busiest thoroughfare.

While emphasis on the father-son axis leads naturally to the social
importance of extended relationships along the male line and the
formation of the clan, the emphasis on husband-wife axis cuts each
married couple adrift to itself. The family starts with a man and a
woman. They beget children and the family may be enlarged to a
size of ten or even fifteen or more, but as the youngsters are married
and move away, the family shrinks back to where it began. In con-
trast to the child in Type A, that in Type B grows up under the
monolithic hands of the parents, usually the mother. Right and
wrong, reward and punishment, tend to be absolute and clear cut.
Before reaching majority children are the exclusive charges of the
parents. Any interference in discipline of the child from any source
(even grandparents) is resented unless the parents ask for it. At the
same time the value of individual privacy leads the parents to foster
in their children a childhood world of their own, divorced from that
of their elders. The tendency is to make this childhood as simple as
possible, as consistent as possible, as angelic as possible, so that the lit-
tle ones will be free from frustration. Since parents tend not to di-
vulge their own affairs to their children and since children's activities
have little or no reference to the adult world (such as making a liv-
ing) , the youngsters are likely to be unaware of the inconsistencies
in adult life, in which honor and dishonesty, triumph and tragedy
may occur simultaneously or intermixed, sometimes without rhyme
or reason. On the contrary, the children tend to be conditioned to
a black or white picture of life, in which all good men are rewarded
and all bad ones punished.

The kinship content most commensurate with the emphasis on
husband-wife axis is individualism or self-reliance. Having to seek
a mate on his or her own merits or demerits, and having to estab-
lish and nurture such a new relationship by cutting himself adrift
from those who have been so dear and so close, the individual is con-
ditioned to think in terms of the first person singular, here and now;
his own rights, his own pleasures, and his own privacy; his own
status, and his own chances for advancement or dangers of regres-
sion. For he is trained to regard the human world around him as
impermanent. He has no inalienable place in the scheme of things
except that scheme he himself initiates and constructs.

Here one must enter a note of caution about the use of the term

418 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

"individualism." This term has been used so loosely to describe the
pattern of behavior of many nonliterate societies (see, for example,
Mead 1937) that it has lost all significance. Individualism is neither
the same as individual differences nor as self-interest or egotism. In-
dividual differences exist in all societies, as demonstrated by Gillin
years ago (1939) and reiterated by Hart more recently (1954).
Self-interest is never absent even among peoples who are said to
value "giving for the sake of giving" (Hsu 1943) , and self-interest
can certainly vary in degree from society to society. But individual-
ism is that conception of each human being as unique and as pos-
sessing God-given rights which cannot be taken away from him by
men, society, or tradition. To express this uniqueness he must have
freedom and, to safeguard his right, his due is equality. Individual-
ism so defined was only initiated and exemplified by Occidental
peoples of our Type B and was unknown among all other peoples
before the impact of the West. Self-reliance is the American variety
of individualism where it has reached its widest and most extreme
expression so far (Hsu 1953) .

The peculiarity of this kinship content is the primary emphasis
given to the uniqueness of the individual rather than relationships
between individuals, and to the likes and aspirations of the indi-
vidual rather than the duties and obligations of one individual to
another — for parents and children tend to be equal before the law
and certainly before the supernatural. There is, therefore, an in-
herent tendency to conflict between the generations not known
in other types of kinship systems. On the one hand parents view
their children as their exclusive possession, since they are given
unbridled authority to order the youngsters' lives. On the other
hand, privacy and self-reliance keep parents and children apart
even before the latter reaches majority in ownership of property,
correspondence, relationship with friends, romance, and in the
choice of life partners. Therefore, parents often find it hard to let
their children go their own way as the youngsters advance in age,
while children often find it necessary to reject their parents as the
most important sign of maturity and independence. As a result the
parent-child tie is not only terminated legally upon the youngster's
reaching majority, it may be socially and psychologically broken
long before.

Ancestor "worship," even when present, is never more than the
mere pride in a distinguished genealogy and is never calculated to
benefit the dead. In fact, death severs the relationship among men,

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 419

for the spirits of the dead have no more interest in the living, while
the living remember the dead only if there is individual affection.
Clan is generally not an active organization, and wherever present,
as in Scotland or Ireland today, of little more than nominal value.

General Characferisfics

The emphasis on the uniqueness and independence of each indi-
vidual cannot but encourage creativity (that is, change and devia-
tion from the established norms) in general. Given a blackest black
or whitest white pattern of approach, these cannot but cause those
who desire change to champion their ends as absolute and with fi-
nality. Such individuals at once threaten those who do not see eye to
eye with them and who are committed to other positions with equal
absoluteness and finality.

There is an eternal struggle. Those who desire to change what has
so far been held as true will be vehement about their intentions and
often violent in their techniques. Others who think they have the
truth already will inevitably feel compelled to defend themselves
as vehemently and violently. Consequently, in this type of society,
we obtain ultraconservatives and ultraradicals, arch-racists and
arch-lovers-of-all-mankind, extreme isolationists and extreme one-
worlders, each, being armed by the absolute truth, bent on a show-
down with and complete conquest of the other. The net result is a
type of society full of exuberance. It is characterized, on the one
hand, by convulsions, purges, and revolutions, and, on the other, by
initiative, emigration, science and technology, idealism, and new
frontiers. Even without significant internal turmoil, the tendency
of the individual in this type of society is centrifugal. Many of them
cannot wait to move out to somewhere else or to move up the social
or economic ladder. In any event, the desire to change may come
about as a means of climbing the social ladder or be precipitated by
the need to better the older generation or by the differences of opin-
ion within the primary groups. And when there is significant failure
in the natural resources, such as the failure of Irish potatoes in the
late eighteenth century, or when there is a significant strife between
those who entertain different beliefs, such as that which underlay the
tensions between the early American pioneers and their other Angli-
can brethren, emigration tends to be on a large scale. Moses led the
Jews out of Egypt, and the White Russians dispersed all over the
world after 19 17. It is interesting to note that even where there was
still an unlimited frontier nearer to home, a considerable number of

420 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Southerners moved from the United States to Brazil and elsewhere
as a result of the Civil War.

When peoples from this type of society move to a new area, their
intrinsic tendency is to set up a new society that is independent from
their old. This tendency is founded on two factors. One is that, lack-
ing permanent kinship ties, they will as a whole have little urge to
return to their home society. Second, they are likely to be fired by an
idealism that is not often present among peoples from societies of
other types. Children who are raised apart from the vicissitudes of
adult life tend to be freer with their imagination. But since the chil-
dren are at the same time under the complete control of their par-
ents, they are likely often to use their fantasy world as a reaction
against the elders. Personal independence is often inextricably inter-
woven with the idea of doing something different. This was why all
the independent immigrant republics were formed by Westerners,
from Australia to the New World. Conversely, no Chinese immi-
grant groups in historical times and no Japanese colonizers in mod-
ern times have ever even suggested a separatist movement from their
respective home countries (except for one Chinese group in Borneo
for a few years) . Under conquest, people of this type of society will
tend to resist with violence either in open rebellion or in under-
ground movement. Many of them would rather die than conform
to the new rule. And the population is likely to be sharply divided
between those who accommodate to the conquerors and those who
do not. The ultimate result is likely to be either that the conquerors
are overthrown by force or that the resistors are overcome and
driven out by force. This does not mean that the ways of life of the
conquerors or the conquered will not in the end become intermixed,
but there will be persistent efforts to root out the suppressed ele-
ments.

They all have alphabetical languages of probably the same origin.
Their written languages have changed from society to society and
from period to period. Both of these changes tend to be much more
pronounced than with the Oriental peoples belonging to Type A.
The archaic form of Chinese writing found inscribed on oracle
bones over 3 ,700 years ago has more in common with modern Chi-
nese writing than does Latin with French or even Chaucerian Eng-
lish with modern English.

Part of the reason may, of course, be that the Indo-European
written languages are phonemic while the Chinese written language
is ideographic, but that is certainly not the whole story. As we noted

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 421

earlier, the Japanese and Koreans are unwilling to give up the more
inconvenient Chinese ideographs even after adoption of the alpha-
bet. The conservatism of Japanese and Koreans with reference to
their written languages is obviously based on other reasons than the
relative ease with which their written languages can or cannot
change.

Their literature is more voluminous than that found in the so-
cieties of Type A in spite of the fact that they came upon printing
much later than the Chinese. Their literature is infinitely richer in
the imaginative and emotional qualities than the Orientals or non-
literate peoples, but not peoples of Type C such as the Hindus. Their
art is great for the same reason. Since the uniqueness of the indi-
vidual is best displayed in creativity, art for art's sake has developed
to an extent unknown elsewhere. Their music is truly one of the
greatest gifts bestowed upon mankind; even the great music of the
Hindus and Indian Moslems cannot surpass it. They have developed
harmony systematically and intensively; they have a wider variety
of instruments, more precise instruments, and instruments which
are able to cover a wider musical range than all other peoples except,
perhaps, the Hindus. Unlike the peoples of Type A, they have much
music that is played simply as music, not as accompaniment to some
thematic plot or dance. With their urge to explore the unseen and
the unknown, these peoples have advanced science both qualita-
tively and quantitatively to a height undreamed of by the rest of
the world.

Central Governmenf

These peoples tend to develop national states whether in modern
or premodern times. These states tend to be either extremely au-
thoritarian or pronouncedly democratic. In both forms, the rulers
feel compelled to make personal appearances before the people for
the purpose of solidarity, since the jpeople, having no mooring in
their primary groups, are always in search of wider circles of soli-
darity. The authoritarian rulers have to be guarded heavily, while
the democratic ones have less need to be so. The techniques are some-
what different, but allegiance to the system as well as allegiance to
the leader is important in both. Both types of government will be
heavily organized and in both the primary relationships of man are
of far less importance than either the impersonal law or the imper-
sonal state. Universal military service and later universal education
tend to be the rule and not the exception. In these and other ways,

422 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the state tends to enter into the private Hves of the average indi-
viduals whether they hke it or not. This type of society gives rise to
modern nationahsm which underhes its strong sohdarity at given
points of time, especially in the face of dangerous enemies, either
human or natural. But in the long run, the organizations of such
societies tend to be unstable or undergo rapid changes from time to
time because they are subject constantly to attack from within,
either by recognized opposition or by unrecognized foes, and to
threat from without by other societies similarly constituted. This
is, perhaps, one of the reasons why Europe was never united under
one government, while large societies like China were marked by
long periods of peace under one ruler interspersed only by short
periods of interdynastic chaos.

Religion

The monolithic family constellation is concordant with a mono-
theistic view of the supernatural. Even before Christianity came
into being, disputes over gods and efforts to suppress creeds other
than those adhered to by the ruler were not unfamiliar in Rome and
in the Middle East. We mentioned the fact that there is as a rule no
ancestor worship. When and if more than one supernatural being is
believed in, the tendency is for the ones other than God to be re-
garded as parts of God's expression, and prayer to them is only justi-
fied on the ground that they will intercede with God for the benefit
of the believer. On the other hand, though believing in the same
God, they will be irretrievably and continuously divided as to faith.
The extent to which the church is divided tends to go hand in hand
with the development of individualism. New sects and denomina-
tions will appear not only when there is a theological difference but
even when no such differences exist. This greater tendency on the
part of the freer branches of the church to subdivide is closely re-
lated to the sharper division among men under stronger individual-
ism. Thus in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, prevalent in
southern Europe, eastern Europe, and Latin America, the clerical
hierarchy is important while in the Protestantism prevailing in
northern Europe and North America, it becomes less important or
of no consequence as far as the relationship of the worshipper and
his God is concerned. Then, as we move from Catholicism to Protes-
tantism the other-worldly punishment goes from being somewhat
relative to irretrievable. In the Catholic purgatory the soul still has
hope, since the good works of his kinsmen as well as his own devotion

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 42 3

can raise him, but when the Protestants removed the beUef in purga-
tory they severed all permanent relationships between the individual
and his kin.

Lacking any permanent relationship among men, the individual-
ist has to compensate it with attachment to some other objects:
faith, creed, dogma, and so forth. He tends, therefore, to be hostile
toward, or persecute, those who do not share his faith or his version
of the fundamentally same faith. Since polytheists will not fight
about or for their supernatural, the monotheists will inevitably
have their most trouble with other monotheists. They must mission-
ize the nonbelievers as well as other monotheists, for the individual-
ists must "advance" personally as a way to salvation or they will
surely lag far behind or even be engulfed by the others. To buttress
themselves they must have not only systematic theology but many
techniques in organization and indoctrination. They need more
and more interpretation and reinterpretation of the theology, but
in spite of such theological erudition, the core of the dogma tends to
remain unchanged and uncompromising, thus requiring more the-
ology in turn.

Religious prejudice, ranging all the way from outright persecu-
tion, inquisition, and burning of heretics to occupational and social
discrimination, is common. The religious wars of the world were
practically all fought by monotheists. Even when religion is not the
outstanding issue, the monotheists cannot but inject religious ele-
ments into any struggle that each group makes with another. While
both parties in a combat may worship the same god, each will con-
sider its own war a struggle of the good against the evil. An eternal
struggle is inherent in monotheism. Their religious men may preach
dependence upon God, but the worshippers usually waste no time in
doing it themselves.

Impetus to Change

Over any period of time, this type of society tends to propel itself
toward incessant change. There will be, as pointed out above, ex-
treme conservatives and extreme radicals. But since those who do
not wish to change do not hesitate to force a showdown with those
who desire extremely to change, the result is usually a major or mi-
nor explosion. And when the remains of an explosion are gathered
and reintegrated together, they are never the same as before. In any
case, the average individual in this type of society is encouraged to
show initiative or he will lose his self-respect. This is the psychologi-

424 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

cal background of free enterprise as a way of life. This is the reason
why associations of all descriptions, based on both abstract and con-
crete goals, are countless. This is the crucial force giving societies
of this type a degree of internal impetus to change undreamed of by
all other types.

In one sense, the technological development and changes are most
noticeable and are usually described as being most characteristic of
this type of society. But changes in other areas of life are no less
colossal. Thus, in religion, this type of society has changed from
early polytheism to Catholicism, and from Catholicism to Protes-
tantism; or from polytheism to Mohammedanism and then branch-
ing out into such creeds as Bahaism. The family has changed from
being extremely authoritarian in form through being equalitarian
to that of America in which the family ties even between parents
and children are based on ideals of friendship. There are drastic
changes in laws, in the treatment of criminals, and so forth. Most
prominent of all are the revolutions which are unique to this type
of society. The revolutions, though primarily directed to a change
in the form of government, always have had much wider effects,
partly because Western forms of government affect the people's
way of life much more than do the Oriental ones, and partly because
each revolution is always based on some ideology which envisages a
new society that it hopes to realize. Utopias are numerous and most
of them very different in form from existing reality.

Such societies tend to be able to develop strong internal solidarity
to withstand external pressure, military or cultural. But because of
their strong solidarity and of the solidarity of those who hope to
conquer or are opposed to them, the resulting conflagration and de-
struction are sometimes irreparable. In addition to the more severe
nature of the explosion, many, perhaps most, individuals in this
type of society tend to be brittle psychologically and lack elasticity
to deal with ambiguity, having been trained in a kinship pattern to
insist on all or none, black or white, completely right or completely
wrong. They will be hilarious in their triumphs and extremely de-
pressed in their failures. They may go on to greater achievements
and greater glories, but they may also sicken at heart and die out, in
the Toynbeean sense.

TYPE C SOCIETIES

Societies in this group include those of the Hindus in India and
possibly the Moslems of this subcontinent as well.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 425

Kinship

The center of the kinship structure of the Hindus is the joint
family ideal like that in China and Japan. It is patrilineal, patrilocal,
and generally patriarchal. It has a nominal clan (Gotra, etc.) that is
mainly a negative means of regulating marriage, but is not organ-
ized as a whole and not based on blood (genetic) relationships.

In one respect the kinship pattern is similar to that in Type A.
Children tend to live in the adult world and are actively initiated
into adult roles as soon as they are physically and mentally capable
of doing so without waiting for the official age of majority (Man-
delbaum 1949 and Murphy 1953) . But the most important struc-
tural relationship is that of mother-son. The mother-son axis
distinguishes itself from both the father-son and husband-wife rela-
tionships by several attributes. Like the father-son axis but not the
husband-wife axis it is inclusive. There is usually more than one son,
and there is the perpetual desire on the part of the parents for more
than one son. In the Orient and in India, high infant mortality is es-
pecially conducive to the usually conscious feeling that there is se-
curity in numbers. Unlike the father-son axis, but like the husband-
wife axis, the mother-son relationship is discontinuous. No mother
is a son and no son is a mother. A mother-son relationship is not,
therefore, a link in a chain of a continuous mother-son line.

A third attribute of the mother-son relationship makes it totally
dissimilar to both of the other axes. It is more one-sidely dependent,
and more ail-inclusively so, than either of the other two. An infant
after birth is undifferentiated in its reaction to its surroundings,
whether human, animal, or material. Watson, reporting the studies
of Bridges, states that the emotional differentiations in the infant
begin at about three weeks of age "when distress characterized by
muscular tension, trembling, crying, and checked breathing can be
distinguished from excitement" in general (Watson 1959:199-
201 ) . The mother-son relationship begins essentially with complete
emotional and physical dependence on the part of the son upon the
mother. As the infant grows in years he learns more and more to
differentiate between persons, things, and ideas, as well as between
different persons, different things, and different ideas. Paralleling
with these processes the infant experiences another process: while
external stimuli are undifferentiated, all things are translatable into
all things. But with differentiation of them into categories, he finds
that some categories are translatable, or more nearly so, into each

426 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

other while others are absolutely immutable into each other. For ex-
ample, a toy dog and a toy duck are far more easily translatable into
each other, from the point of view of the child, while a toy dog and
an actual dog are far less translatable into each other. For some time
a toy dog and an actual dog may be the same to a child, but as he
matures, he is going to perceive a greater immutability between in-
animate and animate things. Similarly, as he grows in his power of
perception he is likely to become aware of the differences between a
toy dog and a toy duck even though this pair will remain more trans-
latable into each other than the other pair. Later on baby sitters are
usually translatable into each other. As the child is more used to one
baby sitter than another, he may develop a higher degree of prefer-
ence for one over the other, thus developing a feeling that some
baby sitters are not translatable into others. But in the majority of
cases, the younger the infant the more dependent he is upon his
mother, since she is the answer to all his troubles and needs, and the
more all categories of stimuli which come to him are translatable
into each other (or undifferentiable) .

In the father-son axis, the son does not come into close relation-
ship with the father at first,^ but is more likely to do so from one
year of age or when he is weaned upon the birth of the next sibling.
In the husband-wife axis, the son may come into close relationship
with both parents at the same time, though his relationship with the
mother is likely to be more intense at first. His possibly close con-
tacts with both parents from the beginning of life may enable him
to have from the start a greater experience of differentiated stimuli
than in the case of the father-son axis. In the mother-son axis, since
the son retains a close contact with the mother till he is much older
than in the case of the father-son axis or the husband-wife axis, the
individual is conditioned to retain more of the thought pattern of
mutability between all categories of stimuli than would be the case
in the other two types of kinship system.

The characteristic kinship content correlated with the emphasis
on mother-son axis is what may be described as supernatural depend-
ence. The most basic quality of the content of supernatural depend-
ence is that, instead of solving life's problems by self-reliance,
external safeguards and conquests as in Type B, and instead of look-
ing to mutual dependence with other human beings as in the case
with Type A, the individual is encouraged to seek supernatural help

' The picture may be different in societies where the custom of convade prevails. But what is
said here certainly applies to the Type A peoples specified in this chapter.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 427

either by passivity or by active elaboration of rituals to control or
at least influence the gods. Passivity often leads to reduction and
even the elimination of many or all of the individual's desires and
wants. (Popularly this pattern has been associated with Buddhism.
What is less well known is that Buddhism is merely a protestant
movement of Hinduism and that self -negation has always been part
of the essence of traditional Hinduism as well.)

The importance of the mother-son axis is not rooted in the cul-
tural design. It is not the traditional ideal. Wherever mentioned in
the scriptures, the father-son and mother-son relationships are given
nearly equal importance, with a slight edge in favor of the former.
However, the actual pattern of life in the Hindu kinship system is
such as to produce the unintended effect of increasing the impor-
tance of the mother-son axis and of decreasing the importance of
the father-son axis.

The Hindu culture, even more so than the cultures in Type A, is
male-oriented. For example, where the Hindu scriptures and ritual
practices are concerned, the males are the primary beneficiaries or
sufferers. Females are mentioned sometimes. They may suffer in the
other world as a result of certain things ; but if and when they bene-
fit somewhere, such benefit primarily comes through men. Other-
wise they seem to have the role of accumulating spiritual merits for
men. They observe fasting days for their husbands and sons ; they
practice austerities so that their deceased husbands can fare better
in the nether world; and they jump on their husband's funeral pyres
so that all members of their husband's families in many generations
can go up to heaven. They have no part in the major rituals of any
worship. They cannot wear the sacred thread except in a modified
form among smaller protestant sects such as the Lingayats.

The clearest statement of the male-centered nature of Hindu
culture is to be found in the four stages (ashramas) of life which
every individual should ideally pass through: brahmacharya (stu-
dentship) , grhastha (life of a married man), vanaprastha (life of
disinterested hermit, in which familial ties and social relations are
renounced) and samnyasa (life of the ascetic) . I am not aware of
any Hindu scripture or even its modern expositions which attempts
to apply this or any similar scheme to women. It is simply designed
for men.

Despite the male-centered nature of Hindu kinship and culture,
the mother-son axis exerts far greater influences on the Hindu in-
dividual for a variety of reasons. In the first place, the Hindu house-

428 rSYCHOLOGlCAL ANTHROPOLOGY

hold is one in which adult males and females are much more
segregated from each other than in Type A and Type B societies.
The higher the caste and the socioeconomic status, the closer the
family tends to approximate complete segregation. Male children,
before puberty or adolescence, tend, therefore, to be under the pro-
tective and guiding hands more of females such as mothers and
grandmothers than of males such as fathers and grandfathers. This
seems not only to be true of individuals like Indrasingh, who grew
up in his mother's village because his father passed away when he
was fifteen months old, as reported by Gitel Steed (1950 and 1955)
but also of numerous other men, in general as reported by G. Mor-
ris Carstairs (1957).

Although it is particularly through his participation in the adult male world
of caste and family discussion that a child receives the imprint of his community's
values, the process has begun even before this, during his earliest years when he
spent more time in the women's side of the household than in the men's. Brahmans
commonly mentioned that it was their mother, or their grandmother, who first
impressed upon them the need to bathe if they touched a low-caste person, until
the response became second nature to them. It is women, also who give a boy his
early toilet training. . . . From his mother and his substitute mothers, a boy also
learns how and what to eat, how to dress, what constitutes good manners and
what is to be avoided as indecent or shameful.

From his mother, grandmothers and aunts a child learns the concrete details
of religious observance at all the multitude of holy days in the calendar. ... A
part of the experience of every child in Deali is to be taken by his mother to a
bhopa when he is sick. . . .

The child's sources of verbal instruction can now be viewed as a series of
concentric circles, the innermost representing the women's world; then that of
the extended family in which his father, if he himself is a younger son, may seem
to play a minor part. (Carstairs 1957:148-149).

In the second place, the relationship between Hindu fathers and
their sons is less close than that between their Oriental or Occidental
counterparts. Mrs. Murphy observes in her chapter on "Roots of
Tolerance and Tensions in Indian Child Development" that Hindu
children "are carried easily, first in cradled arms which do not grasp
them possessively . . . later they straddle a hip of a sister or a brother,
father or mother, balancing comfortably" (Murphy 1953 149) . In
different parts of India, from Punjab to Cape Comorin, Bengal to
U.P., a child may be carried in this way most frequently by a mother,
or sister, less frequently by a young brother, but rarely by a father.
I think part of the reason is the Hindu male's strong aversion against
pollution by the bodily functions of infants and children. But an-
other part of the reason is that the Hindu fathers are also likely to

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 429

be more preoccupied with some aspect of the ritual activities, such
as pilgrimage, designed to bring them closer to their deities or the
Truth.

It is not implied that all Hindus live strictly according to the
injunctions of the ancient scriptures, any more than all Americans
live strictly according to the spirit of the Declaration of Independ-
ence and the Christian concept of universal love or turning the
other cheek. But many Americans have undoubtedly been moti-
vated by the high principles which form part of their heritage. Like-
wise, it is among Hindus, and not among Japanese, Chinese, or Ger-
mans, that we find hundreds of thousands of devout human beings
carrying out various forms of asceticism or doing penance up the
Himalayas and other centers of pilgrimage; and we find also the
great popularity of such leaders as Gandhi with his supernatural-
centered philosophy and ascetic practices. Furthermore, Hindu
children in their home environments are taught much more about
the importance of the great ultimate than the children in other so-
cieties (Mukerji 1923 and Chaudhuri 1953). Therefore, even
though many Hindu fathers do not leave their homes to become
hermits and ascetics as they grow older, most of them cannot but
in many ways be affected by or attracted to their religious ideal and
practices especially away from home.

It is a well-known fact that, even without the Hindu's super-
natural orientation, older individuals in any culture tend to gravi-
tate more toward religion than younger ones. As the Hindu ages, he
is more likely to devote much time and attention to pilgrimages and,
if he can read, scriptures. Furthermore, my personal observation
and Dr. Steed's show it is not at all necessary to be aged for the
Hindu to turn to seclusion and gods. Indrasingh, whom we have met
in a previous paragraph, a man 16 years old with two wives but no
children, turned from opium smoking, one form of institutionalized
retreat, to "goddess-worship which will change a man's present and
future." Yet, "by other members of Kasandra society, Indrasingh's
reactions were not regarded as socially deviant." (Steed 1955:141-
143) . I have seen again and again where men with children con-
ducted themselves in a way quite similar to what Indrasingh did.

Whatever the cause, the lack of close relationship between the
Hindu father and son is also documented by other students. (See
Carstairs 1957:67-70) . Dube's description of a Hyderabad village
confirms Carstairs' findings except that it is more cursory (Dube
1955:148-150).

43 0 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

One other fact is worth noting. While the father-son relation-
ship in Type A societies is, as in the Hindu scene, also marked by
greater formality than the mother-son relationship, it is far more
continuous in nature than the latter. The Hindu father-son rela-
tionship does not seem to go much beyond life since ancestor wor-
ship is of no great importance. The over-all tendency of the peo-
ple is to look to the ultimate station of reaching oneness with the
universe through religious devotion rather than the maintenance of
entities of individual ancestors and lineages. Thus, while each
father-son axis in the Chinese kinship system is one link in a per-
petual line of ancestors and descendants fortified by an organized
clan, the Hindu father-son relationship has no such significance and
is not so fortified. The Hindus tend to keep no genealogical records
except in Rajasthan and, as we noted earlier, have no organized
clan (Hsu 1961), though the recognized circles of relatives are
greater than in Type B. At the same time the absence of individual-
ism does not encourage the Hindu children to any great desire for
independence from their parents which, under the circumstances,
means their mothers more than their fathers. Hindu mothers, in
contrast to American mothers, do not have to worry about resent-
ment on the part of their grown sons, because Hindu sons, in con-
trast to American sons, do not have to regard acceptance of their
mothers' affection and control as signs of immaturity or weakness.
The result is a closer mother-son tie than is found in either of the
other two types of kinship systems analyzed before.

It is, of course, difficult to determine whether the kinship content
of supernatural-dependence or the structural elevation of mother-
son relationship came first. That is not a scientifically profitable
question to be dealt with. But given the cultural tradition of super-
natural-dependence, the influence of mother-son relationship gen-
erates the appropriate psychological material in the individual for
it. Ramakrishna, the greatest Hindu saint in modern times, asked:
"Why does the God lover find such pleasure in addressing the deity
as Mother?"

And he answered himself: ''Because the child is more free with
its mother, and consequently she is dearer to the child than anyone
else." (Muller 1898: No. 89).

Sister Nivedita, one of Ramakrishna's European disciples, nee
M. E. Noble, who was a pillar of the Vedanta movement after the
death of the master, experienced the following episode and senti-
ment:

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 431

Shortly after her arrival in Calcutta, she heard a cry in a quiet lane. Following
her ears, she traced it to a little Hindu girl who lay in her mother's arms dying.
The end came soon, and for a while the mother wept inconsolably. After a while
she fell back into Sister Nivedita's arms and turning to her said: "Oh, what shall
I do? Where is my child now?" "I have always regarded that as the moment when
I found the key," says Sister Nivedita. 'Tilled with a sudden pity, not so much for
the bereaved woman as for those to whom the use of some particular language
of the Infinite is a question of moraHty, I leaned forward. 'Hush, mother,' I said,
'Your child is with the Great Mother. She is with Kali.' And for a moment,
with memory stilled, we were enfolded together. Eastern and Western, in the
unfathomable depth of consolation of the World Heart." (Nivedita I904:i7ff.)

These narrations, given by Ernest A. Payne in his book on The
Saktas (1933:128-129) as evidence for the psychological founda-
tion of Mother Goddess worship are, from what we know of child
development today, actually at the psychological root of all re-
ligions, whether the deities in question are male or female. Un-
doubtedly Mother Goddess worship is one of the most prevalent
forms of worship in India, but there is no need to restrict our con-
sideration to it. The complete dependence of the child upon the
mother is a universal human fact. To the child, the mother is the
magical source of all power, gratification, and punishment. This is
the psychology that makes the widespread appeal of the creation
story in Genesis or other forms possible. In Type A societies this
mother dependence is soon tempered by the authority of the father
and later altered by the individual's integration into a network of
human relationships, with specific duties, responsibilities, and privi-
leges with reference to ascendants including deceased ancestors and
descendants both born and unborn. The adult individual's place
in the scheme of things is measured by concrete points of reference,
and no longer submerged under the unexplainable power of the
mother. In Type B societies growing up means independence not
only from the mother but also from the father, self-reliance in food
and sex quest, and ability to make decisions and bear consequences.
It is not surprising to find that Type A peoples are close only to their
ancestral spirits and make offerings to other gods primarily for
ulterior motives, while Type B peoples believe that God only helps
him who helps himself.

The mother-dependence relationship of Type C peoples gener-
ates the psychological material which feeds a cultural orientation
of supernatural dependence, continued and elaborated generation
after generation. The difference between supernatural dependence
and self-reliance is obvious, but the difference between supernatural

432 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

dependence and mutual dependence is equally significant. For one
thing, in contrast to mutual dependence, it is one-sided. The wor-
shipper-dependent expects much more from the gods than they
give to the gods, just as the child does with the mother. For another
thing it is all demanding and, therefore, the objective realities tend
to be less differentiated and more mutable. The worshipper-depend-
ent expects simple boons to solve all problems however difficult, just
as the child demands of his mother. And finally, unlike mutual de-
pendence, it is loaded with diffuse sexuality. Type A peoples relegate
sex into a few social compartments and see sex as having no rele-
vance to their relationship with the supernatural. Type B peoples
repress sex so that they must have a God-child who is born without
sex. Type C peoples neither relegate sex into separate compartments
nor eradicate it. As a whole, they approach the supernatural through
sexuality, an element which is at times blatant, and at other times
thinly veiled, but at all times more or less present. When demands or
supplication fails, the strongest step on the part of the worshipper-
dependent is extreme passivity, fasting, abstention, and other forms
of austerity, just as many a child can, or thinks he can, bring his
mother to her knees by refusing to eat or to get up. The Hindu ap-
proach to the supernatural, from complicated ritualism to extreme
forms of Samadhi, will be touched on below. The Hindu way in
penance and austerity to achieve power has been made famous by
Gandhi in India's long history of struggle against British colonial-
ism, but also by the martyrs and would-be martyrs in many an in-
ternal struggle (for example, the struggle for linguistic states)
since Independence.

General Choracieristics

There will be more emigration from this type of society than
from those of Type A because the people will not only be propelled
by hunger, but also motivated by pilgrimage. However, Type C
peoples disperse less easily than Type B because the Hindu society
has no inherent tendency to explosion as has its Western counter-
parts. When peoples from this type of society move to a new area,
they tend not to set up a new society that is completely independent
from their old. On the other hand, there is also no such great urge
as exhibited by the Chinese and the Japanese to return to their
homeland for retirement or death. Under conquest peoples in this
type of society tend to act like those of Type A, except that, be-
cause of the centrifugal tendencies inherent in their supernatural

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 43 3

orientation, the conquerors will find them more difficult to ad-
minister than Type A peoples.

At home they will show more dissatisfaction with the status quo
than the Chinese or Japanese, and will be more vociferous about
their dissatisfaction. Most religions embody contradictions, but the
Hindus see little or no necessity to reconcile highly obvious incon-
gruities in their religious beliefs as well as in their secular life which
is governed by religion. Hence, historical changes in their society
due to internal impetus are as insignificant as among Type A peo-
ples.

Their art and literature tends to be richer than that of China or
Japan in the imaginative and emotive qualities, but poorer than
those of the Occidental societies in the logical and rationalistic quali-
ties. Their music is neither Oriental nor Occidental, being based
on the most refined and complicated rhythmic patterns and tonal
elaborations the world has ever seen. Unlike the Chinese music, all
Hindu music, like Hindu art and literature, is religious. In science
the Hindus made more theoretical contributions than the Chinese
or Japanese, but the volume is not great and the practical applica-
tion of it is insignificant.

Central Government

These peoples tend to develop multiple national states. In essence,
the states are not authoritarian or democratic as in the West, but
are essentially autocratic as among Type A peoples. Political and
other relationships are secured either by exaggerated external signs
of differentiation between those who are in power or superior and
those who are not or inferior (caste is an example) , or on the basis
of brutal power (conquest) or by supernatural qualities (auster-
ity) . The rule of man in the name of the supernatural overshadows
the impersonal laws on the state. Universal education and universal
military service were unknown before contact with the West, but
there tends to be more direct interaction between the ruler and the
people than in Type A societies. The discontinuity of the primary
grouping and the supernatural orientation propel the individual
toward wider alliances. Therefore, political leaders in India can
exert a greater active influence over their followers than can their
counterparts in Type A societies. In spite of and probably also be-
cause of this, the stability of the central authority is always in ques-
tion. The diffused outlook and the many diverse issues, objects and
personalities enjoying great separate public enthusiasms tend to

434 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

make large and tight organization difficult. Hence, their written
languages tend to change much more in time and space than do
those of their Chinese or Japanese counterpart.

Religion

Since they are supernatural-oriented and diffused in their efforts
in seeking help, their gods multiply much more freely than in Type
A societies. The Hindus have more gods than any other known peo-
ple on earth. Yet, there is also an opposite tendency to view the
multitude of gods as diverse expressions or part and parcel of the
same Supreme Being.

Hindus, more than the Chinese and Japanese, are occasionally
divided somewhat in religion. There is, however, no irreconcilable
schism among the believers. In fact, even those who call themselves
Vaishnavats (worshippers of Vishnu) or Saivats (worshippers of
Shiva) tend not to neglect, and certainly not to be contemptuous
toward, the other gods.

Theology is more important than in Type A societies but much
less important than in Type B. The central dogma is obscure. Where
clarified, it comes to no more than the negative ideas of "action with
nonattachment," or extreme "devotional love." Theological litera-
ture increases largely through the increase of rituals and to a lesser
extent through protestant movements. But religious truths tend to
be relative, so that the elites and the common men are understood
to possess different grades of knowledge about God and different
experiences with Him, which are considered equally valid. There
will be far more reform or protestant movements in Hinduism
than in the religion of the Chinese and the Japanese, but such protes-
tant movements do not seem to succeed in really dividing the be-
lievers. This is why the remnants of Buddhism in India were merely
absorbed by Hinduism instead of existing as a rival creed. Jainism,
Sikkhism, and so forth remained in India but have become caste
groups in the same Hindu fold. Contrary to popular misconception,
riots between the Hindus and Moslems are of post-British origin
and very recent. It is a well-known fact that Hindus and Moslems
lived and still live peacefully in close proximity in the villages
(Murphy 1953). The Hindus are probably as difficult to convert
to any monotheistic belief as peoples of Type A, except for specific
reasons of social and economic improvement. One of the basic
reasons for Hindu conversion to Mohammedanism was the lowly
position of the untouchables who hoped to better themselves.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 435

Over and above these general characteristics, the Hindu approach
to rehgion, Hke those of the Chinese and the Westerners, reflects
even more clearly the basic content in the Hindu kinship system.
The Type A peoples, with their father-son axis and their perma-
nent web of vertical and horizontal kinship relationships, need their
gods and goddesses for functional and utilitarian purposes. They
cannot get excited about their supernatural unless the latter can
satisfy their materialistic requests. Type B peoples with their hus-
band-wife axis and their impermanent human relationships in the
long run need their gods to be masculine, stern, single minded, and
exclusive, though this stress on masculinity applies more to Western
Protestants than Western Catholics.

The gods of Type C peoples, though represented bisexually, are
basically more feminine than masculine. No other people worship
as many female deities as the Hindus. Not only did recent popular
revolutionary writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee sing of
India's aspirations to Mother and not only do modern Indians refer
to Bharat Mata (Mother India), but also the mother goddess in
the form of Kali, Durga, Radha, Sita, Parvati, Chumundeshvari,
or the wife of Ramakrishna, founder of the modern Protestant
movement bearing his name, is worshipped in every part of India.
Moreover, in Indian popular mythology the gods sometimes change
themselves into females for sexual purposes.

One famous tale concerns Vishnu and Siva, who were so intoxi-
cated by the scenery they saw together that Vishnu changed himself
into a female so that the two could have a sexual union on the spot
to enjoy themselves. Today, there are temples in West and South
India in which are worshipped gods each representing half of one
and half of the other sex. Finally, the Hindu devotee's approach to
the supernatural is predominantly what, for want of a better term,
may be described as "feminine."

I am aware that Margaret Mead in her classic work on Sex and
Temperament has stressed the notion that cross-culturally, psycho-
logical characteristics are not peculiar to either sex. Whether we
call the Hindu devotee's approach "feminine" or not is immaterial.
What is relevant is that this approach is characterized by traits
which traditionally in the West have been subsumed under the
term "femininity." I mention this term here to help me clarify
my position on the subject. Like other people the Hindus resort to
all sorts of rituals to coerce or channelize many gods and spirits
according to their wishes, but one age-old and most widespread

43 6 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Hindu approach to the supernatural is austerity (fasting, absten-
tion, suffering, and so forth) to get what one wants. This method
is so frequently used in Indian mythology, history, and contem-
porary belief, not only by men to coerce gods, but also by one" god
to coerce other gods, that it is sheer redundancy to mention it
more than in passing.

The more modern version of the same approach is represented by
the Bhakti movement begun by Chaitanya of Bengal about 250
years ago, the central theme of which is to love God (the Lord
Krishna) as though the worshipper is the God's illicit sweetheart
(Radha). In South India an outstanding devotee using this ap-
proach would be Kshetranja, the composer and performer of God-
love songs and dances. Foreign visitors and observers have often
been shocked by the proliferation of sexual representation in Hindu
temples that they read in it much that is profane but nonexistent.
Some Hindus, scholars and others, have understandably been de-
fensive about this by trying to explain the sexual elements away
from them altogether. The truth of the matter is that the Hindu
approach to the supernatural is sexual only in the Freudian sense.
For every major Hindu deity has one or more consorts, both of
whom are worshipped by males and females. Even the temple
Lingam is not a static symbol : it is often described as representing
the male and female organs in active sexual congress. What we can
say is that the Hindu attitude is characterized by passivity, sub-
missiveness, diffused eroticism which, if not feminine in character,
is certainly different from that found among Type A and Type B
peoples.

Prejudice

The structural characteristics of exclusiveness and discontinuity
of Type B seem to be related to the greatest exhibition of prejudice,
in contrast to those of inclusiveness and continuity in the kinship
system of Type A, which seem to be related to the least exhibition
of prejudice. This contrast has been more fully dealt with in a pre-
vious chapter (Chapter 7, American Core Values and National
Character) . The Hindu kinship system, being dominated by the
mother-son axis, occupies in this regard an intermediary position.
It is more inclusive than that of type B but less so than that of type
A ; it is more continuous than that of type B but less so than that of
type A. This would seem to be connected with the fact that preju-
dice, though strongly present in the form of caste, untouchability,
and Hindu-Moslem riot, is without finality. That is to say, there are

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 437

obvious and above-board mechanisms for crossing the caste hnes or
for raising the statuses of entire castes. For example, even the extre-
mists in casteism accept the premise that the lower castes and higher
castes are one in the reincarnation scheme. Then, the caste of meri-
torious individuals had often been changed by edicts of kings and
princes. Finally, the place of entire low castes, such as the Reddy of
Andbra and Kayastha of Bengal, were raised by reason of their
numbers or occupation. The entire question of caste in India is
treated in a separate publication (Hsu 1961) and need not be de-
tailed here. There is some witchhunting in Type C societies but it is
moderate, like that in nonliterate societies of Type D.'"'"

Impetus to Change

To the extent that there is more internal dissatisfaction with the
status quo in such societies than in Types A and D, there should
have been more internal tendency toward change. But this pressure
for change is greatly undercut by the diff useness of its direction and
objectives. Over a long period of time, there tend to be changes in
appearance but not in substance. This is probably a partial explana-
tion for the fact that of all the large status-oriented societies of
the East and West, only India built up a caste system, the numerous
princely states, and the highly differentiated nature of the en-
dogamic circles within each caste. The Hindu caste system is an
accommodation between the two opposites: change and no change
(Hsu 1961) . There have always been many centrifugal tendencies
but there have never been any revolutions and/or Utopias which
aimed at achieving a new way of life on this earth. These types of
societies are less likely to die out than the Western variety, either
from loss of resources or from external conquest. The peoples of
this type of societies have a similar ability to endure suffering
as those of Type A, even though they may appear more unhappy
about it because of their tendency to voice their dissatisfaction with
the status quo. The peoples in this type of societies are somewhat
more likely to take to changes than their brethren in Type A, once
they are under the pressure of, and given direction by, the West,
though the permanency of the new changes is questionable.

TYPE D SOCIETIES

In type D societies are to be found the majority of the Africans
south of the Sahara.

* The complex psycho-cultural basis of caste in India is treated intensively in my forthcoming
book, Clan, Caste and Club, a Comparative Study of Chinese, Hindu and American Ways of Life
(Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., in press).

43 8 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Kinship

The kinship structures are varied and the basic unit in which the
infant finds himself may be large or small. There is no ideal of in-
dividualism or supernatural dependence as a road to personal sal-
vation. The structural element in systems of kinship which seems to
have a great deal of dominance over others is brother-brother axis,
across lines of descent, inheritance, and succession. Their kinship
content may be described as fraternal equivalence.

Similar to the father-son and mother-son axes, brother-brother
relationship is inclusive. But similar to the husband-wife and
mother-son axes, it is discontinuous. There is always more than one
brother, but the brothers of each generation have no intrinsic re-
lationship with the brothers of another generation. To the extent
that the individual tends to be oriented little toward the past and
the future but much toward the present, the brother-brother axis
is similar to the husband-wife axis. And to the extent that the in-
dividual is conditioned to be mutually dependent among the peers,
the brother-brother axis is similar to the father-son axis. But the
feature which distinguishes the brother-brother relationship from
all other axes, including the husband-wife axis, is its inherent com-
petitiveness. Where there is acknowledged unequalness between the
parties of a relationship, there is little potential source of competi-
tiveness. This is the situation of the father-son and mother-son axes.
The father and the son or the mother and the son are not equal. In
the husband-wife axis the relationship may be equal in conception
but never really equal in reality, for men and women are different
and they are bound to perform different roles, however such differ-
ences are minimized by other factors. The brother-brother axis
is one in which the parties to the relationship are more equal and
more similar than the parties to any of the other three axes and,
therefore, more competitive with each other.

The kinship content correlated with the brother-brother rela-
tionship is fraternal equivalence. But before I go into the charac-
teristics of fraternal equivalence I must enter a word of caution for
my readers.

In the analysis of the African situation I am on far less certain
ground than in what has gone before. My views on the previous sys-
tems are based on my own field observations as well as extensive
acquaintance with works of my colleagues. I have had no field ex-
perience in Africa, having visited parts of it for only short periods

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 439

of time; and my acquaintance with anthropological works on
Africa is far more limited. Nevertheless, what I have read so far has
emboldened me to make this exploration, following the same trend
of analysis which I have pursued so far, and to hope that the results
will stimulate further works in this direction.

In analyzing Types A, B and C peoples, I have first examined the
characteristics of a particular structural relationship which domi-
nates the kinship system; then proceeded to relate those character-
istics to the kinship content; and finally extended the latter char-
acteristics to the attitudes and ideas underlying the wider culture
as a whole. In analyzing Africa I shall reverse the first two, by dis-
cussing first content of the kinship system and then stating my case
for expecting the dominance of the particular structural relation-
ship in question.

Like Type A and C societies, Type D peoples raise their children
to enter into adult worlds as soon as they are physically and men-
tally capable of doing so. They do not attribute great value to in-
dividual privacy. These two facts favor a community of interest
between the generations. But in spite of such resemblances to Type
A societies, the kinship content is one in which the ties between
generations are overshadowed by those between males of the same
generation.

First, the claims to dependence between parents and their chil-
dren seem to require constant reiteration or open gestures to meet
with satisfaction. The fear against overclaim and against nonful-
fillment of expected claims is indicated by the almost universal be-
lief in sorcery or witchcraft among close family members, espe-
cially between parents and children (between mother's brother and
sister's son in matrilineal systems) , and between other individuals,
who are related as seniors and juniors, but almost none between
brothers and others, who are related as equals.

Secondly, though some African societies — Dahomey, Yoruba,
many Bantu tribes, and others — maintain rites designed to deal
with the dead, they and their ancestral spirits do not have unques-
tioned reliance upon one another. The living may regard the dead
as possible sources of benevolence but more constantly suspect them
as possible sources of harm; while the dead always enforce their
demand on the living for sacrifices and offerings by means of dis-
asters such as epidemics and personal accidents imposed on their
descendants.

Thirdly, in many instances the African word translated into

440 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

English as ancestors simply means spirit or god. In most cases there
is a tendency for ancestral spirits to lose their identity and connec-
tion with their own descendants, so that ancestral spirits are simply
one of the several mechanisms (equally important) for human be-
ings to reach the supernatural, or the connection with the past is
simply a means for vindicating the status of the present.

Fourthly, strong age-grading customs prevail in most parts of
Africa except among people like Dahomean and Bantu of North
Kavirondo (Wagner 1949) so that the youngsters, after reaching a
certain age, leave their parental houses for their own separate quar-
ters and/or by the well-known phenomenon of secret societies in
which members maintain strong bonds outside of kinship. The chil-
dren may or may not be directly dependent upon initiatory rites,
but such rites are undoubtedly as important in Africa as they are
insignificant in Asia. The relationship among the youngsters so
separated from their parents may range from that of intimate
friends, such as the "best friend" institution in Dahomey (Hersko-
vits 1938a) , to what has been described as a kind of "Communist"
order such as found among the Umbundu (Childs 1949 : 1 14-1 15).*

Fifth, although parents and other elders can exercise an authori-
tative hand over members of the younger generation, the latter seem
to exhibit much more independence of thought and action than
in Type A societies. In some African societies the pattern is even
described as "respect" for the personality of the children (Childs
1949:120—121). In practically all known African societies the
young tend to have to work for the establishment of their own
homes and their own marriages, as well as to exercise rather decisive
influences over the choice of their own spouses. In addition there
is much evidence indicating a linkage in the marriage payments and
obligations between brothers and sisters (Radcliffe-Brown 1950:

52-53)-

Sixth, while the institution of blood-brotherhood (that is, a

group of unrelated men usually of similar age swearing themselves

into a brotherhood by rites involving letting or exchanging of

blood) is found sporadically in diverse parts of the world including

Europe and Asia, its prevalence in Africa south of the Sahara and

outside of Ethiopia is well known. It is said that a blood brother is a

* In a comprehensive treatise on age groups all over the world Eisenstadt's examples from the
"Primitive" and "Semihistorical" societies are all taken from Africa (over 40 tribes and groups
of tribes) except for ancient Sparta, five of the Plain Indian groups in North America, Irish
peasants, some tribes in India, and some vague allusions to ancient Inca and Aztec empires
(Eisenstadt 1956).

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 441

"much better friend than a real brother" (Tegnaeus 1952: i3ff.).

Finally, while the problem of royal succession is nowhere on earth
near a perfect solution, it seems to assume extraordinary propor-
tions in many parts of Africa. Tor Irstam of the Ethnographical
Museum of Sweden has made a study of the sacral kingship in
Africa in which he surveys many traits (he calls them "institu-
tions") connected with the coronation, life, and death of the king
in 103 tribes from existing ethnographic reports. Four of the traits
are particularly relevant to the question of succession: (i) "The
announcement of the king's death was followed by a period of
anarchy" ; ( 2 ) "the king's death was kept secret for a certain time" ;
(3) "the king's brothers were killed"; and (4) the king was chal-
lenged to a "ritual combat" (Irstam 1944:78-166).

We have, of course, to exercise much caution in ascertaining the
meanings given to each fact by the particular people among whom
it occurs. Thus, among the Ganda the king's ritual combat some-
times led to actual fighting which was "continued until only one
of the rival princes was left alive," but among the Nyoro, as far
as the ethnographer was able to determine, "only actual fighting
for the throne occurred" (Irstam 1944:62) . Again, the custom of
the newly crowned king going into a certain period of solitude
was practiced "to avoid his brothers' envy and conspiring" but the
same sentiment was not reported for the other tribes with a similar
custom. For this reason, this last-mentioned usage is not included
in our list of traits considered as supporting our contention that the
problem of royal succession seems extraordinary, and the magnitude
of this problem is related to the importance of the kinship content
of fraternal equivalence which undermines the vertical continuity.

From Irstam's study we have 62 tribes (or over 60 per cent of his
total) in which at least one of the four traits or customs indicating
succession difficulties was found. Trait No. 2 ("The king's death
was kept secret for a certain time") was found among the largest
number of tribes (32). Trait No. i ("The announcement of the
king's death was followed by a period of anarchy") was found
among the second largest number of tribes (19). The other two
traits are found among 7 (Trait No. 3) and 10 (Trait No. 4) tribes,
respectively. From the logical point of view the four traits are
obviously interrelated. The fraternal contention for the throne will
lead to suppression of the news of the King's death, which when
released leads to a period of anarchy, and for both of which the kill-
ing of the king's brothers seems to be a reasonable solution. The

442 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ritual combat to which the king is challenged could be considered
a formalized version of the actual fight which frequently occurs
among the contenders.

A tabulation of the occurrence of these traits shows a high degree
of correlation among them and indeed supports this thesis. The cor-
relation is less pronounced between Trait No. 2 and others (out of
51, 19 are correlated with one or more other traits) than between
Trait No. i and others (out of 19, 17 are so correlated). (See the
accompanying table.)

Distribution of Traits among Tribes '■'

Total
Trait or Trait Number of Tribes

Combination Tribe in Category

No. I Kabinda, Ha 2

Nos. I & 2 Dahomey, Konde, Kuba, Luba, Lunda, Mbundu, Nyamwezi,

Pare, Shambala 9

Nos. I & 3 Wydah (Wadai) (?) i

Nos. I, 2 & 3 ... . Abyssinia i

Nos. I, 2, & 4 . . Congo, Loango, Ruanda, Shilluk 4

Nos. I, 2, 3 & 4 . . Ganda, Nyoro 2

No. 2 Ashante, Bena, Camba, Comendi, Daka, Djaga, Gbande,

Gissi, Gogo, Hona, Igara, Yoruba, Jukun, Kam, Kanakuru,
Kimbu, Konongo, Kpelle, Mbum, Ngoni, Safwa, Sango,
Saramo, Shona, Soga, Sove, Temne, Tikai, Toma, Vende,

Zeguha, Zulu 52

Nos. 2 & 3 Kaffitsho I

Nos. 2 & 4 Tonga, Nkole 2

No. 3 Limmu, Koki, Benin 3

Nos. 3 & 4 Rundi I

No. 4 Umundri, Mossi, Ziba, Toro 4

Total 62

* Greater statistical sophistication is not attempted at this stage of the analysis. This will be done
in a later paper when more precise data may be obtained from the literature and field work.

It is on the basis of the foregoing facts that I expect the domi-
nance of the brother-brother relationship in a majority of African
kinship structures over other relationships. I frankly admit that I
have as yet insufficient direct data except in a few African societies,
such as the Nyakyusa age-set villages as reported by Monica Wilson
(Radcliffe-Brown and Forde [ed.] 1950:111-138). However, I
feel strongly that if future students of African tribes will explore
this hypothesis, their chances of being rewarded are likely to be
good. Furthermore, the theory of tribal and lineage segmentation
developed by Af ricanists like Evans-Pritchard and Fortes in which
the peoples are said to live in "ordered anarchy" (Evans-Pritchard
1940b: 181) and in which corresponding segments oppose each

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 443

Other, suggests that horizontal or fraternal solidarity and opposi-
tion are actually far more important in African kinship system than
are parent-child and other relationships.

General Choracteristics

In contrast to Type B societies the individual here will have less
urge to leave home because there is no need to prove his worth else-
where. But in contrast to Type A societies the individual here will
also be more easily forced to do so by nature (population pressure,
epidemics, and so forth) , or by human enemies (war, conquest, and
so forth) , because of lack of strong anchorage with the past. The
kinship content of fraternal equivalence makes possible larger ex-
pansion of human relationships than in Type A. That is to say,
whereas in Type A societies the individual is encouraged to think
lineally and to regard himself as a link in an endless chain connect-
ing the past with the future, in Type D societies he is encouraged
to think horizontally and to gravitate toward contemporaries far
and near. Therefore, once forced to move they tend to be more
ready than Type A peoples to give up much of the past and make
new adjustments on neiu bases. Some of them, like the Masai, might
resist innovation in their modes of livelihood but some have gone
from dry cultivation of rice to wet cultivation of rice (Linton
1939) . Others might start with a well-defined monarchial system
and disintegrate into a context of contending nobles, none of whom
has any central authority (Evans-Pritchard 19402:^1-61) . In
Southern Rhodesia, there are ruins of one or more rock cultures of
perhaps only 1,500 or 1,000 years ago, or less which are probably
ancestral to the cultures of some of the modern Bantu groups (such
as Ba Vanda) but with which the latter today claim no psycho-
cultural affiliation (Caton-Thompson 193 i). On the other hand,
in the nonliterate world, Africa is one of the continents where
trade contacts, team work, and group dances (ritual and otherwise)
were most extensive and impressive. The magnitude of their mes-
sianic-movements against conquest and oppression, within or with-
out the Christian Church, in Africa or in the New World (Hersko-
vits 1938b), is without parallel among other peoples in similar
circumstances.

Compared with Type A peoples, they have less determination to
resist external cultural pressures or to absorb the invaders and to
restore their past glory; but compared with other nonliterate peo-
ples they are much more indomitable because of their tendency to

444 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHP^OPOLOGY

group themselves horizontally. They do not easily give up the
struggle for political independence. However, their fraternal
solidarity is undermined by much opposition which some psycho-
analysts could easily designate as a sort of "sibling" rivalry. The
Type B peoples form many effective nonkinship groups to revolt
against the past. Type A peoples form few effective nonkinship
groups because they have solidarity with the past. But the most im-
portant attributes of Type D peoples' kinship content is rooted in
the fact that the brother-brother relationship is discontinuous with
both past and future at the same time that it is internally competi-
tive. The difficulties of the horizontal groupings of Type D peoples
are due, outside of foreign domination, primarily to the fact that
they are their own worst enemies.

As a rule they have no written languages even though they must
have at one time or another come into contact with either the Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics or the Indo-European alphabets. My inference
is that the assumption of a written language, even though its ele-
ments may have been borrowed, as were those of a majority of man-
kind who have written languages, depends upon a strong need
for a wide circle of communication and for a permanent preserva-
tion of the relationships with the past, and requires a concerted and
continuous group exertion. Most peoples of Type D obviously did
not feel the need and were not willing or prepared to make the
necessary efforts.

Central Government

Though some of these peoples have developed centralized na-
tional states, or at any rate some forms of externally recognized
chieftainship, the political domains are not likely to reach the extent
of some of those found among Types A or B, nor are they likely
to be as stable. We have already related the succession difficulties of
African chieftainship. A reverse support for this thesis is seen in
the degree of correlation in Africa between more centralized po-
litical organizations under autocratic kings or chiefs, and a some-
what more well-defined ancestor cult in Africa. A preliminary sur-
vey, without meaning to be exhaustive, shows the correlation to
hold in the following African tribes: Bemba, Lozi, Ngoni, Nya-
kyusa (Colson and Gluckman 1951:1-93, 164-291), Dahomey
(Herskovits 1938a) , Kikuyu (Kenyatta 1939), Yoruba (Bascom
i944),Tanala (Linton 1933), Jukun (Meek 193 i) Shilluk (Hof-
mayr 1925 and Seligman 1932), Baganda (Roscoe 191 1), Fanti

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 445

(Christensen 1954), Kgatla (Schapera 1941), Ankole, Zulu, and
Mgwato (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (ed.) 1940:25-82, 121-
164).

The following African tribes seem to have little belief in an-
cestral spirits coupled with unclear, vague or lack of centralized
tribal organization: Tonga, Yao, Shona tribes (Colson and Gluck-
man 1951:94-163, 292-395), Lango (Driberg 1923), and Anuak
(Evans-Pritchard 1904a) .^ The few tribes known to me in which
this correlation does not seem to obtain are Tallensi (Fortes and
Evans-Pritchard 1940:239-271) , and several tribes composing the
Bantu Kavirondo (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940:197-236,
and Wagner 1949:277-288), which have a somewhat more well
defined ancestor cult but no centralized tribal organization. The
clearest negative cases are those of the Nuer and the Tiv who have
no belief in ancestral spirits and no centralized tribal organization
of any kind (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes and Evans-Pritchard
1 940; 272-29 6; and Laura and Paul Bohannan 1953).^

The reason for this correlation between more centralized politi-
cal authority and better-defined ancestor cult has already been sug-

^A well-defined ancestor cult includes the following basic elements: a. the belief in the exist-
ence of ancestral spirits; b. the belief that all ancestral spirits are interested only in their own
living descendants and can affect their welfare; c. shrines, sacred places or tombs where offerings
and sacrifices are made to the ancestors regularly or on special occasions from facts already noted.
Ancestor cult in most African societies cannot be described as well-defined. The usual African
pattern is that only a few of the ancestors are remembered and made offerings to, that the
ancestral spirits so honored tend to be merged with other gods, and, therefore, not necessarily
worshipped only by their own descendants because the spirits' interest is wider and vaguer.

® Both Fortes and Evans-Pritchard speak elaborately of political organization when in fact only
some kinship or lineage system prevails. This problem has been dealt with elsewhere (Hsu 1959).

One group, the Ngoni, has a centralized political organization but about whom the ethnog-
rapher reports no present evidence of ancestor cult (Colson and Gluckman 1951:194-252).
Judging by the case of Nupi (and probably that of Kede, a formerly independent group within
the Nupi kingdom) who have well-defined political organization but are presently Moslems (Fortes
and Evans-Pritchard 1940:165—195, and Nadel 1946), complete absence of ancestor cult among
the Ngoni is inconclusive. For the Nupi, though converted to Islam, hold to their mythical an-
cestor-king, Tsoede, as of basic importance to whom annual sacrifices are made, recite long lists
of illustrious ancestors of noblemen at public functions, and consider the Tsoede's grave and
relics as the most sacred treasures they possess (Nadel 1946:66—67, 72, 85, 130, and so forth).
In addition, we find: "We shall see that the ruling house of Nupe crystallized in three dynasties,
which trace their descent from different sons of the founder of the ruling house, and divide be-
tween them the rights and duties vested in the ruling house. The ancestors of the three dynasties
lived only two or three generations back; but already certain religious observances (prayers on
their grave) mark them off from all subsequent royal ancestors. In this rigidly defined system of
reckoning descent in the father's line back to these almost sanctified 'first ancestors' and in the
relationship with one another which is in the nature of mutual obligations for the sake of the
larger unit, the royal house itself, the three dynasties correspond, from kinship point of view, to
incipient "clans" — the only analogy to clan structure which we find in Nupe." (Nadel 1946:33).
It is probably, therefore, not unreasonable to suggest that in pre-Islam days the Nupi did have
some sort of ancestor cult.

446 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

gested with reference to Type A peoples: submission to parental
authority and to long lines of ancestors paves the way to ties with
the wider government.

In line with the fact that the kinship content is fraternal equiva-
lence, the centralized governments tend to be somewhat "demo-
cratic." The word "democratic" is used to denote the fact that,
while at any given time the ruler of such a government may have
the power of life and death over his subjects, he tends to remain in
touch or in direct contact with them and to be at their mercy. In
Type A societies, the ruler will not be in any close contact with the
people and there tends to be no occasion on which the people can
as a matter of convention turn out to see the ruler in person. In
Type B societies, the people demand to see the ruler in person,
whether upon his return from the Crusades or from the victory at
Verdun, essentially to admire him as a hero for what he has done,
for his shining armor, or for his stately bearing and good looks. The
modern Western tendency of criticizing their heads of states for
poor taste or calling them by shortened names like "Ike" or "Jack"
is but a variety of the same underlying attitude. The ruler-subject
relationship in Type D societies differs from either in some respects
but combines both in other ways. Here the ruler can and must
maintain direct contact with his subjects under specified condi-
tions. In order to maintain his power among psychological equals
he must awe and exact obedience from them. His person is sur-
rounded with taboos and restrictions, and as a rule his subjects
treat him with great ceremony often including prostration before
him so as to avoid his sight (Bascom 195 1; Gluckman 1951;
Herskovits 1938: Vol. II; Meek 193 i; Oberg 1940; and others.).'^

The other feature in which the ruler-subject relationship in Type
D societies distinguishes itself is that the ruler seems always to be
very much at the mercy of his subjects, or at any rate many of them.
The despotic position of the rulers of Lozi (Gluckman 195 1) or
Dahomey (Herskovits 1928 : Vol. 2, Chap. XXIII) may appear ab-
solute enough. But in most Type D societies the power of the ruler
is basically diffused, residing in the hands of his chief councils, min-

'The King of Ife in Yorubaknd makes, for example, according to W. R. Bascom, two public
appearances before his subjects every year. One is for the worship of the deity Orishanla and the
other for the worship of two other deities. On the first occasion no subject is allowed to see him.
Everybody is required to go home and lock their windows and doors, and if caught peeking, will
be beaten. On the second occasion the King appears with great fanfare and the whole town turns
out prostrating before him. At all other times the king is not even supposed to leave the palace
(personal communication).

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 447

isters, Queen Mother, lesser dignitaries, and even the commoners.
In 50 per cent of the 103 African tribes surveyed by Irstam, the
king was killed under various stipulations ( 1944: 146) . Even where
the custom of killing the physically weakening king does not pre-
vail, the ruler is likely to be subject to election and deposition by
the courtiers and/or by many of the people (Fortes and Evans-
Pritchard 1940; Colson and Gluckman 195 1 ; and Bascom: personal
communication) . The fact is that if a considerable number of the
people are opposed to the ruler in a Type D society, or even show
no interest in him, there is very little that such a man can do to
force the obedience of the people. He will simply be unable to find
instruments for the implementation of his rule. The rulers in Types
A and B, though limited by their subjects in the long run, are much
more secure and, therefore, more absolute in their rule at any given
point of time.

Religion

The beliefs in Type D societies will range from simple animism to
personified gods. Their religious mythology tends to be matter of
fact, which offers common sense answers to problems of origin or
of daily life. Their supernatural beings, often mixed with ancestral
spirits, are valued more or less for concrete ends. There is no mis-
sionary zeal or movement. There is no systematic theology as the
West knows it. Jealousy between rival priests is reported, but re-
ligious strife on theological or denominational basis cannot be ex-
pected. Like Type A peoples they do not fight religious wars. New
gods are introduced as in Types A and C societies, but having little
feeling for vertical continuity with the past or with the unfathoma-
ble Ultimate Reality, gods are much more replaceable than in Types
A and C societies. In fact, Africa is the only continent outside
Europe in which entire societies such as the Basuku simply gave up
their own gods wholesale and without a struggle in favor of the
missionary's holy water (Igor Kopytoff i960) .

Prejudice

There tends to be no racial or religious prejudice of the Western
kind, except that learned from their present or former colonial
masters. Rivalry among medicine men or priests will exist as it will
wherever there is conflict or practical interests. African societies
believe in witches and conduct witch hunts. But what has so far
escaped the attention of students who have made specific contribu-

448 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

tions on the subject (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Kluckhohn 1944) and
the students who contributed to one special number of Africa
(19355 Vol. VIII, No. 4) is that witch hunting in all nonliterate
and Type A and C societies is relativistic while its counterpart in
the West is absolutistic. For example, Western "witches," convicted
or suspected, were rarely spared, while "witches" in all other
societies can be freed from such punishment by material compensa-
tion from their families. In nonliterate societies there are always
counterwitchcraft measures or white magics which are essentially
the same sort of acts as those employed (alleged or actual) by the
witches or the sorcerers, but which are greatly valued by the people
(Wolfe i954a:853-856) . Possessors of such counterwitchcraft
measures may even achieve positions of influence (Browne 1929;
Hogbin 1934:216; Firth 1954:103 and 113-115). The question
has been dealt with elsewhere (Hsu i960) .

Impetus to Change

Because the individual can more or less reach his proper station
among fellow men through the kinship framework, there is, as in
Type A, little internal impetus to change. But since the solidarity
within the kinship groups is far less than that in Type A, there is
not the same centripetal force to resist deviation. In fact, there is
evidence that a daring member of the society, if he is really deter-
mined, can actually break some of the traditional rules by personal
initiative. Witness the way in which incest taboos can be and are
actually broken in spite of the threat of death penalty, which is
rarely carried out to the extent that they are formally threatened
(Hsu 1940). But although they tend to have more nonkinship
groupings than in Type A societies, such as age-grade villages and
secret societies, which seriously claim the individual's allegiance and
attention, such ties remain concrete but not idealistic in nature.
Therefore, customs, whether considered by the West as good or evil,
tend to perpetuate themselves since no individuals or groups will
take it upon themselves to eradicate them. Too, although they have
many more revolts against their rulers than would be the case among
Type A societies, they also know no such thing as revolution of an
internal origin, which aims at not only changing the ruler but also
the social order. Having no written languages, their opportunities
for accumulation of knowledge and ideas from the past and for
stimulation within the society are much more limited than among

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 449

Type A, B, and C peoples. This fact actually gives such societies,
in spite of their greater instability, fewer internal chances for cul-
tural evolution than Type A societies.

Concluding Remarks

This chapter is no more than a preliminary exploration of the
hypothesis. It is offered in the spirit of a Chinese proverb: "Throw
the bricks to lead in the jade." In the first place, there are, of course,
many facts which cannot be squeezed into the categories postulated,
although as pointed out before, no scientific classification covers all
the facts. In the second place, many differences do exist within each
of the types postulated. Take prejudice for example. Obviously,
not all societies in Type B are equally prejudiced. The pattern of
variation in prejudice coincides roughly with that of variation in in-
dividualism. In Europe, racial prejudice is more pronounced in
Britain and Germany, where individualism is stronger, than in Spain
and Italy where it is weaker. This difference becomes magnified
when European peoples settle in colonies. As a matter of fact, there
is almost a complete dichotomy with Protestant colonies, including
the United States, Canada (the word "colony" is applied to these
independent countries in a historical and cultural sense) , Union of
South Africa, East Africa, and Australia, showing more racial
prejudice than Catholic colonies from French Equatorial Africa,
Portuguese East Africa, to Mexico and all South American repub-
lics.«

The differences between China and Japan (both being Type B)
are perhaps even more spectacular. Elsewhere I have advanced one
reason why Japan had actively and successfully met the modern
challenge of the West while China remained politically, economi-
cally, and militarily prostrate for a whole century. I found the
presence of the kinship usage of primogeniture in Japan and the
absence of it in China to be one of the most relevant factors (Hsu

* New Zealand is a possible exception so far. There the relationship between the Protestant
whites and the Maoris shows greater harmony than that between the indigenous populations and
white settlers elsewhere. There are some peculiar but complex reasons for this which are not as
yet systematically explored. One of these reasons is the the Europeans never scored decisive victories
over the Maoris in battle. Another rason is that Maori values seem to have a great deal of affinity
to those of the European settlers. Judging by the white New Zealanders' prejudicial attitude
toward other nonwhites, the significance of the nature of their relationship with the Maoris re-
mains inconclusive. According to recent reports, the situation in Angola seems to be one other
exception. But the usual defect in such reports is their failure to distinguish politically and mili-
tarily oppressive actions from the continued and tenacious prejudice in day-to-day life. A truer
picture must await more intensive researches.

450 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

1954). The diversity in patterns of life among nonliterate tribes,
even of one in sub-Sahara Africa, is both great and obvious.
The relationship between kinship structure, kinship content, and
way of life postulated in this chapter must be seen as circular or
spiral, with all variables boosting or limiting each other in time,
rather than in the manner of a straight line, with one variable being
the ultimate cause of another. The circular or spiral relationship
in the four types of societies may be crudely represented in the
following diagrams:

TYPE A ^ TYPE B

.HUSBAND-WIFE-^ ^^_» FATHER -SON •

AXIS ^V /-^ AXIS

INDIVIDUALISM EXCLUSIVENESS . ELABORATION OF INCLUSIVENESS

AND SELF-RELIANCE AND DISCONTINUITY ANCESTOR CULT AND CONTINUITY

INDEPENDENCE ,6-^ V MUTUAL

OF CHILDREN DEPENDENCE

TYPE C TYPE D

.MOTHER-SON _^ ^^BROTHER-BROTHER ^

LONGING FOR CONTINUITY SOME EXCLUSIVENESS ANCESTORS AND GODS HORIZONTAL
OF ONE-SIDED OR AND DISCONTINUITY USEFUL FOR PRESENT ORIENTATION-
ALL-EMBRACING CLAIMS-GREAT IMPORTANCE VERTICAL
DEPENDENCE RELATIONSHIP ] OF PERSONAL ABILITY DISSOCIATION

AND POWER

;

J

\ ONE-SIDED DEPENDENCE
\ UPON AN ALL-ANSWERING V BROTHERHOOD OF

FIGURE ^ MAN, BUT ALSO

UNRELIABILITY OF MEN
BECAUSE OF COMPETITION

The peoples belonging to each of the four types of kinship sys-
tems presented here enjoy some obvious advantages and suffer from
some obvious drawbacks. Continuity in Type A is an advantage be-
cause it provides the individual with psychological security, but it
also can be a drawback because it restrains the individual's initia-
tive. With reference to the discontinuity of Type B, the order of
advantage versus disadvantage is exactly the reverse. Type C peoples
may be more diffused in outlook than others but among them we
find more individuals reaching great heights of spirituality than
among others. Type D peoples may fight more among themselves,
but their kinship content is the only one of the four which seems
truly consistent with universal brotherhood of man.

Finally, the kinship structure and content of a people obviously

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 451

form only one of the variables, though a most important one, af-
fecting its development. The physical facts of size of population
and ecology may have a great deal to do with it. Firth's description
of Tikopian family, clan, and ancestor cult (Firth 1936) bears
great resemblance to what we find in China, but factors other than
kinship (for example, life on isolated islands as compared with that
on a vast continent) obviously have some important bearing on
why the Tikopia did not develop vast empires such as those of the
Chinese. Other important factors in the development of peoples
are the presence or absence of external threats of conquest, of inter-
tribal or international communication and stimulation, and perhaps
even climatic conditions and biological compositions.

The error of some students lies in their attempt to produce final
explanations for all by one factor. But the error of some others lies
in reluctance to explore any hypothesis to its logical conclusion for
fear of the accusation of being biased. Neither of these approaches,
if carried to the extreme, is likely to be fruitful in the long run.

What I have tried to do in this chapter is probably to raise many
more questions to be settled by further research than I have an-
swered. My purpose is to show that the patterns of kinship content,
which have been neglected in systematic kinship studies, are demon-
strably rooted in those of kinship structures, and that both have
strong bearing on the patterns of personality and culture in differ-
ent societies. In the preliminary results, I plead guilty to having
lumped numerous peoples together whom many will certainly re-
gard as being incongruous. But I am no more guilty than the zoolo-
gist who puts fish, chickens, crocodiles, monkeys, and humans to-
gether into the single category of vertebrata and attributes to all
of them a number of common characteristics. If differences alone
are stressed, I am positive that no two human societies are identical.
For that matter we can go further and note that no two individuals
are completely alike. At a certain level, it is important to ascertain
the exact cultural differences between two particular tribes just
as at a certain other level it is relevant to see the mental differences
between two individual leaders. But before those who are interested
in diamonds attempt to ascertain the differences between diamonds
and pebbles, they must first make sure that they know what sepa-
rates, on the one hand, the diamonds and pebbles (which are both
stones) , and, on the other, cabbages and turnips (which are both
vegetables) .

452 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bascom, W. R.

1944 The sociological role of the Yoruba cult-group. American Anthropo-
logical Association. Memoir, 03.

195 1 Social status, wealth and individual differences among the Yoruba.
American Anthropologist (Part I) 53:490-505.

BoHANNAN, Laura and Paul

1953 The Tiv of Central Nigeria. Ethnographic Survey Series, International
African Institute, London.

Browne, C. R.

1929 Maori witchery. London, J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd.
Carstairs, G. Morris

1957 The twice born. London, The Hogarth Press.
Caton-Thompson, G.

193 I The Zimbabwe culture ruins and reactions. London, Oxford University
Press.

Chang, Tung-Sun

1952 A Chinese philosopher's theory of knowledge. Yenching Journal of
Social Studies, I.

Chaudhuri, Nirad C.

195 1 The autobiography of an unknown Indian. New York, McMillan Co.
Childs, Gladwyn M.

1949 Umbundu kinship and character. London, Oxford University Press.
Christensen, J. B.

1954 Double descent among the Fanti. New Haven, Human Relations Area
Files.

CoLSON, E. AND M. Gluckman (cd.)

195 1 Seven tribes of British Central Africa. London, Oxford University Press.
Driberg, J. H.

1923 The Lango. London, T. F. Unwin, Ltd.
DUBE, C. S.

1955 Indian village. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press.
Eggan, Fred

1950 Social organization of the western Pueblos. Chicago, University of
Chicago Press.

Eisenstadt, S. N.

1956 From generation to generation: age groups and social structure. Glencoe,
111., The Free Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.

1937 Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. London, Oxford

University Press.
1940a The political system of the Anuak of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

London, P. Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd.
1940b The Nuer. London, Oxford University Press.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 45 3

Firth, R.

1936 We the Tikopia. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
195 1 Elements of social organization. London, Watts & Co.
1954 The sociology of 'magic' in Tikopia, Sociologus, 14, 2, New Series,
97-116.

Fortes, M. and E. E. Evans-Pritchard

1940 African political systems. London, Oxford University Press.
Fortune, R.

1932 Sorcerers of Dobu. London, G. Routledge & Sons, Ltd.

GiLLIN, J.

1939 Personahty in pre-literate societies. American Sociological Review
4:681—702.

Gluckman, Max

195 1 The Lozi of Barotzeland. In Colson and Gluckman, Seven Tribes of
British Central Africa, pp. 1-93. London, Oxford University Press.

GOLDSCHMIDT, WaLTER

1948 Social organization in native California and the origin of clans. Ameri-
can Anthropologist 50:444-456.
Granet, Marcel

1934 La pensee Chinoise. Paris, La Renaissance du Livre.
Hart, C. W. M.

1954 The sons of Turimpi. American Anthropologist 56:242-261.
Herskovits, M. J.

1938a Dahomey. 2 Vols. New York, J. J. Augustin.

1938b Acculturation. New York, J. J. Augustin.

HOFMAYR, WiLHELM

1925 Die Schilluk. Vienna, St. Gabriel, Modling bei Wien. Admistration
des Anthropos.
HoGBiN, Ian H.

1934 Law and order in Polynesia. New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Hsu, Francis L. K.

1940 The problem of incest tabu in a North China village. American An-
thropologist 42:122—135.

1943 Incentives to work in primitive communities. American Sociological
Review 8:638-642.

1953 Americans and Chinese: two ways of life. New York, Abelard-Schuman.

1954 Cultural factors. In Williamson and Buttrick (ed.), Economic De-
velopment. New York, Prentice-Hall.

1959 Structure, function, content and process. American Anthropologist
(Part I) 61:790-805.

i960 A neglected aspect of witchcraft studies. Journal of American Folklore
73:287.

19 6 1 Clan, caste and club: a comparative study of Chinese, Hindu and Amer-
ican ways of hfe. Princeton, Van Nostrand and Co.
Irstam, Tor

1944 The King of Ganda, studies in the institutions of sacral kingship in

454 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Irstam, Tor (cont'd)

Africa. Stockholm, The Ethnological Museum of Sweden, New Series,
Publication 8. ; .

Kenyatta, J.

1939 Facing Mount Kenya. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Kluckhohn, C.

1944 Navaho witchcraft. Cambridge. Peabody Museum Papers, XXII, 2.

KopYTOFF, Igor

i960 Suku religion: A study in internally induced reinterpretation. Evanston,
111., Northwestern University doctoral dissertation.

KuHN, Manford H.

1954 Factors in personality: socio-cultural determinants as seen through the
Amish. In Francis L. K. Hsu (ed.), Aspects of Culture and Personality,
pp. 43—45. New York, Abelard-Schuman.

Leach, E. R.

195 1 The structural implications of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage.
Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain (Part I
&II) 81:23-55.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

1949 Les structures elementaires de la parente. Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France.

Linton, R.

1933 Tanala, a hill tribe of Madagascar. Chicago Field Museum Series, XXII.

1939 In A. Kardiner, The individual and his Society. New York, Columbia
University Press.

1940 A neglected aspect of social organization. American Journal of So-
ciology 45:870-866.

1945 The Comanche. In A. Kardiner, The psychological frontiers of society,
pp. 47—48. New York, Columbia University Press.

1955 The tree of culture. New York, Alfred Knopf.

Malinowski, B.

1929 Sexual life of savages. 2 vols., London, G. Routledge & Sons, Ltd.
1933 Sex and repression in a savage society. London, G. Routledge & Sons,
Ltd.

Mandelbaum, David G.

1949 The family in India. In R. N. Anshen, ed., The family, its function and
destiny. New York, Harper Bros.

Mayer, Philip

1949 Lineage principle in Gusii society. Memorandum XXIV, International
African Institute, London.

Mead, Margaret (ed.)

1937 Cooperation and competition among primitive peoples. New York,

McGraw Hill Book Co., Inc.
1939 Coming of age in Samoa. In From the South Seas. New York, Morrow

&Co.

KINSHIP AND WAYS OF LIFE 45 5

Meek, C. K.

193 I A Sundanese kingdom. London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubiier & Co.,
Ltd.

MUKERJI, D. GOPAL

1923 Case and outcaste. New York.
MuLLER, F. Max

1938 Ramakrishna, his life and sayings. London.
MuRDOCK, George Peter

1949 Social structure. New York, McMillan & Co.
Murphy, Gardner

1953 In the minds of men. New York, Basic Books, Inc.
Murphy, Lois B.

1953 Roots of tolerance and tensions in child development, chap. IV, In
Gardner Murphy: In the minds of men. New York, Basic Books, Inc.
NivEDiTA, Sister (Miss M. E. Noble)

1904 The web of Indian life. London & Bombay, Longmans, Green & Co.
Oberg, K.

1940 The Kingdom of Ankole in Uganda. In Fortes and Evans-Pritchard,
eds., African political systems. London, Oxford University Press.

Payne, Ernest A.

1933 The Saktas. Calcutta & London, Oxford University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, a. R.

1950 Introduction. In African systems of kinship and marriage, edited by
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, pp. 1—85. London, Oxford
University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. and Daryll Forde, (ed.)

1950 African systems of kinship and marriage. London, Oxford University
Press.
RoscoE, J.

191 1 The Baganda. London, MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
Schapera, I.

1 94 1 Married life in an African tribe. New York, Sheridan House.
Seligman, C. G. and B. Z.

1932 Pagan tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. London, G. Routledge & Sons, Ltd.
Spoehr, Alexander

1940 Changing kinship systems. Anthropological Series. Field Museum of
Natural History, vol. 33, No. 4.
Steed, Gitel P.

1950 Life history documents, I (Indrasingh) . New York, Columbia Uni-
versity Research in Contemporary India Project (hectographed).
1955 Personality formation in a Hindu village in Gujarat. In McKim
Marriott (ed.) : Village India, pp. 102-144. Chicago, University of
Chicago Press.
Steward, Julian

1954 Types of types. Discussion of Ford, The type concept revisited. Ameri-
can Anthropologist 56:42-54, 55-57.

1955 Theory of Cultural change. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.

456 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Tegnaeus, Harry

1952 Blood brothers, Stockholm, The Ethnological Museum of Sweden, New
Series, Publication 10.
Wagner, G.

1949 The Bantu of North Kavirondo. London, Oxford University Press.
Watson, R. I.

1959 Psychology of the child. New York, John Wiley & Sons.
Wolfe, Alvin W.

1954 The institution of demba among the Ngonje Ngombe. Zaire (Belgian
Congo Review) 8:843-856.

INTRODUCTION TO PART IV

ASSESSMENT

In this final section Spiro gives us an integrated picture of the
whole field of psychological anthropology. He touches on some of
the chapters of this book which have gone before but he also takes
into consideration other works not specifically dealt with by the
contributors to this volume. The reader will note that in certain
areas Spiro 's views do not agree with those of some of his colleagues.
To take but a few examples: He opines that anthropology cannot
claim to be a synthetic science of man because "vast dimensions of
human behavior and experience," from "British folklore, American
politics, Greek archaeology" to "Chinese economy," do not "come
within our purview." But quite a few anthropologists specialize
wholly or partially in "national character" studies of large and liter-
ate societies.

Then the term "primitive," which Spiro uses liberally and which
the other contributors use only rarely or not at all, is meeting with
increasing disfavor among anthropologists. Apart from other con-
siderations, such as the fact that in our fast-changing world most
former colonies now enjoy equal diplomatic relationship with the
great powers, there are grave doubts, from the purely scientific
point of view, concerning the lumping together of diverse peoples
from Australia and Polynesia to Africa and the Americas into this
one category.

Finally, Spiro's characterization that psychological anthropolo-
gists "have been primarily concerned with explaining personality"
neglects the fact that even the Kardiner-Linton studies emphasize
folklore and religion as projections of personality.

In spite of these and a few other points on which there is possible
disagreement, the main thesis of Spiro's chapter is as important as
it is likely to meet with hearty approval by psychological anthro-
pologists. After having discussed the fact that psychological
anthropologists have so far been "primarily concerned with ex-
plaining personality" by focusing our studies on "those aspects of

457

458 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

social systems and culture which putatively are determinants of
personality," he goes on and devotes the rest of his chapter to the
problem of "maintenance of persistence of social systems" and "the
problem of their internal change." In other words, he is emphasizing
the view, as the Editor does in Chapter i, that psychological anthro-
pology not only must deal with "the origin of psychological char-
acteristics as they are molded by the patterns of child rearing, social
institutions, and ideologies but must also account for the origin,
development and change in these child-rearing practices, institu-
tions, and ideologies." Spiro indicates that there are at least three
situations in which the potential conflict between personal desires
and cultural norms is not resolved and the motivation for noncom-
pliance with cultural norms is stronger than the motivation for
compliance. He then proceeds to examine these in detail and hy-
pothesizes on the dynamics of how such conflicts and their eventual
resolution in each of the three situations — psychologically, struc-
turally, and culturally induced — not only enable the social systems
to persist but also to change.

Som.e readers will note, however, one point of discord between
Spiro and the Editor. In Chapter i the Editor had indicated some
possible distinctions between cultural anthropology, social anthro-
pology, and psychological anthropology. Spiro, on the other hand,
concludes that psychological anthropology should "conceive of
itself as part of . . . social anthropology." The difference of opinion
between Spiro and the Editor is, however, more superficial than real.
The Editor's distinctions between the three subdisciplines are purely
a matter of points of view, which cannot and should not prevent
the territories of the three from overlapping with each other.

Chapter 15

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED
REORIENTATION

MELFORD E. SPIRO

University of Washington

The Emergence of Culture-and-Personality

An examination of textbooks in general anthropology, of symposia
such as Anthropology Today, of compendia such as the recently
inaugurated Annual Kevieiv of Anthropology, of the classification
of book reviews in the American Anthropologist, or of much of the
empirical and theoretical work which is labeled as "culture-and-
personality" — an examination of all of these yields the unambigu-
ous impression that for most anthropologists culture-and-person-
ality is a substantive field within the larger domain of anthropologi-
cal science. Since anthropology as a collective enterprise audaciously
pursues an imperialistic course consistent with its etymological
meaning — I say, "collective'," because with Kroeber's recently
lamented demise no single anthropologist pursues the study of man
in all its dimensions — we easily and naturally slice up our field into
physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthro-
pology, social anthropology, historical anthropology, and finally —
in the case of culture-and-personality — psychological anthropol-
ogy. When we are challenged by some of our academic colleagues to
explain the meaning of "anthropology" in each of the above expres-
sions, we are often embarassed in our attempts to provide a satis-
factory response because, of course, other sciences are centrally
concerned with man's soma, his society, his psyche, and so forth. We
sometimes attempt to explain "anthropology" in these expressions
— and at the same time to justify our imperialism — by claiming
that "anthropology" connotes a concern for all of these dimensions
of man's existence in a synthetic or holistic manner.

459

460 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Unfortunately this claim cannot be seriously defended. There
are vast dimensions of human behavior and experience with which
we have little or no concern. Seldom, for example, do British folk-
lore, American politics, Greek archaeology, Chinese economy — to
take but a few examples — come within our purview. On the other
hand, we do study Navaho folklore, Nuer politics, Iroquois archae-
ology, and Samoan economy. In short, not Man, but primitive
man, has been our concern. It must be admitted, of course, that in
some important instances, the development of theoretical models
and analytic schemes has proceeded without special concern for the
uniquely primitive. But when this has occurred, progress has been
made by eschewing the holistic approach. Thus in those fields where
advance has been most spectacular, such as population genetics or
structural linguistics, the anthropologist has become indistinguish-
able from his nonanthropological colleagues working in these vine-
yards.

These comments concerning the anthropological concern with
primitive peoples are not intended as a criticism, but rather as a
characterization, of the nature of our discipline, which in turn pro-
vides the historical context within which culture-and-personality
studies developed. These studies emerged, I believe it is fair to say,
as a result of a serious crisis with which anthropology was con-
fronted beginning, roughly, about 1920. One might almost charac-
terize this crisis, as Erik Erikson characterizes the typical adolescent
crisis, as one of "identity."

"When anthropology first arose as a separate discipline, its primary
concern was with the origin, evolution, and distribution of man and
his cultures. Holding this aim as its charter, armed with the older
comparative method as its main research tool, and accepting as a
methodological premise the approximate equation of primitive and
prehistoric peoples, its rationale for the study of primitive peoples
was axiomatic. With the growth and development, however, of
American anthropology and its disparagement of both the aims and
methods of the various evolutionary schools, the rationale for the
focus on primitive peoples lost much of its force. If, according to
the American school, the study of American or Australian ab-
origines could shed little light on the origin and evolution of culture,
what interest, for other than an antiquarian curiosity, could ab-
original peoples have for modern science? And if, in accordance
with the emerging conception of cultural relativism, the cultures
of aboriginal peoples (like our own culture) were to be viewed as

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 461

so many variants of a universal culture pattern, rather than as dif-
ferent stages in an evolutionary scheme or as different points on
some scale — of progress, or development, or complexity, or any
other measure — why bother to study them? To provide further
documentation for the thesis of variability and of relativism? But
were anthropologists then to become like those, of whom Pierce
(1935:233) complained, who

. . . seem to love to argue a point after all the world is fully convinced of it.
But no further advance can be made. When doubt ceases, mental action on a
subject comes to an end; and, if it did go on, it would be without a purpose.

In general, American anthropologists justified their preoccupa-
tion with primitive cultures by arguing that ethnographic facts —
when they were all in — would constitute vital data for the recon-
struction of culture history, and, perhaps, provide the evidence for
an inductive construction of cultural "laws" (presumably, laws of
change, invention, diffusion, and so forth) . Hence, like the older
evolutionists — but for different reasons — anthropologists con-
tinued to collect ethnographic facts. They differed from the evo-
lutionists in that their facts were collected at first hand in the field,
rather than from the reports of missionaries and travelers. They dif-
fered too in their antitheoretical bias. Since science was "objec-
tive," ethnographic science was to be descriptive, assiduously avoid-
ing all theoretical entanglements; and the immediate if not the
ultimate aim of ethnographic research was to be the meticulous
observation, collection, and classification of facts — in the spirit
of Ranke's historiography: wie es eigentlich gewessen ist. Only
after this essentially descriptive task was performed in a fairly large
number of societies could the anthropologist (if he were so inclined)
attempt to discover cultural laws. And even then, as Boas (1936:
257) cautioned, "cultural phenomena are of such complexity that
it seems doubtful . . . whether valid cultural laws can be found."

This approach to the study of primitive peoples — the approach
of radical empiricism — which, I believe, represented a serious at-
tempt to solve our identity crisis, had at least two important conse-
quences for anthropological theorizing. On the one hand, it led to
the proliferation of speculative, nontestable theory. On the other,
it led to an extreme skepticism concerning the possibility of any
theory. As one wit put it, it led to the generalization that the only
valid anthropological generalization is the generalization that there
are no valid generalizations.

That a method which insisted on the divorce of theory and data

462 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

should have resulted in a proliferation of speculation was, though
ironical, inescapable. If theoretical generalizations are to emerge
from research, they must be used in research. And if theory is di-
vorced from research, it necessarily leads an independent existence,
neither affecting the nature of inquiry, nor being affected by the
results of inquiry. Removed in effect from any empirical context, it
remains in the realm of speculation — and of fruitless controversy.
This state of affairs can cease only when theory exists in a correla-
tive relationship with fact, when, that is, it generates hypotheses
to be tested in inquiry. Only then are its concepts formulated op-
erationally and its predicted consequences confirmed or discon-
firmed empirically. But the method of radical empiricism precluded
the empirical resolution of theoretical controversy. Since theory
was not employed in research, facts adduced for the support of
theories were, at best, illustrative; and equally good illustrations
could be found for almost any theory and its antithesis.

Facts can become data only when they are used as evidence for
the testing of scientific hypotheses, only when, that is, they are
expected to solve theoretical problems. For it is a theory, in the
form of a hypothesis to be tested, that determines which facts out
of a potentially infinite number are to be collected — those facts,
namely, which are believed to constitute evidence for the inquiry
at hand. Dewey (1938:497) put it much better when he observed
that:

All competent and authentic inquiry demands that out of the complex welter
of existential and potentially observable and recordable material, certain material
be selected and weighed as data or the "facts of the case." This process is one of
adjudgment, of appraisal or evaluation . . . An idea of an end to be reached, and
end-in-view, is logically indispensable in discrimination of existential material
as the evidential and testing facts of the case. "Without it, there is no guide for
observation; without it, one can have no conception of what one should look
for or even is looking for. One "fact" would be just as good as another — that is,
good for nothing in control of inquiry and formation and in settlement of a
problem.

That the method of radical empiricism should have led, too, to
scientific agnosticism is not at all surprising. Cultural phenomena
are indeed complex, as Boas rightly cautioned; but this method
could hardly have decreased the impression of their complexity. The
fact is, of course, that the phenomenal world — the physical no less
than the cultural — is always complex; it is, as William James put
it, a "booming, buzzing, confusion." Hence, it is at least arguable

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 463

that the order and simpHcity now perceived to characterize the
physical world are conceptual rather than phenomenal, and that the
absence of order and of simplicity that seems to characterize the
cultural world may similarly be conceptual rather than phe-
nomenal. For we anthropologists are no exception to a universal
law of perception: viz., that any stimulus field becomes a percep-
tually meaningful field only when it is structured. But having de-
cided to collect all the ethnographic facts, and to collect them as
objectively as possible — that is, without explicit theory — anthro-
pology was confronted with an enormous corpus of unstructured
ethnographic material. And, as in any other unstructured situation,
the resultant perception was one of enormous complexity.^

It is against this background and within this context that culture-
and-personality studies emerged.^ In an era of radical empiricism
and scientific agnosticism, it is probably inevitable that the desire
of some scholars for a different methodological charter and a satis-
fying theoretical orientation should lead to new approaches. For
anthropologists this desire was satisfied in two quite dissimilar ways
and by two seemingly dissimilar schools: the British school of social
anthropology and the American school of culture-and-personality.
Despite the important differences that divided these schools, it
should be observed that they also had much in common. First, in
contrast to the earlier historical schools, both displayed almost
systematic indifference to problems of a historical nature. This is
not to say, as is sometimes charged, that they dismissed historical
variables as irrelevant, but rather that they viewed the task of
anthropology as something other than historical reconstruction.
Second, in contrast to an older trait-list approach, both emphasized

In this connection the following statements, one by an eminent physical, and the other by
an eminent social, anthropologist, are relevant. In an article on social structure Levi-Straus (1953:
549) observes: "Surprisingly enough, it is at the very moment when anthropology finds itself
closer than ever to the long-awaited goal of becoming a true science that the ground seems to fail
where it was expected to be the firmest: the facts themselves are lacking, either not numerous
enough or not collected under conditions insuring their comparability." Washburn, writing in
the same volume (1953:714—715) on physical anthropology, states: "After more than a century
of intensive fact-finding there is less agreement among informed scientists on the evolution of man
to other primates than there was in the latter part of the nineteenth century."

" Since these studies have historical roots both in eighteenth century thought and in nine-
teenth century scholarship, I do not mean to imply that culture-and-personality represented an
unprecedented innovation. Indeed, in addition to its deeper historical roots, it will be remembered
that Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead were all students of Franz Boas, whose
psychological interests are well known. But continuity is not identity, and these three pioneers are
sufficiently distinct from their intellectual predecessors to warrant our reference to their work as
a "new approach."

464 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the primacy of context, pattern, configuration, and structure.
Third, instead of a descriptivist approach, both were theoretically
oriented. Primitive societies were to be studied for the Hght they
could shed on theoretical issues: in the one case — and here they dif-
fered— sociological, in the other, psychological. The one was in-
terested in the forms of society, the other in the dynamics of be-
havior. And this difference in turn led to still another fundamental
difference. The one either dismissed culture as irrelevant to its in-
terests (for example, Radcliffe-Brown) , or else concentrated on an
examination of its properties (for example, Malinowski) ; the other
viewed it as of crucial importance, but as an independent rather
than as a dependent variable. That is, its interest was in demonstrat-
ing the importance of culture as an efficient cause in the develop-
ment of personality and in the patterning of behavior. In any event,
both innovations — social anthropology and culture-and-personal-
ity — represented important attempts to salvage anthropology as a
theoretically informed discipline, concerned with discovering laws
or principles that would explain classes of phenomena, whether
these phenomenal classes be social, cultural, behavioral, or psycho-
logical.

For culture-and-personality, the phenomenal class to be explained
was personality and its cross-cultural variability. This school, like
the older historical schools, was deeply interested in culture — and,
like the older schools, it conceived of culture as a holistic concept,
including social structure, material goods, social norms, values and
ideas, and so forth; in short, the "man-made part of the environ-
ment." But this school, as has already been stated, was interested in
culture as an independent, rather than as a dependent, variable. In-
stead of asking — as did the older schools — what historical, environ-
mental, or biological variable (s) produced certain cultural vari-
ables or even a total culture, culture-and-personality asked what
cultural variables produced certain personality variables or a total
personality. Culture-and-personality, focusing on personality but
stemming from general anthropology, was concerned with demon-
strating that almost all behavior was cross-culturally variable rather
than constant; that this variability was a function (primarily) of
environment rather than biology (race) ; that the crucial environ-
mental variable was culture; and that culture was learned rather
than innate.

The Copernican revolution in anthropology which was spon-
sored by culture-and-personality did not consist (as the threadbare

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 465

cliche has it) in the promotion of the study of the individual, in
contrast to social or cultural anthropology which studied the group
(as if it were possible to do either without the other! ) , It consisted,
rather, in the change from the traditional focus on culture as ex-
planaudnm to culture as explanans, and in the substitution of per-
sonality as explaiiandum. Indeed even a cursory examination of
the early literature of culture-and-personality will reveal how false
is the claim that culture-and-personality was — or is — a "study of
the individual in culture." Although some autobiographies were
collected, the autobiography was exploited to the end of discovering
not individual differences, but Cultural influences on the individual.
The "individual" was of concern not in those characteristics which
differentiated him from other individuals in his group — not, that
is, as an idiocyncratic person — but as a social person, as an example
of a culturally molded psychological or personality type. The ques-
tion to be examined was how this individual, viewed as a proto-
typical Hopi or Samoan or Alorese acquired a Hopi, rather than an
Alorese or Samoan personality. Culture-and-personality students
became, in short, the personality psychologists of primitive societies
— comparative human psychologists — attending always to the cru-
cial importance of culture for personality: its development, its
structure, and its functions. And since there were many new the-
ories to be tested, culture-and-personality studies were, from their
inception, strongly theoretical — if not always systematic — in
orientation.

Nevertheless, and despite its theoretical emphasis, culture-and-
personality did not — and in some quarters does not, even today —
receive an entirely favorable reception even among theoretically
oriented anthropologists. Many — perhaps most — of the pioneering
articles in culture-and-personality were published in nonanthro-
pological journals — sometimes, to be sure, because psychologists
replaced anthropologists as the reference group of certain members
of this school, but more frequently because their work did not re-
ceive the imprimatur of anthropology. In general, those anthro-
pologists who were dissatisfied with the older intellectual styles in
anthropology turned, not to culture-and-personality, but to British
social anthropology for new directions. Despite some of the dra-
matic changes introduced by this school, it was not the terra in-
cognita of culture-and-personality. Kinship and economics, divina-
tion and totemism, government and law — rather than shame and
guilt, projection and displacement, hostility and repression — con-

466 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

tlnued to comprise its basic vocabulary. In short, if British struc-
turahsm ^ constituted a revolution in anthropology, it was certainly
not Copernican; for however radical its departure from the more
conventional anthropological tradition, British structuralism re-
mained, like the latter, a social science. Culture-and-personality,
on the other hand, entered anthropology — and was eventually le-
gitimized— as its behavioral science branch. Its unique contribution
to the understanding of behavior was the culture concept of tra-
ditional anthropology. By conceiving of culture as an efficient cause
which could not only, like other putative efficient causes, explain
behavior but which could also, unlike some other putative causes,
explain its cross-cultural variability, culture-and-personality not
only commanded serious — if not always respectful — attention
among the other behavioral sciences, but it also provided the anthro-
pological concern for primitive peoples with triumphant vindica-
tion. Instead of satisfying essentially exotic, quixotic, or romantic
curiosity, anthropology — according to the more partisan support-
ers of culture-and-personality — was pursuing a scientific enterprise
of the first magnitude: it was engaged, almost uniquely, in an "ex-
perimental" study of human behavior. Whereas the other be-
havioral sciences were studying the same highly restricted sample of
behavior drawn from an atypical segment of the total universe of
behavioral samples, the study of primitive peoples allowed anthro-
pology to sample the total universe. Since anthropology had already
shown that behavioral differences within the class of primitive so-
cieties were even greater than the differences between primitive so-
cieties as a class and nonprimitive societies as a class, primitive
societies could acquire new interest for the behavioral sciences not
because they were alike but because they differed. Since all societies
were members of the same universe, each society — including primi-
tive— represented a variation on the same human theme.

With this new rationale and this new approach, the study of
primitive peoples, for many anthropologists who had viewed the
more traditional approach as having entered an intellectual cul-de-
sac, received new and important justification. Primitive peoples,
it was claimed, were important, not because they could contribute

^ Here, and elsewhere in this chapter, the term "social anthropology" is not intended to be
synonymous with British social anthropology: the latter is to the former what the part is to the
whole. I use the term "British structuralism" or "pure structuralism" to refer to that school
within social anthropology which views the discovery of "structural principles" as its major
analytic task, and which systematically excludes psychological variables from its modes of analysis.

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 467

to an understanding of a separate class of behavior, the class of
primitive behavior, but because they could contribute to the under-
standing of a larger behavioral class, the class of human behavior.
From this point of view, each primitive society was thought to
constitute, as it were, a natural laboratory for the study of different
dimensions of behavior. And since these laboratories seemed to be
the special preserve of anthropologists, they alone, it was alleged,
were able to study the complete content, and to test the full limits,
of human behavioral variability.

Toward a Reorientation of Culture-ond-Personolity

It is not my task to evaluate this charter, or to assess the culture-
and-personality studies which have been conducted in many parts
of the world within its provisions: the latter task is admirably ac-
complished in other chapters in this volume. I am concerned rather
with assessing the future contribution which such studies may make
to the furtherance of the theoretical aims of anthropological sci-
ence. It is, of course, both difficult and hazardous to draw hard and
fast distinctions among the various sciences; and it is even more
hazardous to fix the frontiers of any discipline and, thus, to declare
as alien all research concerns that fall beyond those frontiers. I do
not intend to do either. At the same time, within the present system
of scientific specialization it is obvious that anthropology and soci-
ology have been traditionally concerned with the analysis of cul-
tural and social systems, while other disciplines (personality psy-
chology, psychiatry, and so forth) are centrally concerned with
personality. I would suggest that anthropology, including culture-
and-personality, persist in its traditional concern — not because I be-
lieve that cultural or social systems are of greater scientific interest
or importance than personality systems, but because the theoretical
problems which they pose are still for the most part unsolved; and if
anthropologists (as well as sociologists) eschew them, they may
never be solved. Hence, I am suggesting that, as anthropologists, the
important task for culture-and-personality theorists today is the
analysis of sociocultural systems rather than personality systems.

This suggested reorientation of the focus of culture and per-
sonality is not intended to imply that our past efforts have been
wasted, misguided, or misdirected. Quite the contrary! I believe
they were crucially important and highly desirable, both for an-
thropology as well as for personality psychology. Their importance

468 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

for the latter discipline has been marked. The relevance of socio-
cultural variables in the process of personality development and
formation, though acknowledged in part prior to the work of cul-
ture-and-personality, was seldom incorporated systematically into
personality theory. This is no longer the case. Most personality
theorists — from psychoanalytic, to stimulus-response — are now
systematically aware of the relevance of sociocultural variables for
personality development and persistence. This is not to say that
culture- and-personality was solely responsible for this change. Many
currents in the social, behavioral, and psychiatric sciences con-
tributed to this growing awareness of the importance of sociocul-
tural variables. (Indeed, it is possible, as Wallace implies in his
chapter in this volume, that the importance of sociocultural deter-
minants has been exaggerated, and that it might be well to take
another look at genetic and other biological variables.) Neverthe-
less, the documentation of the importance of cultural determinants
in personality formation was a major — though not exclusive — in-
tellectual achievement of culture-and-personality studies, and it
represents the major contribution of anthropology to personality
theory.

The importance of culture-and-personality has been, if anything,
even more important for anthropology than for psychology. By
focusing on personality dynamics and on social behavior (rather
than on culture traits or social structure) these studies have im-
pressed upon some anthropologists, at least, the realization that cul-
tures and/or social systems do not lead an independent existence
of their own; that their operation and maintenance are dependent
to a marked degree on their internalization (either as cognitive or
as affective variables) within the personalities of the members of
society; and that for many — but by no means for all — problems of
both structure and process, a studied indifference to the psycho-
logical dimensions of behavior can only lead to truncated, if not
false, theories.

Indeed it is precisely because it has been so successful that I am
suggesting a reorientation of culture-and-personality. Having suc-
ceeded in its attempts to induce personality psychology to in-
corporate sociocultural concepts within its conceptual apparatus,
and having succeeded in legitimizing the use of personality concepts
by anthropology, it might be argued that its original mission has
come to its end. For if, on the one hand, the study of personality is
not the focal concern of anthropology, I can see no grounds for

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 469

pursuing something which others can do better than we; or are we
content to become for personahty theory what medieval philoso-
phy was for theology, its handmaiden?— in this case, a handmaiden
in exotic places. If, on the other hand, the study of culture and of
social systems is the focal concern of anthropology, I can see no
grounds for abandoning this concern to other anthropologists whose
conceptual apparatus does not systematically include what for us
is a key concept: the concept of personality.

For those au courant with the literature of culture-and-per-
sonality (if only from having read the previous chapters in this
volume) , this suggestion for a reorientation of the focus of our in-
terest will not be received as a new or original suggestion. Much of
the research and theory in culture-and-personality, even that of its
pioneers — Mead, Hallowell, Henry, Kluckhohn, and others — ex-
emplifies the approach which is proposed in this chapter. This pro-
posal, therefore, is intended not as a radical departure from, but
rather as a strengthening of, a trend which already has distinguished
practitioners. But this trend must be broadened as well as strength-
ened. Because, as comparative personality theorists, we have been
primarily concerned with explaining personality, our studies have
in general focused on those aspects of social systems and culture
which putatively are determinants of personality. And since, in the
main, our theories have stressed the primacy of primary groups and
the crucial importance of the socialization system, we have tended
to ignore other social groups and other systems. In saying this I am
not concerned here with evaluating the validity of our theories con-
cerning the importance of primary groups or of socialization, but
rather with explaining the relative neglect of other systems — po-
litical systems, as Inkeles rightly observes in his chapter in this vol-
ume, are a notable case in point — in culture-and-personality studies.

It is at least debatable, of course, that even as comparative per-
sonality theorists we have been negligent in our relative neglect of
other systems; perhaps political systems, for example, are important
determinants of personality formation. If this is so, our theories of
personality development must be revised. But this is not the brunt of
this discussion. Even if it were established that political and other
institutions have no bearing on personality formation, my proposal
for a reorientation of culture-and-personality would nevertheless
demand that these institutions, instead of personality as such, be-
come our major concern.

In suggesting that we abandon the Copernican revolution of cul-

470 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ture-and-personality, I do not intend to imply that we abandon our
concern for personality. On the contrary! The introduction of per-
sonality concepts has been our unique contribution to anthropol-
ogy, and the retention of personality as a crucial variable is our very
raison d'etre. My suggestion implies, rather, that its conceptual
status be changed from explanandiim to explanans, from a concept
to be explained to an explanatory concept. Hence, though we would
share a common focal concern — social system and culture — with
our fellow social anthropologists, we would differ from them in our
emphasis on personality and personality-derived concepts as our
central analytical tools.

Restricting the discussion to social systems, I think it can be
shown that current anthropological theories of social systems which
explicitly preclude personality concepts from the domain of an-
thropological modes of explanation — pure structural theories —
frequently fail to deal adequately either with the problem of the
maintenance or persistence of social systems, or with the problem
of their internal change. With respect to change, the strategy of
pure structural analysis almost necessarily precludes the possibil-
ity of dealing with internally derived sociocultural change. The
analysis of social structure is, of course, the first task in the analysis
of social and cultural systems, and any theorist — psychological and
antipsychological alike — must derive his structural variables by
abstraction from the behavior of psychobiological organisms. The
pure structuralist differs from other theorists, however, in insisting
that these structural variables are the only legitimate data for an-
thropological analysis, and in denying other variables which can
be derived from the behavior of these psychobiological organisms
the status of legitimate anthropological concern. Since psychologi-
cal variables are not structural variables, they are relegated to the
psychologists. Having thus excluded the very variables which com-
prise a constant and persistent source of internal (in contrast to
external) change — the needs and drives of the psychobiological or-
ganisms whose frustrations exert a continuous innovative strain —
pure structural theories must necessarily adopt models of stable
equihbrium, models which are almost inherently incapable of deal-
ing with internally derived change.

Yet personality variables are as important for the maintenance
of social systems as for their change. Without the use of personality
concepts, attempts fully to explain the operation of these systems,
either in terms of efficient causes or in terms of functional conse-

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 471

quences, are seldom convincing. (Indeed the frequent recourse to
psychological explanation, albeit in disguised form, at crucial points
in many "antipsychological" structural analyses attests to the va-
lidity of this thesis.) Thus, although no one could take issue with
Radcliffe-Brown's assertion (1950:82) that "the social function of
any feature of a system is its relation to the structure and its con-
tinuance and stability, not its relation to the biological needs of
individuals," — although no one could take issue with this assertion
(because, of course, no one would commit the semantic fallacy of
confusing social with biological functions) , and although we might
even concede that our task as social anthropologists is the discovery
of social rather than biological functions, we might still want to ask
whether in some instances at least an understanding of the biological
functions of some structural unit may not be necessary for an un-
derstanding of its social functions. Or are we to say that the satis-
faction of biological needs or their frustration have no consequences
— even crucially important consequences — for the operation of a
social system? If a negative answer to this question is the obviously
correct answer, it is certainly not obvious to me.

Similarly although we might agree with Professor Firth (1956:
224) that in studying religious ritual the anthropologist "is con-
cerned primarily with the kinds of social relations that are produced
or maintained, rather than with the inner state as such of the par-
ticipants," we would ask whether it is at all possible to understand
the nature of a "social relation" without having some understanding
of the "inner state" of the participants? Whether, indeed, the dif-
ferent "kinds" of social relations are not, among other things, a
function of different "kinds" of "inner states."

Theories which attempt to explain the operation of social insti-
tutions, either in terms of their efficient causes or of their functional
(particularly their latent) consequences, must necessarily include
personality variables as explanatory concepts because, as I have
attempted to show elsewhere (Spiro, 1961), these institutions
provide culturally approved and/or prescribed means for the satis-
faction of personality needs, and these, in turn, provide the moti-
vational bases for the performance of the roles which comprise these
institutions. Hence, if the social function of personality — it has
others — consists in the contribution it makes to the maintenance
or persistence of a society, and if the psychological function of
social systems — they have others — consists in the contribution they
make to the maintenance of personality, the unique task of culture

472 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

and personality, as a theory of social systems, is to explain their
operation in terms of personality dynamics, and to explain their
social (not merely their psychological) functions by reference to
their capacity for the gratification and frustration of personality
needs.

This is, however, a most difficult task. Human social systems are
necessarily culturally constituted systems; and although culture
may be viewed, in evolutionary perspective, as man's unique and
crucial mechanism for adapting to nature and adjusting to other
men, it is at the same time a new environment to which man must
adapt and adjust. In short, culture is both an instrument and an
object; it contributes to social adaptation and adjustment and at the
same time it constitutes an object for adjustment. Hence, any
analysis of human, that is, culturally constituted, social systems
must explain how man adapts to the demands of culture — with
all the conflict attendant upon the process — at the same time that
he uses culture for the purpose of adaptation. Analyses which ig-
nore or are unacquainted with the dynamics of behavior — including
such unconscious mechanisms as psychological defenses — cannot
perform this task satisfactorily. This is the thesis to be examined
in the next section.

Culture-ond-Personality Theory and the Operation
of Social Systems ^

On the basis of our present knowledge, it is probably safe to com-
pile at least a partial list of both personal and social functional re-
quirements. In this short compass we shall be concerned merely
with those which are germaine to the relatively narrow focus of
this discussion — some of the problems posed by cultural conformity
and social control. With respect to the functional requirements of
personal adjustment and integration, at least the following must
be mentioned: {a) the gratification of drives, both acquired and
innate; {b) their gratification by means which comply with cul-
tural norms; (r) their gratification by means that preclude pain
for the actor, whether imposed by others (in the form of social
sanctions) or by the self (in the form of shame or of moral anxiety) .
These functional requirements are fulfilled by the organization and
operation of personality. Similarly, the functional requirements for
the adaptation and integration of society include at least the fol-

^ Isolated paragraphs, scattered in various parts of this section, have been taken from Spiro
i960.

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 473

lowing: (a) the gratification of the drives of its members; (b) the
performance of those tasks which achieve commonly accepted
group ends; (c) the protection of its members from aggression and
other socially disruptive acts. For the most part these functional
requirements are fulfilled by the organization and operation of so-
cial systems.

If social systems be conceived as configurations of reciprocal roles
which are shared by the members of a group in virtue of their in-
heritance from a prior generation — innovations do not become part
of a social system until or unless they are accepted, that is, shared,
and thereafter transmitted to succeeding generations — then, in the
most inclusive comparison of societies, from insect to human, we
can distinguish three broad types of social systems. First, there are
those whose constituent roles are inherited but not learned. These,
of course, are the insect social systems whose shared roles are in-
herited through some process of biological determination, either
by genetic inheritance or by postpartum nutrition. The persistence
of these systems poses no special problem for the theorist of insect
social systems: a worker ant must do whatever it is that worker ants
do do; her status is defined by her role, and her role is determined
by her nature. Second, there are social systems whose constituent
roles are inherited, at least to some extent, through learning. These
are the mammalian, and especially the primate, social systems.
Third, there are social systems whose roles are not only inherited
through learning, but whose roles are prescribed. These are human
social systems.

Whereas the second type of social systems is found in those biolog-
ical species characterized by a relatively small degree of plasticity,
and, hence, by a relatively narrow range of behavioral variability,
the third type is found in a species — homo sapiens — which exhibits
an enormous degree of plasticity and, hence, a broad range of be-
havioral variability. Thus, holding the physical environment con-
stant, all societies within the same inf rahuman mammalian species
have, more or less, the same social system; and within each society
the system persists with little change over time. This homogeneity
in space and time suggests that although many, if not all, of the
social roles in these societies are learned, the behavioral repertoire of
the typical member of these societies is not significantly broader
than the learned behavior patterns that comprise this group's social
system. Hence, in these societies what any member has learned to do
in order to satisfy his needs is little different from what he is able to

474 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

do and it, therefore, corresponds (more or less) to what he would
like to do.

For the human species, even when the environment is held con-
stant, different societies have different social systems and, for any
society, social systems change over time. Since, therefore, the actual
range of behavioral variability within the species is much broader
than the permitted range of variability within any society of the
species — since, that is, humans are capable of doing many things in
addition to those they are expected to do — it is obvious that for hu-
man societies it is not sufficient that social roles be inherited, shared,
and learned; they must also be prescribed. Hence, if human social
systems differ from those of other mammals in that only the former
are cultural, the crucial difference between cultural and noncul-
tural systems is not — as we anthropologists have always, and I now
believe wrongly, maintained — a difference between learned and
nonlearned systems. Recent work in comparative animal sociology
(Beach and Janes 1954; Schneirla 1950; Carpenter 1958) shows
convincingly that learning is an important mechanism in the social
behavior not only of man, but of all social mammals. With Hal-
lowell (i960). Parsons (1951), and others, I believe that the
distinctive feature of culture resides, rather, in its normative or
prescriptive dimension.^

This prescriptive, or normative, dimension of culturally consti-
tuted social systems is for human societies what narrow plasticity
and biological determination are, respectively, for mammalian and
insect societies: it reduces the range of intragroup behavioral varia-
bility and, thus, helps make social order possible. Without this tech-
nique for reducing the range of potential variability inherent in any
status, the long-range adaptive value of flexibility — which is made

^ In a previous publication (Spiro 195 1) I argued that culture and personality were inter-
changeable concepts, since culture, if it had any ontological status, was internalized by the individ-
ual. This extreme position was adopted in opposition to various superorganicist theories which
seemed to postulate a reified entity, culture, which was empirically as well as analytically divorced
from its "carriers," and was assigned an independent existence in its own ontological realm. It
has long been obvious to me that this extreme position is no more tenable than the position it had
attempted to counter. In the first place, although it may be cognized, culture need not be inter-
nalized; and even when internalized, it comprises only one dimension of the personality: the
superego. I would now argue, in agreement with the Parsonian tripartite classification, that culture
consists, among other things, of the norms which govern social relationships; that these norms are
to be distinguished analytically from that system of social relationships which may be termed
the social system of a society; and that both are to be distinguished from personality, by which
I understand the motivational system (including internalized norms) that characterizes individuals.
It is obvious, from this classification, that much so-called "culture and personality research" is
really concerned with social systems rather than with culture, or with culture rather than with
personality.

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 475

possible by wide plasticity — would have had to be sacrificed for the
short-run superiority of social order achieved through narrow plas-
ticity. Hence, the invention of culture allowed man to achieve both
flexibility and order; in short, almost to have his cake and to eat it
too. Almost, but not quite; for since what a person must learn to do
in order to participate in his social system is not the same as what he
can learn to do, it may conflict with what he would like to do.

This is, however, not the only conflict which may exist between
personal desires and cultural norms. Cultural norms may be pro-
scriptive as well as prescriptive. The former not only function to
reduce the range of potential variability in a society, but also to
preclude the expression of those activities which are, or are deemed
to be, socially disruptive. In short, in human societies par excellence
there exists, potentially, persistent conflict between cultural norms
and personal desires. But since cultural conformity — whether in the
form of the performance of socially prescribed tasks or in the form
of the inhibition of socially prohibited acts — is a functional require-
ment of society,'' this conflict must be resolved in such a way as to
achieve compliance with the cultural norms. On the other hand,
since the gratification of drives is a functional requirement for per-
sonal adjustment, this conflict must be resolved in such a way as to
permit at least a minimum degree of drive gratification. In short,
the conflict must be resolved so as to satisfy the functional require-
ments of the individual and of society simultaneously. How can this
be done?

If it be granted that behavior is motivated, it is obvious that the
mere learning of the cultural norms is not sufficient to induce com-
pliance. For if behavior is motivated, cultural conformity can be
achieved only if, in addition to the learning of the norms, the moti-
vation for compliance with their demands is stronger than the
motivation for the performance of competing behavior patterns
that comprise the behavioral repertoire of the actors. With respect
to the performance of social roles (compliance with prescriptive
norms) there is one obvious way in which this can be achieved. If
motivated behavior is goal-oriented behavior, and if we conceive
of goals as objects, events, or conditions which gratify drives, the
performance of roles can be ensured if, in the first place, the goals

" It is not the maintenance of the social system, but of a social system that is a functional re-
quirement. It is not cultural change but anomk that is dysfunctional, so that new roles may
fulfill the functional requirements just as well if not better than the old ones. But change in a
social system does not alter the problem with which we are concerned: potential conflict between
compliance with the new norms and gratification of drives.

476 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

which are achieved by their performance are cathected by and,
hence, serve to gratify personaHty drives, and if, secondly, the roles
are perceived to be efficient means for their achievement. When this
occurs, not only are the functional requirements of individual and
society satisfied simultaneously, but the functional requirement of
each is satisfied by an attribute of the other; that is, personality
drives serve to instigate the performance of social roles, and the per-
formance of roles serves to gratify personality drives.

There are, as far as I can tell, only two types of objects, condi-
tions, and events which can become cathected as goals for the grati-
fication of drives, and which, therefore, can serve to instigate the
performance of roles which attain them. These are (a) the func-
tions which comprise the culturally defined raison d'etre of a status,
and {b) the social rewards, or incentives,^ which societies offer to
the occupants of statuses. To use the esteem drive as an example,
those individuals for whom the culturally prescribed functions of
health or economic productivity are cathected as goals for the grati-
fication of this drive will be motivated, respectively, to occupy the
statuses of doctor or entrepreneur. Frequently, however, a status is
occupied, even though its social function is not cathected, because
of the cathexis of those rewards which societies offer to the occu-
pants of the status. Thus, the statuses of doctor and entrepreneur
may be occupied because of the incentives provided by a prestigeful
title or a high income. If, then, occupants of a status perform its
prescribed role in order to obtain either or both of these goals, the
motivation for their performance may be termed "function ori-
ented" and "incentive oriented" respectively.^

To summarize, if the culture of a society provides goals which
gratify drives, and if its social system consists of roles whose per-
formance is instrumental in achieving these goals, the functional
requirements both for successful personal adjustment as well as for
social adaptation and integration are satisfied. Although potential
conflict between personal desires and cultural norms is frequently
resolved in this way, there are at least three situations — psychologi-
cally, structurally, and culturally induced — in which this type of
resolution is not achieved, in which, on the contrary, the motivation
for noncompliance with cultural norms is stronger than the moti-
vation for compliance. In each of these situations other means for

' "Social rewards" is used instead of the conventional "positive sanctions."

' This is a deliberate oversimplification. It is obvious that role performance is almost always
motivated by a congeries of conscious and unconscious needs (r/. Spiro 1961).

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 477

ensuring cultural conformity — means which are usually referred to
as "techniques of social control" — are required. We may begin with
the least disruptive of these situations, that which is psychologically
induced.

Although the performance of social roles may attain drive -
gratifying goals, some of their constituent norms may be sufficiently
irksome to lead to a psychologically induced preference for non-
compliance with these norms. Thus, a teacher may prefer not to
comply with a five-day teaching schedule, although in general he
is otherwise content with his role. Compliance with norms of this
type must be achieved by some technique other than function-
oriented or incentive-oriented role motivation.

A second situation of potential violation of norms obtains even
though the performance of roles is an efficient means for the attain-
ment of drive-gratifying goals, because the social structure prevents
certain social strata from occupying the statuses in which these roles
are performed, so that drive gratification requires other — perhaps
proscribed — means for the attainment of the goals. Hence, unlike
the first situation in which cultural conformity (compliance with
prescriptive norms) , however irksome, produces drive gratifica-
tion, the second situation is one in which cultural conformity (com-
pliance with proscriptive norms) leads to drive frustration. Thus,
if Negroes are prevented from occupying those achieved economic
statuses in which role performance attains prestige-gratifying goals,
they may acquire a structurally induced motivation for proscribed
techniques of gratification. I say "may" because often, as we shall
see below, a frustrated drive is free to seek gratification by other ap-
proved techniques, as well as by those which are proscribed. Only
if these alternative means are not attempted or, if attempted, prove
to be unsuccessful, can it be predicted that the frustration of the
drive will become a powerful basis for the motivation of proscribed
behavior. And in order to preclude these proscribed motives from
seeking overt expression, techniques of social control are required.

The third basis for nonconformity — one which is culturally in-
duced— obtains when a drive can find no sanctioned means of grati-
fication because the drive itself is culturally disapproved. This is
almost universally true with respect to such interpersonal drives as
hostility and dependency. That any expression of these drives should
be deemed socially undesirable is not difficult to understand. Al-
though the minimal satisfaction of a child's initial dependency is a
necessary condition for the survival of society, the persistence of

478 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

childhood dependency into adulthood is a sufficient condition of its
extinction. Similarly uncontrolled aggression against the in-group
would ultimately eventuate in a Hobbesian state o£ war of all
against all. Culturally viewed, these drives are entirely different
therefore from, for example, the esteem drive. Although cultural
norms may differ concerning the desirability of the latter drive —
cross-culturally the norms may vary from permission to encourage-
ment to applause — there is no society to my knowledge in which
every undisguised expression of this drive is prohibited. And in those
societies in which this drive is widely frustrated, it is not because the
drive itself is deemed undesirable, but because, as we have seen, the
social roles by which it may be gratified are not available to large
segments of the population. Hence, where a conflict exists between
the esteem drive and prescriptive norms, the conflict is between cul-
tural norms and certain motives for the gratification of the drive,
rather than between cultural norms and the drive itself. In the case
of hostility and dependency, however, there is a conflict between
the cultural norms and the drives themselves because, since they are
socially disruptive, all motives for their gratification are proscribed.
But since these are powerful drives, techniques of social control are
required to prevent their overt expression.

In sum, the psychologically induced bases for nonconformity
require techniques of social control to ensure the performance of
socially required tasks, while the structurally and culturally in-
duced bases for nonconformity require techniques of social control
to protect society from socially disruptive activities.

It would seem that there are two techniques of social control —
provided by the social system — which may be employed for the ful-
fillment of these functional requirements of society. One technique
consists of social sanctions, that is, socially administered punish-
ments,'^ which induce the members of society to perform prescribed
activities or to suppress (or inhibit) proscribed activities. If these
sanctions — which consist either of physical or emotional punish-
ment (prison terms or public censure, for example) , and which
may be administered either by constituted authority (natural or
supernatural) or by peers — are cathected as negative goals (because
their imposition frustrates important drives) , the resultant motiva-
tion to comply with cultural norms may be termed "sanction
oriented."

But social sanctions may not be sufficient to ensure compliance

* "Social sanctions" is used here in place of the traditional, "negative social sanction."

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 479

with all cultural norms for the obvious reason that many activities
occur at times and in places which are temporarily inaccessible
either to authority figures (super alters) or to peers (alter egos) . If
the social system, through its socialization institutions, produces
personalities in which the norms themselves are cathected as goals —
personalities, that is, that have acquired a superego — cultural con-
formity may be achieved by what may be termed "norm-oriented"
motivation. In this technique of social control — one whose uni-
versality is still a matter of dispute among anthropologists (Spiro
1961) — compliance with cultural norms itself becomes a goal
(which gratifies the drive of self-esteem) . In short, norm-oriented
motivation differs from the other motivational bases for cultural
conformity in that the norms are internalized as ends as well as
means. By providing these techniques of social control, social sys-
tems satisfy two functional requirements of society: they assure the
performance of those tasks which achieve commonly accepted
group ends, and they protect society from socially disruptive ac-
tivities.

Although they arrive by somewhat different routes, most theories
of social systems — psychologically oriented and antipsychological,
alike — converge at this point. That is, almost all theorists agree that
the potential conflict between the normative demands of cultural
systems and the personal desires of psychobiological systems presents
all societies with one of their crucial maintenance problems. Almost
all theorists agree, too, that this potential conflict is resolved by vari-
ous techniques of conflict resolution that are built into the very
fabric of the social system: on the one hand, by socialization mecha-
nisms which, at least to some extent, create personalities whose de-
sires are consistent with cultural norms; on the other hand, by
techniques of social control which serve to preclude the expression
of those desires that remain in conflict with cultural norms. Thus,
by these (and other) maintenance mechanisms, the potentially dis-
ruptive forces inherent in any society are contained.

Yet it is precisely at this point of convergence that psychologi-
cally and nonpsychologically oriented theorists diverge most dra-
matically. The typical pure structural theorist would now conclude
that with the resolution of conflict equilibrium is achieved, and so-
ciety can now go about its business. For the culture-and-personality
theorist, on the other hand, it is only at this point that the problem
of social control becomes truly vexatious. For though the techniques
of social control described above are adequate to handle what are

480 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

termed the psychologically induced bases for nonconformity, they
are most definitely inadequate to handle, except temporarily, the
structurally and culturally induced bases for nonconformity. That
is, the desire to achieve goals by means less onerous than those cul-
turally prescribed (psychologically induced nonconformity) can
easily be held in check by ordinary techniques of social control be-
cause the culturally prescribed means of attaining cathected goals,
however sufficient or irksome, do in fact lead to drive gratification.
This is not true of the other two bases for nonconformity. Although
forbidden motives (proscribed means for gratifying the sanctioned
esteem drive, for example, and all means for gratifying the forbid-
den hostility or dependency drives) may be inhibited by the fear
of superego or of social sanction punishment, the drives which acti-
vate these motives are not extinguished. On the contrary, they per-
sist and they continue to demand gratification. Hence, although
the expression of the forbidden motive may be effectively contained
by techniques of social control, the conflict between cultural norms
and personal drives remain unresolved. In short, although they may
satisfy a functional requirement of society by discouraging the ex-
pression of forbidden motives, techniques of social control may
prevent the satisfaction of a functional requirement of personal ad-
justment when, as in the case of culturally and structurally induced
forbidden motives, they not only contain the expression of forbid-
den motives, but they also prevent the gratification of personal
drives. And since these drives demand gratification, they must either
be gratified by some approved technique whose existence eludes the
conceptual framework of pure structural analysis, or else their con-
tinued frustration will lead either to serious dysfunctional conse-
quences for personality — which, in turn, is bound to have serious
dysfunctional consequences for society — or to the breakdown of
social control (that is, the motives for noncompliance will be
stronger than those for compliance) . ~ x

To summarize, techniques of social control serve to contain the
expression of socially disruptive motives without producing ill ef-
fects on personal adjustment or social integration if the drives which
instigate the performance of the motives are gratified in other ways
— ways which the more conventional anthropological theories have
not systematically explored because of their exclusion of personality
variables from their conceptual formulations. Culture-and-person-
ality theory, cognizant of the importance of frustrated drives, and
realizing that these drives must be handled in some way, can make a

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 481

unique contribution to the analysis of social system by an investiga-
tion of this problem. Not only unique, but important! For however
these drives are handled, their expression has important conse-
quences for the maintenance, change, or disruption of social sys-
tems. Here we can offer only some preliminary suggestions.

Frustrated drives, in the first place, provide one motivational
source for social-cultural change. Thus, in the case of structurally
induced drive frustration, the frustrated drive, which cannot be
gratified by the performance of social roles, is free to seek gratifica-
tion, as we have already indicated, by other approved means. For
example, individuals whose esteem drive is frustrated may seek
satisfaction in the invention or borrowing of new means for the
achievement of blocked goals, means which, though not proscribed,
are different from the prescribed roles. Should these instrumental
innovations, however bizarre, fall within the limits of variability
permitted by the cultural norms, they are socially acceptable; and
should they be broadly imitated by others, they become the basis of
cumulation and/or change in the social system. If, on the other
hand, new means are not available or if they do not succeed in at-
taining the blocked goals, the pain of drive frustration may lead
to a substitution of new goals for the gratification of the drive
(nativistic and Utopian movements provide extreme examples) .
Sometimes this may be achieved by the conversion of the norms
themselves into goals. If, for example, the sanctioned norms are
conceived to have been instituted by the gods, compliance with the
norms may become the goal whereby esteem is gratified. This is
frequently the stance taken by movements of religious protest and
sectarianism.

Secondly, frustrated drives provide an important motivational
basis for the disruption of social systems. Thus, from the data now
available there is abundant reason to believe that frustrated drives —
whether culturally or structurally induced — constitute at least one
important motivational basis for delinquency, crime, and political
revolution. And such frustration must surely be a powerful basis
for the anomie that is said to characterize certain sectors of indus-
trial society, as well as for the frequently observed disruptive con-
sequences of acculturation.

Our concern in this discussion is with the persistence of social
systems. And here it would appear that the most important means
by which forbidden motives are handled consist of the various
mechanisms of ego defense described in the personality literature.

482 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

These mechanisms have been viewed by personahty theorists as
techniques for defending the ego against pain — the pain of shame,
of moral anxiety, of guilt, and of social sanctions. For the social sys-
tem theorist, however, their significance resides in their social func-
tions. That is, by resolving the conflict between cultural norms and
personal drives in ways which are satisfactory to both personality
and society, they not only protect the ego from the pain of inner
conflict, but they may also — as we shall see — contribute impor-
tantly to the maintenance of social systems. Among the various
types of defense, three are of special importance to us here because
of the additional light they may shed on this thesis. These are repres-
sion, displacement, and sublimation.

Repression — the rendering of the awareness of a drive or of its
frustration unconscious — although an important means of ensur-
ing cultural conformity is, at best, an unsatisfactory defense mech-
anism. The persistence of an unconscious, because forbidden, motive
may, for example, lead to guilt and depression. Moreover, the en-
ergy required for persistent repression may result in continuous
enervation and fatigue. Or, perhaps, the motive may break through
the repressive forces only to find expression in some hysterical symp-
tom. Alternatively, as in the case of unconscious hostility, it may
be turned against the self and result in suicide. Depression, hysteria,
and so forth, are unlikely candidates for indices of good mental
health; and, should they become widespread, they would hardly
(except in certain special circumstances) provide the psychological
basis for a viable social system. In brief, a successful defense mecha-
nism must not only protect the individual from the inner conflict
and pain produced by the motive in question, but it must also allow
him to gratify it in some form. But is this possible for such drives as
hostility and dependency, all of whose motives are prohibited?

The answer is, of course, that although proscribed drives are not
permitted direct gratification, they may be gratified in disguised
ways. Thus, since it is the meaning of a motive, rather than the
motive itself, that renders it acceptable or unacceptable, a change
in any of its four dimensions — the drive, or its goal, the act, or its
agent — may sufficiently alter its meaning so that it may re-enter
consciousness and, in its disguised form, seek gratification. Each
of these dimensional distortions produces each of the well-known
defense mechanisms which need not be described here. Although
these mechanisms may resolve inner conflict (between norm and
desire) and promote drive gratification, not all of their expressions

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 483

are equally desirable, either for the individual or for society. Indeed,
using the latter qualification as a criterion, we can distinguish three
types of defenses: (a) those that are ctdturally prohibited, and so-
cially and psychologically disruptive; {b) those that are culhiraUy
approved, and socially and psychologically integrative; (r) those
that are culturally constituted, and socially and psychologically
integrative.

Let us begin with the first type. If the distortion of a forbidden
aggressive motive, for example, should lead to paranoid projection
and therefore to acting-out behavior, on the one hand, or to its dis-
placement onto other members of the in-group, on the other, the
defensive behavior (in-group aggression) encounters the same cul-
tural disapproval and meets the same social sanction as the original
motive. The resolution of inner conflict is achieved at the price of
mental illness and/or social punishment for the individual, or of the
breakdown of social control for society. This is hardly a satisfactory
type of defense.

The second type of defense does not require the payment of such
a high price. In any society, everyone uses defenses of this type all
the time, and they serve them, their society, and their social system
very well. Thus, for example, the kicking of a tree instead of attack-
ing a kinsman; the killing of animals for sport, instead of assassi-
nating a chief; the temporary dependence upon a wife during
illness, instead of the permanent dependence upon mother — these
and scores of other defenses are used by individuals in all societies.
They protect individuals from inner conflict and, at the same time,
permit them to satisfy, albeit in a disguised form, forbidden needs;
they achieve compliance with cultural prohibitions and thereby
protect society from the expression of forbidden motives. Their im-
portance both for the student of personality and for the student of
social systems cannot be overestimated. For the latter they provide
an important conceptual tool for the analysis of cultural conform-
ity. They enable him to understand how techniques of social control
can frustrate proscribed motives without producing dysfunctional
consequences for the members of society or for their social system.

But defense mechanisms are of even greater importance to the
social system theorist than has thus far been suggested; and this
brings us to our third type of defenses. Defense mechanisms, like
other behavior patterns, are both idiocyncratic and culturally pat-
terned. That is, some defense mechanisms — the ones to which we
have already alluded — are developed by the individual through his

484 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

own personality resources; others are developed by groups of in-
dividuals, and even by an entire society by means of resources which
are provided by their social system or their culture. In short, if social
systems and cultures are analyzed by an array of conceptual tools —
psychological as well as structural — it would appear that many of
their component parts (values, norms, beliefs, roles, and so forth)
are used by the typical member of society as the bases for defense
mechanisms. Indeed, their use as important ingredients of defense
mechanisms may sometimes be their crucially important (latent)
function. These mechanisms of defense, to be described below,
which are based on beliefs, practices, and roles, and other constitu-
ent parts of cultural or social systems, comprise that type which I
have termed "culturally constituted," in contrast to the other two
types which consist of privately constituted defense mechanisms.
The analysis of these culturally constituted defense mechanisms is,
in my opinion, one of the vital tasks of culture-and-personality as
a theory of social systems. Although this task has still to be under-
taken, I should like to suggest a preliminary classification of cul-
turally constituted defenses.

One type of culturally constituted defense is the functional
equivalent for society of the private defense of repression. Like re-
pression— but by other means to be explained below — it serves to
preclude the expression of socially disruptive motives. A second
type — analogous to displacement — utilizes materials from the so-
cial or cultural system for the distortion of a forbidden motive and,
hence, its disguised gratification. Both of these types are essentially
techniques of social control; they serve, that is, to contain the po-
tential expression of disruptive motives. A third type — analogous
to sublimation — not only serves to contain socially disruptive mo-
tives, but it uses these very motives as an important basis for the
performance of social roles. This type, in short, not only protects
society from the expression of proscribed motives, it also provides
an important motivational basis for the performance of prescribed
roles. Space permits only a brief description of each of these types.
We shall begin with the first.

I would suggest that various types of avoidance behavior, based
on avoidance taboos, may be viewed as culturally constituted de-
fenses which serve to prevent the expression of forbidden motives.
These are the functional equivalents of the private defense of re-
pression. This suggestion has been made by Freud (1919, ch. i) and
Murdock (1949:273) with respect to sexual avoidance, when they

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 485

observe that patterned avoidance of relatives of opposite sex —
mother-in-law and son-in-law, for example — is a means of pre-
venting incest. Similarly, other motives which are deemed socially-
disruptive — aggression against a same-sex in-law, for example —
may be denied expression by separating (physically or emotionally)
the motivated individual from the source of temptation. Other cus-
toms may have the same function. For example, the couvade — shorn
of its cultural elaborations — has the objective consequence of sepa-
rating a mother from her offspring for a certain period after its
birth. If we assume that fathers are initially hostile to their offspring
of either sex (because they are competitors for his wife's affection,
nurturance, and so forth) , either repression of the hostility or in-
stitutionalized avoidance (or some third functional equivalent)
would serve to preclude the overt expression of the motive. To be
sure, since avoidance behavior serves only to contain the motive
rather than to gratify the drive, we would expect to find other
means of disguised or symbolic gratifications — either in private or
cultural fantasy (religion, myth, and so forth) or in one of the
other culturally constituted defenses.

The differences between this type of analysis and a typical "struc-
tural" analysis of the Radcliffe-Brown type — in which in-law
avoidance is interpreted as symbolic expression of friendship
(1952:92), and postpartum fatherhood rituals as symbolic expres-
sions of paternal concern (1952:150) — are threefold. First, hy-
potheses of the former type are deduced from fairly well estab-
lished, empirically grounded, principles of behavior, while those of
the latter type are based on certain assumptions concerning human
nature — in this case, the necessity to symbolize certain types of in-
terpersonal relationships — whose validity is merely assumed. (Both
types, be it noted, are "psychological.") Second, hypotheses of the
first type are based on a functionalist conception of social systems
which views them as (in the long run) instrumental to a variety of
personal and social adaptive and integrative ends, while those of the
latter type view them as essentially serving the one end of maintain-
ing the social structure. Third, and most important, hypotheses of
the first type are empirically testable: they can be confirmed or
disconfirmed. Those of the latter type are essentially nontestable.
What kinds of empirical data could either confirm or disconfirm
the hypothesis that sentiments of friendship between in-laws must
be institutionalized and symbolically expressed, and that avoidance
does in fact constitute such an expression?

486 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The second type of culturally constituted defense uses materials
provided by the social or cultural systems, not for the containment
of forbidden motives, but for their distortion and, hence, for their
disguised gratification. This type, which is most frequently exem-
plified by culturally constituted displacement mechanisms, has a
number of subtypes. Thus social systems which include headhunt-
ing raids permit the displacement of aggression from in-group to
out-group. Similarly, cultural systems that postulate the existence
of malevolent supernatural permit the projection and displacement
of aggression from in-group to out-group. In both these subtypes,
a forbidden motive (in-group aggression) is allowed disguised grat-
ification by a cognitive distortion of either its object and/or its
agent — a distortion which is based on culturally constituted beliefs
or behavior patterns. By allowing for the disguised and culturally
approved gratification of a forbidden motive, this defense reduces
the probability of its undisguised gratification, and thus protects
society from its disruptive consequences. "Rituals of rebellion," as
Gluckman terms them, exemplify still a third subtype of cultur-
ally constituted displacement mechanisms. Here again, it is in-
structive to contrast a psychologically oriented analysis with a
nonpsychologically oriented analysis. According to Gluckman
( i956:ch. 5) these rituals, in which the politically subservient sym-
bolically rebel against authority figures, strengthen rather than
weaken loyalty to the political order, because "they assert accept-
ance of common goals despite these hostilities." Viewed as a cul-
turally constituted defense, however, the performance of these
rituals would be said to achieve this end because of, rather than
despite, "these hostilities." This seemingly trivial substitution of
adverbs contains an entirely different mode of explanation.

In Gluckman's structuralist point of view, these rituals are es-
sentially expressive; their performance "asserts" or symbolizes a
state of affairs which exists prior to their performance — the accept-
ance of common goals. From a culture-and-personality point of
view these rituals are essentially instrumental; their performance is
a means for the attainment and/or persistence of a state of affairs —
the acceptance of common goals. Gluckman's mode of analysis is,
of course, paradigmatic of almost all structural analyses — at least
those that derive from Radcliffe-Brown: practice a symbolizes the
solidarity of the lineage, practice b reflects the structure of the clan,
practice c symbolizes both the conjunctive and disjunctive dimen-
sions inherent in a social relationship, and so forth. But even if it

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 487

were granted that certain practices are symbolic, for example, of
solidarity, why, it may be asked, is it necessary or important either
from a social system point of view or from a personality point of
view to symbolize that which, ex hypofhesi, exists prior to its sym-
bolization? Thus, in the case at hand, if rituals of rebellion merely
express a state of affairs — the acceptance of common goals — which
already exists, then, from a social system point of view, what
possible functions can these rituals have? Certainly not the
strengthening of the political order since, so it is argued, the ac-
ceptance of the political order exists prior to their performance.
And, even if it be argued that they have some function of which we
are not aware, we still have the problem, from a personality point of
view, of accounting for their motivation. That their performance
is highly motivated is an obvious conclusion from Professor Gluck-
man's graphic descriptions. Yet, unless we postulate some person-
ality "need" to symbolize political loyalty, we are at a loss to ac-
count for their motivation. And even if we were to grant the
existence of such a dubious need, we would ask why this need is
symbolized in this peculiar form.

If, on the other hand, these rituals be viewed as culturally con-
stituted displacement mechanisms, their motivation is explicable in
terms of personality theory, and their functions become explicable
in terms of the functional requirements of any society. For since,
as Gluckman describes very clearly, those who are politically sub-
servient are hostile to those who hold political power, and since the
expression of this hostility in acts of aggression is in conflict with
norms which prohibit such expression, we may conclude that (a)
the performance of these rituals is motivated by hostility to au-
thority; (b) their performance serves the personal function of
gratifying the hostility drive — in a socially approved and non-
disruptive (symbolic) manner; (c) in serving this personal func-
tion, these rituals serve the adaptive social function of preserving
political order because by gratifying this hostility drive in a sym-
bolic manner, their performance reduces the probability of its
gratification in ways (such as revolution) that would be disruptive
of this order; and (e) by serving this personal function, these rit-
uals also serve the integrative social function of strengthening po-
litical loyalty because in draining off these hostile emotions, their
performance permits the commitment to ''common goals" to re-
assert itself over those emotional forces which militate against this
commitment.

488 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

It may be noted that in the first two subtypes of culturally con-
stituted displacement mechanisms, a forbidden motive finds dis-
guised gratification through a distorted expression of the motive;
in this third subtype, a forbidden motive finds direct gratification
through a symbolic (ritualized) expression of the motive.

The third type of culturally constituted defense — that which is
analogous to the private defense of sublimation — is even more im-
portant than the first two. For in this type, society is not only pro-
tected from the possible dysfunctional consequences of socially
disruptive drives, but these very potentially disruptive drives are
used as the motivational bases for the performance of social roles.
This may be illustrated by a brief examination of a universally pro-
hibited drive — dependence — and its vicissitudes on the atoll of
Ifaluk. The Ifaluk, like all people, must both express and gratify
their dependency drive in a disguised manner; and, in my opinion,
the disguise by which they express this drive takes the form of obe-
dience and subservience fo their chiefs, while the disguise by which
they gratify the drive takes the form of affection and food fram
their chiefs.

The desire for love from the chiefs and the fear of its loss is in
Ifaluk the primary basis for chiefly authority and, hence, for cul-
tural conformity. Indeed, if love from the chiefs were not of pri-
mary importance for the Ifaluk, it would be difficult to understand
how their authority could persist. For Ifaluk chiefs can neither
reward nor punish; they possess neither punitive sanctions nor the
means to implement them. Since they possess no means of enforcing
their authority, it must be delegated to them; and the primary basis
for its delegation seems to reside in the almost magical significance
for emotional well-being with which their love, expressed in praise
and in kindly understanding, is invested by the people. The Ifaluk
say that if the chiefs "talk good," the people will live long, but if
they "talk bad," the people will perish. In the former instance the
people, as they say, are erafu dipei — that is, their stomachs are
"good"; in the latter, they are ejigaic dipei, their stomachs are "bad."
In short, in this society, in which food — from the earliest age and
in almost all anxiety-producing contexts — is used for comfort and
nurturance, the kind talk of these chiefs who — as it is said in pidgin,
are "all same pappa this place" — is symbolic of nurturance, their
harsh talk of its withdrawal.

This symbolism of good stomachs and bad stomachs provides a
possible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable, but ubiquitous.

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 489

Ifaluk ritual of food distribution. At the completion of almost any
collective activity — and in Ifaluk they are frequent — the chiefs
distribute food and tobacco. Since, except for a small quantity of
tobacco, both the food and the tobacco distributed by the chiefs has
been offered to them by the people, and since the amount received
by any one household is of the same quantity and quality as they had
brought, and since in any event the economic value of a few coco-
nuts, a taro pudding, and a few ounces of tobacco is negligible, the
eagerness and expectancy with which the Ifaluk await its distribu-
tion is manifestly inexplicable. Indeed, for the Ifaluk themselves
the entire ritual is inexplicable. To an inquiry into its meaning, the
Ifaluk retort with musuwe, 7nusuwe ("before, before") ; that is,
"this is a tradition, and we cannot know why we perform it." But
if food is a symbol of nurturance (as it is in Ifaluk) , and if the chiefs
are perceived by the Ifaluk as nurturant parent figures (as I believe
them to be) , their eager and expectant attitudes may be explained
in terms of the meaning of the ritual as an instrument for the grati-
fication of their dependency drive. (This ritual, of course, has other
functions as well.)

Since the chiefs gratify the Ifaluk dependency drive, by provid-
ing them with love and nurturance, the expectation of gratifying
this potentially dysfunctional drive becomes an important moti-
vational basis for obeying the chiefs, which in effect ensures the
maintenance of the political system and the body of cultural norms
which it supports. This function of Ifaluk chieftainship was co-
gently articulated by the paramount chief:

The chiefs are Uke fathers here. Just as an empty canoe is tossed about by the
waves and finally sinks, so, too, a society without chiefs is tossed about by con-
flict and strife and is destroyed. If a father asks his son not to behave badly the
latter may not obey him since he may not respect him highly. But all people
obey the words of the chiefs, since they are feared and respected by all. The chiefs'
duty is to see that the people behave well. The chiefs must constantly tell the
people to be good, or else the society, like the canoe, would be destroyed.

Notice, then, the important functions, both personal and social,
that are served by this type of culturally constituted defense mech-
anism. By utilizing elements of the social system as a means for dis-
guising and thereby gratifying a forbidden drive {a) this type — like
the second type — permits the members of society to resolve conflict
between a cultural norm and a forbidden drive in a way that pre-
cludes psychotic distortion of the drive; (^) it protects them from
punitive sanctions or punitive superego, since the disguised drive is

490 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

gratified in socially prescribed activities; (c) society is protected
from the socially disruptive influence of the direct gratification of
the forbidden drive; (d) finally — and this function is served only
by the third type — a potentially disruptive drive is transmuted into
a powerful force for the maintenance of the social system.

Conclusion

I have suggested that, rather than persist as a distinctive sub-
discipline within the total range of the anthropological sciences,
culture-and-personality conceive of itself as part of that subdisci-
pline — social anthropology — which is concerned with the analysis
of social and cultural systems. Thus the contributions of culture-
and-personality theory can be combined with the important con-
tributions of structural theory (notably those of British social
anthropology) and of role theory (notably those of American soci-
ology and social psychology) to advance our understanding of hu-
man society and culture. As a partner in this venture, culture-and-
personality can make (indeed, has made) a unique contribution.

Rooted as it is in an instrumental approach to behavior, culture-
and-personality necessarily looks at social systems from the perspec-
tive of ends to be achieved, functions to be served, and requirements
to be satisfied. Given this perspective, its important theoretical goal
is to discover the ways in which personality systems enable social
and cultural systems to serve their social functions. These functions,
it is obvious, are not served by the mere existence of these systems,
but by their operation. And their operation is, in the last analysis, a
motivational problem. Hence, culture-and-personality — always
mindful that human behavior is the empirical datum from which
all systems, all structures, and all sociocultural variables are ulti-
mately abstracted — insists that the operation of social and cultural
systems cannot be understood without reference to the empirically
demonstrable or inferential needs whose expected gratifications
constitute the motivational basis for human behavior, and which,
therefore, comprise the immediate antecedent conditions for the
operation of these systems. Hence, if the gratification of needs con-
stitutes the personal function of social and cultural systems, their
social functions cannot be served unless their personal functions are
served. In short, although social and cultural systems develop —
through a process of adaptive selection — as a response to various
functional requirements of human social life, they persist because

AN OVERVIEW AND A SUGGESTED REORIENTATION 491

of their ability to satisfy the functional requirements of human
personal life.

Despite the importance of motivation in the operation of social
and cultural systems, an understanding of their operation could
proceed without the benefit of culture-and-personality analysis if
culture and personality always existed in a one-to-one relationship
so that conformity with cultural norms always gratified personal
needs, and personal needs were always gratified by means of cul-
turally prescribed or approved behavior. If this were the case, moti-
vation could be taken for granted by the social anthropologist; and
though the social functions of these systems could be served only
if their personal functions were served, the anthropologist would
not require an understanding of the latter in order to understand
the former. But conformity with cultural norms — alas — does not
always gratify needs. Conformity often leads to the frustration of
needs; and it is because of this frequent conflict between need grati-
fication and cultural conformity that an understanding of per-
sonality dynamics is crucial for an understanding of cultural
conformity, social control, and the operation of social systems. For,
although social sanctions and superegos may, as control mechanisms,
induce conformity, they do not extinguish culturally proscribed
desires and, hence, they do not reduce intrapersonal conflict (be-
tween cultural norm and personal desire) . It is one of the tasks of
culture-and-personality to discover how this intrapersonal conflict
is resolved in such a way that functional requirements both of the
individual and of social life are satisfied simultaneously. The analysis
of culturally constituted defense mechanisms offers one such ave-
nue of investigation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beach, Frank and E. Janes

1954 Effects of early experience upon the behavior of animals. Psychological
Bulletin 51:239—263.
Boas, Franz

1938 Race, language and culture. Boston, Heath.
Carpenter, C. R.

1958 Naturalistic behavior of the non-human primates. Handbuch der
Zoologie. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter.
Dewey, John

1938 Logic. The theory of inquiry. New York, Holt.

492 PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Firth, Raymond

195 1 Elements of social organization. London, Watts.
Freud, Sigmund

19 19 Totem and taboo. New York, Moffat, Yard.
Gluckman, Max

1956 Custom and conflict in Africa. Glencoe, Free Press.
Hallowell, a. Irving

i960 Self, society, and culture in phylogenetic perspective. In the evolution
of man. Sol Tax, ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude

1953 Social structure. In Anthropology today. A. L. Kroeber, ed. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Murdock, George Peter

1949 Social structure. New York, Macmillan.
Parsons, Talcott

195 1 The social system. Glencoe, Free Press.
Pierce, Charles

1935 Collected papers Vol. 5. P. Weiss and C. Hartshorne, eds. Cambridge,
Harvard University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, a. R.

1950 Introduction. In African systems of kinship and marriage. A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds. London, Oxford University
Press.

Schnf.irla, T. C.

1950 A consideration of some problems in the ontogeny of family life and
social adjustment in various infrahuman animals. In Problems of in-
fancy and childhood. M. Senn, ed. New York, Josiah Macy Fd.

Spiro, Melford E.

195 I Culture and personality, the natural history of a false dichotomy. Psy-
chiatry 14:19—46.

1959 Culture heritage, personal tensions, and mental illness in a South Sea
culture. In Culture and mental health. M. K. Opler, ed. New York,
Macmillan.

i960 Social control, socialization, and the theory of social systems. Presented
at the Berkeley Conference on Personality Development in Childhood.

1 96 1 Social systems, personality, and functional analysis. In Studying per-
sonality cross-culturally. Bert Kaplan, ed. Evanston, Rowe-Peterson.
Washburn, S. L.

1953 The strategy of physical anthropology. In Anthropology today. A. L.
Kroeber, ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

APPENDIX

A Selected Bibliography Bearing on the Mutual

Relationship between Anthropology,

Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis

Though Chapter 9 deals with the subject of mental illness from
the point of view of an anthropologist, it is not intended as a com-
prehensive assessment of the anthropological uses of psychiatry and
psychoanalysis. The selected bibliography given here is intended to
help those readers who are particularly interested in this area. Of the
bibliographical items listed here, Margaret Mead's article on "Psy-
chiatry and Ethnology" (forthcoming) covers nearly all the exist-
ing literature, though the results of many studies she touches on are
not spelled out.

Aberle, D.

195 1 Analysis of a Hopi life-history, Comparative Psychology Monographs,
21, No. I. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Adorno, T. "W., et al.

1950 The authoritarian personality. Studies in Prejudice Series. New York,
Harper Bros.
Bateson, G.

1943 Cultural and thematic analysis of fictional films. Transactions, New

York Academy of Sciences, Ser. 2, 5:72—78.
1947 The frustration-aggression hypothesis. In Readings in social psychology,
T. M. Newcomb, E. L. Hartley, et al., eds., pp. 267-269. New York,
Henry Holt.
1953 An analysis of the Nazi film Hitlerpinge Qtiex. hi The study culture
at a distance, M. Mead and R. Metraux, eds., pp. 302—314. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, G. and M. Mead

1942 Balinese character. New York, Special Publications of the New York
Academy of Sciences, 2.
Bateson, G., et al.

1956 Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science 1:251—264.
Beaglehole, E. and P. Beaglehole

1 94 1 Personality development in Pukapuka children. In Language, culture
and personality, L. Spier, A. I. Hallowell, and S. S. Newman, eds., pp.
282-298. Menasha, Wise, Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.

493

494 APPENDIX

Belo, J.

i960 Trance in Bali. New York, Columbia University Press.

Benedict, R.

1934 Anthropology and the abnormal. Journal of General Psychology, 10.

BOWLBY, J.

195 I Maternal care and mental health, WHO Technical Monograph Series,

2. Geneva, World Health Organization.
1958 The nature of the child's tie to his mother. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 39:310—373.
Carstairs, G. M.

1957 The twice born. London, Hogarth Press.
Caudill, W.

1952 Japanese American personality and acculturation. Genetic Psychology
Monographs 45:3—102.

1958 The psychiatric hospital as a small society. The Commonwealth Fund.
Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Davis, A., and J. Dollard

1940 Children of bondage. Washington, American Council on Education.
Devereux, G.

1951a Logical status and methodological problems of research in clinical psy-
chiatry. Psychiatry 14:327-330.
1951b Reality and dream: the psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. New York,
International Universities Press.

1953 Psychoanalysis and the occult. New York, International Universities
Press, (ed.)

1956 Normal and abnormal: the key problem of psychiatric anthropology.
In some uses of anthropology: theoretical and applied, J. B. Casagrande
and T. Gladwin, eds., pp. 23—48. Washington, Anthropological Society
of Washington.

1957 Psychoanalysis as anthropological field work: data and theoretical im-
plications. Transactions, New York Academy of Sciences, Series 2,
19:457-472.

Dollard, J.

1935 Criteria for the Ufe history. New Haven, Yale University Press. (Re-
printed, New York: Peter Smith, 1949.)

1937 Caste and class in a southern town. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Dollard, J., ei al.

1939 Frustration and aggression. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Erikson, E. H.

1950 Childhood and society. New York, Norton.
Frank, L. K.

1948 Society as the patient. New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press.
Freud, S.

19 1 8 Totem and taboo, trans. A. A. Brill. New York, Moffat, Yard and Com-
pany.
Fromm, E.

1 94 1 Escape from freedom. New York, Farrar and Rinehart.

APPENDIX 495

GoLDHAMER, H. and A. W. Marshall

1949 The frequency of mental disease: long term trends and present status.
Santa Monica, Calif., Rand Corporation.
Hallowell, a. I.

1955 Culture and experience. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Henry, J.

1957a The culture of interpersonal relations in a therapeutic institution for
emotionally disturbed children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

27:725-734-
1957b Types of institutional structure. Psychiatry 20:47-60.

Henry, J. and Z.

1944 Doll play of Pilaga Indian children. Research Monographs of the Ameri-
can Ortho-Psychiatric Association, 4.

HoLLiNGSHEAD, A. B. and F. C. Redlich

1958 Social class and mental illness: A community study. New York, Wiley.
Horney, K.

1937 The neurotic personality of our time. New York, Norton.
Hsu, Francis L. K.

1949 Suppression versus repression: a limited psychological interpretation of
four cultures. Psychiatry 12:223-242.

1952 Anthropology or psychiatry — a definition of objectives and their impli-
cations. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8:227—250.

Hsu, Francis L. K., B. Watrous and E. Lord

1 96 1 Culture pattern and adolescent behavior. The International Journal of
Social Psychiatry 7:33—53.
Kardiner, a., et al.

1945 The psychological frontiers of society. New York, Columbia Uni-
versity Press.

Kardiner, A. and L. Ovesey

195 1 The mark of oppression. New York, Norton.
Kluckhohn, C.

1944 The influence of psychiatry on anthropology in America during the
past one hundred years. In One hundred years of American psychiatry,
J. K. Hall, G. Zilboorg, and H. A. Bunker, eds., pp. 589-618. New
York, Columbia University Press.
LaBarre, W.

1938 The Peyote cult. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 19.
New Haven, Yale University Press.

1958 The influence of Freud on anthropology. American Imago 15:275-328.
Leighton, a. H.

1961 The Stirling County studies In psychiatric disorder and soclocultural
environment. Vol. I: My Name Is Legion. New York, Basic Books.
Leighton, A. H. and D. C. Leighton

1944 The Navaho door. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Leites, N.

1953 A study of Bolshevism. Glencoe, 111., Free Press.

496 APPENDIX

Lerner, D., ei al.

195 1 The Nazi elite. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Levy, D. M.

1937 Studies in sibling rivalry. Research Monographs of the American Ortho-
psychiatric Association, 2.
1943 Maternal overprotection. New York, Columbia University Press.

1946 The German Anti-Nazi: A case study. American Journal of Ortho-
psychiatry 16:507-515.

LiFTON, R. J.

1956a Thought reform of Chinese intellectuals: A psychiatric evaluation.

Journal of Asian Studies 16:75—88.
1956b Thought reform of western civilians in Chinese Communist prisons.

Psychiatry 19:173—195.

LiFTON, R. J., et al.

1957 Chinese Communist thought reform. In Group processes: transactions
of the third conference, ed. B. Schaffner, pp. 219—312. New York,
Josiah Mach, Jr., Foundation.

Linton, R.

1956 Culture and mental disorders, G. Devereux ed. Springfield, 111., Thomas.

LOWENFELD, M.

1939 The world pictures of children — A method of recording and studying
them. British Journal of Medical Psychology 18:65—101.

Malinowski, B.

1927 Sex and repression in savage society. New York, Harcourt, Brace.

Mead, M.

1942 And keep your powder dry. New York, Morrow.

1947 The concept of culture and the psychosomatic approach. Psychiatry
10:57-76.

1954 The swaddling hypothesis: Its reception. American Anthropologist

56:395-409.
i960 Mental health in world perspective. In Culture and mental health, M. K.

Opler, ed. New York, Macmillan.
(Forthcoming) Psychiatry and ethnology. /;/ Psychiatrie Der Gegenwart, III,

Heidelberg, Springer- Verlag.

Mekeel, H. S.

1937 A psychoanalytic approach to culture. Journal of Social Philosophy
2:232—236.

Metraux, R. and M. Mead

1954 Themes in French culture. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Muensterberger, W.

1955 On the biopsychological determinants of social life. In Psychoanalysis
and the social sciences, W. Muensterberger and S. Axelrod, eds., pp.
7-25. New York, International Universities Press.

Opler, Marvin K.

1959 Culture and mental health. New York, MacMillan and Company.

APPENDIX 497

Radin, p.

1936 Ojibway and Ottawa puberty dreams. In Essays in anthropology pre-
sented to A. L. Kroeber., pp. 233—264. Berkeley, University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Richardson, H. B.

1945 Patients have families. New York, Commonwealth Fund.

Rivers, W. H. R.

1920 Instinct and the unconscious. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
1923 Conflict and dream. New York, Harcourt, Brace.

1926 Psychology and ethnology, G. E. Smith, ed. New York, Harcourt,
Brace.

RODNICK, D.

1948 Postwar Germans. New Haven, Yale University Press.

ROHEIM, G.

1934 The riddle of the sphinx. London, Hogarth.

RuESCH, J. and G. Bateson

195 1 Communication: the social matrix of psychiatry. New York, Norton.

Sapir, E.

1927 The unconscious patterning of behavior in society. In the unconscious:
a symposium, E. S. Dummer, ed., pp. 114-142. New York, Knopf.

Seligman, C. G.

1923 Anthropology and psychology: a study of some points of contact. Jour-
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 54:13.
Simmons, Ozzie G. and James A. Davis

1957 Interdisciplinary collaboration in mental illness research. The Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology, 63:297-303.

SODDY, K.

1955 Mental health and infant development, 2 Vols. ed. London, Routledge
and Kegan Paul.

Spiro, M. E.

1958 Children of the Kibbutz. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Stouffer, S. a., ei al.

1949- The American soldier: studies in social psychology in World War II,
1950 4 Vols. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Sullivan, H. S.

1947 Conceptions of modern psychiatry, 2d ed. Washington, D.C., William
Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation.

Thompson, L, and A. Joseph

1944 The Hopi way. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Wallace, A. F. C.

1956 Revitalization movements. American Anthropologist 58:264-281.

Whiting, J. W. M. and I. L. Child

1953 Child training and personality: a crosscultural study. New Haven, Yale
University Press.

Wilbur, G. B. and W. Muensterberger, eds.

498 APPENDIX

195 I Psychoanalysis and culture: essays in honor of Geza Roheim, pp. 455-
462. New York, International Universities Press.
WoLFENSTEiN, M. and N. Leites

1950 The movies. Glencoe, 111., Free Press.

Human ideas and feeling tones are hard to convey in pic-
tures. In addition the photographs of the different peoples
assembled here are not strictly comparable in subject mat-
ter. Ideally we need pictures of different ways of life in
action as they express themselves in similar situations.
Nevertheless, these photographs, a majority of which are
taken from the personal collections of some of the con-
tributors to this volume, are reproduced here to serve as a
relatively superficial but useful introduction to some of the
peoples whose psychocultural characteristics are discussed
here. The chapter number following each caption indicates
where reference to that particular people is most likely to
be found.

Boy of an Inland Sea fishing community in hot
weather clothing, with strips of squash drying in back-
ground. The loincloth, once a common hot season
garment for mates of all ages in fishing communities,
is disappearing as changing Japanese ideas of bodily
modesty of the past century have come to demand more
clothing. (Chapter 2)

Fisherman of Takashima, Okayama
Prefecture, bringing in a net for
drying and repair. In rural Japan,
a serious, unsmiling countenance
is considered appropriate for even
informal photographs of adults.
(Chapter 2)

Buddhist festival dancers at the village of Shiraishi, Hiroshima
Prefecture, semiprofessionals performing for fellow villagers and
Japanese tourists. Once a principal form of communal recreation
for people of all ages, religious festivals tend increasingly to be
family observances and community dancing is disappearing.
(Chapter 2)

The human figures in the standard Thematic Appercep-
tion Test designed by Henry Murray are all European in
appearance. Here are sample cards of a slightly modi-
fied version of the same test in which the human figures
are made to look Japanese so as to make it easier for
Japanese subjects to react to them. (Chapter 2)

^

m^ t

ty

i;?^ /

i w^

f -^'^.^^H

i^^-^H-*-

^

1^ -:

h^^^^l^C^

-Jkwr- ....^

-1
■

■

The Gusii of Kenya expect boys to display unflinching
bravery during circumcision. This young initiate, the
son of a chief, was made to believe he would be
speared to death by the older men should he cry
out or try to escape. (Chapter 3)

Clitoridectomy is practiced in many parts of Kenya. This opera-
tion, which is part of the girls' initiation among the Gusii, is per-
formed by middle-aged and old women. The woman wearing a
cowrie shell necklace is typical of those skilled in the operation.
{Chapter 3)

«>4f

rV*'

^/' .

'♦^

V ■•:

fV

eiSim>:!SIIPrt,l£f^W. ■smSS'Stiltma^l'U^^'ei^S^''

I

Gusli infants are never left alone; they are usually close to their
mothers and fed as soon as they cry. Even while dancing in an
initiation celebration, a young mother nurses her child. (Chap-
ter 3)

In sub-Saharan Africa, belief that death, disease, and misfortune
are caused by witches is often combined with a faith in the prac-
titioner who claims to counteract or prevent the evil effects of witch-
craft. Mochama, a Gusii witchsmeller, is followed by his assistant
in a frenzied chase to unearth some medicine allegedly buried by
witches. (Chapter 3)

\ -■

4.i«i**

m^

A Kaska husband and wife teain is
the most popular music-maker. They
play for dances held in summer
when the tribe assembles around the
trading post. (Chapter 4)

A Kaska Indian grandfather plays
with his daughter's child. (Chapter
4)

Kaska Indians subordinate external
necessity, duty, and hurry to per-
sonal inclination. (Chapter 4)

Emotional aloofness is an outstand-
ing characteristic of the Koska In-
dians. It can already be discerned
in this young girl who is imitating
her mother as she back-packs her
doll. (Chapter 4)

Kaska Indians gamble in traditional
fashion to the accompaniment of a
drum made of a discarded tin.
(Chapter 4)

The Kaska are fur trappers and
hunters. Moosehide is a commodity
they prepare themselves and fashion
into moccasins for wear and sale.
(Chapter 4)

Truk: Young men and women
singing and dancing. It is the
breadfruit season, a time of
plenty, and the dancing will
be followed by an island
feast for which large bowls
of food have been prepared
and are waiting. The dance
form is widely distributed,
with local variants, in Micro-
nesia. However, it is of com-
paratively recent, probably
European, derivation. (Chap-
ter 5)

Truk: A mother with three of
her children. Characteristi-
cally, the mother tends the
baby while the slightly older
child is in charge of his older
sister. Modesty is irrelevant
until a child can talk, and
rather perfunctory, especially
for boys, for some years
thereafter. (Chapter 5)

Truk: Interisland baseball
games are big events. These
women have accompanied
their team from an island
some 15 miles distant to
cheer their men, and inciden-
tally to gossip with friends
and relatives. Baseball was
introduced by the Japanese
when they controlled the is-
lands. Games such as this
could be interpreted as func-
tional substitutes for the inter-
island warfare of old. (Chap-
ter 5)

Truk: Same dance as at left.
A young man who is one of
the more graceful and ac-
complished dancers on his is-
land. In those few dances in
which young women partici-
pate they play a secondary
role, with a limited array of
restrained steps and gestures.
In contrast the men show off
to the best of their ability.
Until they were discouraged
by missionaries the dances
traditional for festive occa-
sions were frankly erotic.
However, contemporary danc-
ers still strive primarily to
impress the opposite sex by
more subtle means. (Chapter
5)

Truk: Funeral for a respected woman
of a large lineage. She died after o
long illness, thus allowing time for her
relatives to avoid the anger of her de-
parted spirit through their attentive-
ness during her last days. For the fu-
neral their ranks are swelled by those
who bear any relationship to the
household or lineage. The funeral ser-
mon is just concluding. The deceased's
daughter and principal mourner sits
with bowed head by the coffin (at left).
The coffin will now be covered and
lowered into the grave. (Chapter 5)

Truk: Women returning from
fishing on the reef. Women
wade in a line in the shallow
water on the coral reef, hold-
ing a large dip net in each
hand ready to scoop up a
fleeing fish. Deep water fish-
ing from boats is reserved to
men. The women hove used
the canoes here only for
transportation to and from a
rather distant fishing site.
(Chapter 5)

A group of Nunivak Island Eskimo, not all related, traveling be-
tween the village and the landing "field" on the river. Two teams
have linked up, impromptu fashion. The children are riding since
they could not run fast enough to keep up with the teams.
(Chapter 4)

Man building old-style semisubterranean house at Mekoryuk,
Nunivak Island Eskimo village. The children watch him. (Chapter

4)

n

Pibloktoq is a form of so-called "arctic hysteria" and seems to
occur most frequently omong the Polar Eskimo in the high latitudes
of northwest Greenland. This photograph and the one below were
taken in 1914 by Commander Edward Macmillan during a single
attack sufFered by a Polar Eskimo woman and were reproduced
by courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. (Chapter
9)

Inah-loo pibloctoq, Greenland, Etah. {Courtesy of ihe American
Museum of Natural History)

Dancing Is a form of religic
worship in India, as is mu
and even wrestling. Here A
U. S. Krishna Rao and M
Chandrabhaga Devi (Mrs.
S. Krishna Rao), two of t
best interpreters of the das
cal Bharot Natya, are posi
in a dance scene as the Lo
Krishna and his divine lo
Rodha. (Chapter 14)

A dancing class in session under Mr. U. S. Krishna Rao in Banga-
lore. (Chapter 14)

^ K

^;,^>'^.

Worshippers at a Vishnu
temple (where the deity is
represented in the form of
Vitoba) in Bangalore, India,
receiving fire from a priest.
Each worshipper in turn puts
one or both hands over the
fire for a second and then
runs them over his or her
face, hair, and back of the
head. (Chapter 14)

Durga Puja (Durga worship) in Bengal. During the festival,
which occurs in early fall and lasts over a week, many hundreds
of pandals with images of the goddess in a warring posture
against demons and her four children, for public or private wor-
ship. (Chapter 14)

Car Festival, worshipping Lord Jaganath (a form of Vishnu) In Serampore, near Calcutta.
Once a year the images of the god and his two siblings are taken from their usual
temple in this four-story, nearly 70-feet-high "car" for a ride of about half a mile down
the street to another temporary abode. Seven days later they are returned to their own
temple in another ceremony. During each trip, the "car" is pulled by a crowd of about
150 persons, who proceed a few feet at a time, accompanied by much music and danc-
ing. Each trip lasts four to five hours and is attended by a crowd of at least 100,000
men, women, and children, most of whom come for the darshan, or spiritual radiation,
of the gods. (Chapter 14)

Representation of Lakshm!
drawn by the young college
student in previous photo,
Delhi. (Chapter 14)

Dival! Festival (festival of
lights) in Delhi. A young col-
lege student is seen here
painting one form of sym-
bolic representation of Lak-
shmi (goddess of v^ealth) on a
wall in his father's house to
serve as object of family v/or-
ship later in the evening.
(Chapter 14)

The central concern in Chinese ancestor worship is the benefit the rites will pro-
vide for the deceased. Here a Hawaiian-born Chinese father and his young son
stand in front of a list of ancestors posted on the inside wall of a Chinese temple
in Honolulu. The list contains names of ancestors submitted by living descendants
of many families who have paid for the rituals and scripture recitation for the
benefit of these ancestors during the annual public ancestral festival. (Chapter
14)

According to Chinese custom the dead should be
buried in his ancestral graveyard near his place
of birth. If he dies away from home, it is the duty
of his sons to see that this is done. In this picture
Mr. Francis Hiu, a prominent business man, born
in Hawaii, examines jars containing the ashes of
his deceased parents temporarily stored in a tem-
ple in Honolulu. These jars, and many others,
were waiting to be shipped back to China in 1949.
(Chapter 14)

¥

The Chinese, like many other non-Western peo-
ples, are polytheistic. These three images are from
a single temple in Kunming, Southwestern China.
Some of the gods are obviously of Indian origin
with certain Chinese modifications. (Chapter 14)

A farmer and his young son in a village near Kunming, South-
western China. As a son grows up, he enters into closer relation-
ship with his father though he retains his warm ties with his
mother. In time of trouble he takes for granted the help of his
father or his older brother. (Chapter 14)

Native doctor in upper Burma village, near Mandalay.
Burmese peasants, like those in other countries, combine
traditional conceptions with those derived from modern
science. Psychological security is obtained by recourse to
the ritual techniques of traditional doctors. (Chapter 14)

Ceylon villagers v/ashing the feet of a hermit (Bud-
dhist) monk. Ceylon is a major center of Theravada
Buddhism. The reverence shov/n for Buddhist priests,
especially those living in jungle retreats, is deeply
imbedded in Singhalese personality. (Chapter 14)

•'

IQI

0

au

^Uj

BL^^^^hN

Mmn

IlJ^^SJ"

'^^^^flp

■ ^9^H'-^

J^

<«i@Ss

^^^ ^^^^ri

mUl^M

Vedda school children in jungle
village, Ceylon. The Veddas of
Ceylon were, until recently, a fa-
mous example of primitive hunt-
ers and gatherers. These children
are the first generation of this
particular village to face the
psychological readjustments de-
manded by a sedentary, food-
producing existence.

Young woman holding neigh-
bor's baby in Ifoluk. infants
are highly prized in Ifaluk.
The experience of being
handled and nurtured by a
variety of people is modal.
(Chapter 15)

Ifaluk child at o public meet-
ing. Ifaluk children partici-
pate in almost all public
gatherings. This child has re-
cently suffered from the birth
of a sibling. (Chapter 15)

Religious ceremony in Ifaluk.
The Ifaluk of Micronesia pro-
pitiate many types of spirits.
Similar attitudes are evoked
by elders, chiefs, and benev-
olent spirits. (Chapter 15)

An NYU freshman gets the
feel of water as he is dunked
in a horse trough dubbed
"The Fountain of Knowledge"
at the rear of the Hall of
Fame on the New York Uni-
versity campus in New York
City. Other pajama-clad
freshmen join in the fun dur-
ing traditional orientation of
new students. {Wide World
Photos) (Chapters 6 and 7)

Demonstration at segrega-
tionist meeting. Demonstra-
tors in front of audience
sound off and wave signs at
start of Citizens' Council of
New Orleans meeting in New
Orleans. Thousands attended
the meeting to hear segrega-
tion leaders of the state
speak regarding the integra-
tion of two New Orleans
elementary schools. (Wide
World Photo) (Chapters 6
and 7)

All was bedlam on the floor
of the Los Angeles Sports
Arena during a demonstra-
tion for Senator Stuart Sym-
ington of Missouri after he
was nominated as Democratic
candidate for President on
July 13, 1960. (Wide World
Photo) (Chapters 6 and 7

Anti-American demonstration
in Moscow. This is part of the
estimated 100,000 people in
Moscow, July 18, 1958, pro-
testing American action in the
Middle East as they march in
front of the U.S. Embassy in
the Soviet capital. In the
second straight day of anti-
American and anti-British
demonstrations, the demon-
strators smashed nearly 300
windows in the Embassy and
stained the building with ink
hurled in bottles. Some of
the banners read, "Hands off
Iraq," and "Long life, free-
dom for Iraq and Lebanon."
{Wide World Phofo) {Chap-
ters 6 and 7)

Russian Communist Party
chief Nikita Khrushchev, left,
Soviet Premier Nikolai Bul-
ganin, center, and Deputy
Premier Anastase I. Mikoyan
chat with an unidentified
woman at the Kremlin, Feb-
ruary 20, 1956, during a re-
ception for delegates to
Moscow's 20th Communist
Party Congress. Delegates
heard leaders pledge con-
tinued Soviet "collective
leadership" — as opposed to
one-man rule — and approve a
massive new 5-year plan call-
ing for sharp boosts in heavy
industry and agriculture out-
put. (Wide World Photo)
(Chapters 6 and 7)

Demonstrators on Red Square
during 1959 May First cele-
brations in Moscow. (Sov-
fofo) (Chapters 6 and 7)

INDEXES

AUTHOR INDEX

Abel, Theodora M., 187, 203, 241, 252
Aberle, David, 12, 117, 128, 390, 397, 493
Adcock, C. J., 236, 252
Adelson, Joseph, 306, 328
Adler, Alfred, 251
Adorno, T. W., 187, 203, 493
Albert, E. M., 114, 128, 346
Albino, R. C, 57, 85, 8 8

Allport, Gordon, 191, 198, 204, 214, 221, 229
Almond, Gabriel A., 174, 178, 203
Anthony, Albert, 59, 60, 65, 92, 352, 360, 361,
363. 364. 378, 380, 385, 388, 392, 396, 399
Arieti, Silvano, 294
Arth, Malcolm, 379
Atkinson, John, 199
Aubert, Villem, 192, 203
Ayres, Barbara C, 368, 378

B

Baashus-Jensen, J., 266, 292

Babcock, Charlotte, 36, 42

Bacon, Margaret K., 63, 88, 114, 128, 325, 326,

328, 346-349, 357-359, 363. 37i-374> 378,

385, 386, 391, 393, 396, 397
Bain, Read, 212, 229
Bakan, David, 335, 348
Barnouw, V., 102, 128
Barrett, Albert M., 271, 292
Barry, Herbert III, 63, 88, 114, 128, 325, 326,

328, 345, 347-349, 357-359. 363. 371-374.

377. 378, 385, 386, 391, 393, 396, 397
Bascom, W. R., 444, 446, 447, 452
Bateson, Gregory, 140, 141, 146, 147, 158, 164,

165, 165, 493, 497
Bauer, Raymond A., 180, 203
Beach, Frank, 474, 491
Beaglehole, Ernest, 138, 147—149, 151, 158,

159, 164, 165, 167, 168, 493
Beier, H., 185, 186, 244, 252
Bellah, Robert N., 39, 42
Bellak, Leopold, 292, 294
Belo, J., 494
Bender, L., 155
Benedict, Ruth, 12, 19, 21, 23, 42, 93, <)7, 98,

112, 128, 144, 146, 150, 168, 174, 175, 179,

180, 183, 203, 328, 355, 378, 387, 397, 463,

494
Bennett, John, 21, 42, 100, 128, 333, 340, 349
Berger, H., 259
Berger, S., 237, 254
Berndt, R. M. and C. H., 137, 168
Bertelsen, A., 267, 268, 292

Best, Charles H., 294

Biesheuvel, Dr. S., 51, 52, 62, (>j, 71, 72, 88

Billig, O., 113, 128, 241, 252

Blalock, H. M., Jr., 360, 378

Bleuler, M. and R., 186, 187, 203

Boas, Franz, 179, 181, 203, 461, 463, 491

Bock, R. Darrell, 345, 349

Bogardus, E. E., 12, 14

Bohannon, Laura, 445, 452

Bohannon, Paul, 85, 88, 400, 445, 452

Bourguignon, Erika E., 314, 328

Bowlby, J., 494

Brelsford, W. V., 79, 88

Brickner, Richard M., 175, 203

Brill, A. A., 264, 292

Brogan, D. W., 172, 174, 203

Browne, C. R., 448, 452

Bruner, Edward M., 78, 88

Buchanan, D. C, 41

Buchanan, W., 191, 192, 203

Bunzel, R., 150

Burrows, Edwin G., 155, 156, i68

Burt, Cyril, ^j, 129

Burton, Roger V., 361, 362, 378

Bush, Robert R., 379

Callaway, Canon H., 281, 282, 292

Campbell, Donald T., 12, 203, 333-349, 361

Cannon, Walter B., 277, 292

Cantril, H., 191, 192, 203

Carothers, J. C, 48, 49, 88

Carpenter, C. R., 474, 491

Carstairs, G. M., 187, 203, 248, 249, 252, 428,

429. 494. 452

Caton-Thompson, G., 443, 452

Cattell, R. B., 7, 14

Caudill, William, 31, 32, 34-36, 38, 42, 102,
129, 494

Chang, Tung-Sun, 409, 452

Chapin, F. S., 10 1, 129

Chapman, Loren J., 345, 349

Chauduri, Nirad C, 428, 452

Chesky, J., 108, 13 i

Child, Irvin L., 60, 63, 88, 114, 121, 128, 134,
325, 326, 328, 332, 334, 337, 338, 341, 345-
349. 352, 356, 363-375. 377. 378. 381. 385-
387. 391, 393. 396, 397. 399. 497

Childs, Gladwyn M., 440, 452

Christensen, J. B., 445, 452

Christie, Richard, 188, 203

Clausen, J. A., 277, 292

501

502

AUTHOR INDEX

Cochran, William G., 342, 349

Coleman, Lee, 194, 204, 209, 229

Colson, E., 444, 445, 447, 452

Colton, H. A., Jr., 42

Commager, Henry Steele, 172, 204, 213, 214,

229
Cook, Frederick A., 266, 292
Cox, Gertrude M., 342, 349
Cronback, Lee J., 345, 349
Cuber, John F., 210, 229
Curschmann, Hans, 273, 293

D

D'Andrade, Roy G., 12, 114, 133, 322, 323,
332, 346, 352, 357, 362, 364, 374, 375, 379
Davidson, S., 49, 88, 294
Davidson, W., 113, 128, 241, 252
Davies, James C, 204
Davis, A., 494
Davis, James A., 497
Dement, William, 306, 307, 328, 329
Dening, Walter, 42
Devereux, George, 96, 129, 298, 300, 302, 310,

315. 494
De Vos, George, 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 32, 34-36,

42> 43. 239. 253
Dewan, John G., 294
Dewey, John, 462, 491
Dicks, Henry V., 184, 185, 188-190, 200, 204,

245. 253
Dittman, Allen, 305, 329
Doi, Takeo, 33, 43
Dollard, J., 143, 494
Doob, Leonard W., 71, 89, 345, 350
Dore, Ronald, 24, 36
Dorjahn, Vernon R., 53, 56, 89
Driberg, J. H., 445, 452
Dube, C. S., 429, 452
DuBois, Cora, 117, 129, 140, 150, 152, 156,

168, 236, 240, 253
Duncan, Garfield G., 294
Dunn, H. L., 95, 129
Durkheim, E., 50
Dyk, Walter, 96, 129, 390, 397

Earle, M. J., 148, 168

Ebaugh, F. G., 42

Eggan, Dorothy, 300, 302, 304, 305, 307, 320,

329, 350
Eggan, Fred, 344, 382, 397, 403, 452
Eisenstadt, S. N., 389, 392, 396, 397, 452
Elwin, Verrier, 302, 303, 329
Embree, J. F., 19, 43
Erickson, Erik H., 9, 103, 104, 129, 143, 200,

245. i5i> 253> 306, 317, 329, 460, 494

Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 4, 5, 14, 50, 51, 61, 89,
181, 204, 442, 443, 445, 447, 448, 452, 453
Eysenck, H. J., 188, 204

Farber, M. L., 114, 129

Ferguson, F., 121, 129

Field, M. J., 60, 83-85, 89

Field, Peter B., 377, 378

Firth, Raymond, 5, 314, 315, 403, 448, 451,

453. 471. 492
Fischer, John L., 362, 378
Fiske, Donald W., 345, 349
Ford, C, S., 96, 129, 368, 378
Forde, Daryll, 455
Fortes, Meyer, 5, 51, 62, 89, 181, 204, 445, 447,

453
Fortune, Reo F., 138, 140, 146, 168, 403, 453
Frank, L. K., 143, 494
Freeman, Linton C, 346, 350
Freud, Sigmund, 10, 11, 14, 138-140, 146, 158,

159, 251, 296, 299, 300, 302, 306, 335, 337,

344, 484, 492
Friedl, E., 129

Friedman, G. A., 345, 347, 35i. 37°. 37'. 379
Friedrick, Carl J., 228, 229
Friendly, Joan P., 371, 378
Fromm, Erick, 9, 182, 183, 187, 204, 242, 243,

251. 394. 398. 494
Fujioka, Y., 43, 44

Gamo, Masao, 36

Geber, Marcelle, 54, 55, 57, 89

Geertz, H., 248, 250, 253

Gesell, A., 57, 58

Gillespie, James M., 191, 198, 204

Gillin, John, 3, 12, 14, 113, 128, 129, 241, 252,

339. 350. 418. 453
Gladwin, Thomas, 17, 104, 122, 129, 154, 156,

164-166, 168, 169, 239, 253, 346, 350
Glass, Albert J., 270, 293
Gluckman, Max, 5, 50, 61, 74, 89, 444-447,

452, 453. 486, 487, 492
Goldfrank, E. S., 102, 103, 113, 119, 129
Goldhamer, H., 495
Goldman, II, 114, 129
Goldschmidt, Walter, 403, 453
Goldstein, Kurt, 275, 293, 294
Goodenough, D., 307, 329
Goodman, Mary Ellen, 35, 44
Gorer, Geoffrey, 19, 29, 44, 172, 180, 181, 183,

204
Granet, Marcel, 409, 453
Griffith, R., 305, 306, 329
Gulick, J., 123, 129
Gurink, Gerald, 199, 203

AUTHOR INDEX

503

Gussow, Z., 263, 264, 293
Gutkind, P., 69, 92

H

Haddon, A. C, 138
Hald, A., 360, 375, 379
Hall, Calvin S., 305, 329

Hallowell, A. Irving, 12, 19, 100—102, 115, 119,
130, 249, 251, 253, 315, 329, 469, 474, 492,

49 5
Hanfmann, Eugenia, 185, 186, 243, 251
Hanks, Lucien, Jr., 247, 248, 253
Hare, Clarence C, 294

Haring, D. G., 29, 37, 44, 113, 130, 180, 204
Harlow, Harry, 56, 89
Harper, Robert A., 210, 229
Hart, C. W. M., 3, 14, 418, 453
Havighurst, R. J., 64, 108, iii, 130
Hearnshaw, F. J. C, 174, 204
Heider, Fritz, 335, 350
Helson, Harry, 341, 350
Henry, Jules, 253, 350, 495
Henry, W. E., 157, 336, 469
Henry, Zunia, 350, 495
Herskovits, Frances S., 58—61, 89, 350
Herskovits, Melville J., 3, 12, 14, 51, 52, 58—61,

73. 89> 336, 339, 35°. 44°, 443. 444. 44^.

453
Herz, Frederick, 173, 204
Hobbes, Thomas, 297, 330
Hofmayr, Wilhelm, 444, 453
Hogbin, Ian H., 448, 453
Holden, M., 307, 329
HoUingshead, A. B., 276, 293, 495
Holmberg, Alan R., 113, 130, 310, 329
Holmes, Lowell Don, 340, 350
Homans, George C, 222, 230
Honigmann, I., 121, 134, 130
Honigmann, John J., 17, 18, 95, 105, 113, 117,

121, 130, 180, 204, 300, 302, 333, 334, 339,

346, 350
Hook, Sidney, 195—197, 204
Horkheimer, Max, 187, 205
Horney, Karen, 9, 104, 130, 495
Horton, Donald, 345, 350
Hoshino, Akira, 29, 44
Hoskins, R. B., 294
Hoygaard, Arne, 263, 266, 267, 293
Hsiao, H. H., 44
Hsu, Francis L. K., 10, 14, 27, 44, 161, 163,

168, 180, 187, 203, 205, 218, 220, 222, 224,

230, 241, 252, 253, 313, 330, 336, 351, 401,

402, 404, 408, 409, 413, 430, 437, 445, 448,

449. 453. 495
Hull, C, 153, 160, 335
Hunt, J. McV., 260, 293
Hunt, William A., 339, 341, 349
Hyman, Herbert, 201

I

Ikeda, T., 43, 44

Imai, Yoshikazu, 43

Imanishi, K., 44

Inkeles, Alex, 173, 185, 186, 205, 236, 242, 244,

253
Irstam, Tor, 441, 447, 453
Iscoe, I., 380
Ishiguro, Taigi, 30, 45
Izumi, Seiichi, 22, 36

J

Jaensch, Erich R., 175, 205
Jahoda, Gustav, 64, 89
Jahoda, M., 203
Janes, E., 474, 491
Janowitz, Morris, 188, 205
Jones, Ernest, 297, 298, 330
Joseph, Alice, 108, 131, 133, 154-156, 168,
241, 253, 497

K

Kallman, Franz, 260, 293, 294

Kane, E. K., 264, 267, 293

Kaplan, Bert, 8, 14, 36, 45, 131, 236, 241, 254

Kardiner, Abram, 9, 18, 104, 117, 123, 131,
140, 150-153, 158, 168, 180, 205, 236, 251,
355. 356, 379. 383. 398. 495

Kato, Hidetoshi, 23, 24, 45

Kato, Seiichi, 38, 45

Kawashima, T., 21, 45

Kecskemeti, Paul, 198, 205

Keller, Albert G., 336, 351

Kenyatta, J., 444, 454

Kerlinger, F. N., 45

Kida, Minoru, 45

King, Arden R., 314, 330

Kish, Leslie, 348, 351

Kleitman, N., 306, 307, 328, 329

Kline, Nathan S., 294

Klineberg, Otto, 12, 14, 173, 205

Kluback, W., 131

Kluckhohn, Clyde, 3, 4, 12, 14, 59, 65, 74, 78,
93. 96, 97 y 108, 113, 114, 122, 123, 131, 132,
139. 158, 169, 180, 205, 212, 230, 236, 298,
299, 30^. 303. 330, 333. 346, 351. 352, 360,
361, 363, 364, 380, 385, 388, 390, 392, 448,

454. 469. 495
Kluckhohn, F., 115, 131
Kluckhohn, Richard, 59, 60, 65, 92, 346, 385,

39i. 396, 399
Kodama, Habuku, 26, 45
Kopytoff, 51, 447, 454
Kornhauser, Arthur, 188, 189, 205
Kornhauser, William, 205
Kroeber, A. L., 3, 14, 131, 459
Krout, Maurice H., 205
Kuhn, Manford H., 401, 454

504

AUTHOR INDEX

LaBarre, Weston, i8, 28, 44, 140, 169, 495
Lambert, William W., 338, 346, 351, 357, 372,

377. 379, 396
Landes, R., 100, 131
Lane, R. E., 188, 205
Lanham, Betty, 29, 30, 45
Lantis, M., 119, 121, 132
Laski, Harold J., 212, 230

Lasswell, Harold, 177, 182, 196, 197, 206, 351
Laubscher, B. J. F., 80, 81, 90
Leach, E. R., 403, 454
Leblanc, Maria, 68—70, 90
Lee, Dorothy M., 140, 164, 169
Lee, S. G., 51, 66-68, 77-81, 85, 90, 300, 302,

309, 3 10
Leighton, Alexander H., 9, 34, 45, 96, 132, 495
Leighton, D. C, 96, 108, 131, 132
Leites, Nathan C, 179, 205, 206, 208, 495, 497
Lerner, Daniel, 206, 250, 254, 496
Lessa, W. A., 139, 154, 156, 157, 169, 240, 254
LeVine, B., 51

LeVine, R. A., 17, 60, 62, 63, 90, 370, 379
Levinson, D. J., 131, 173, 188, 192, 201, 205,

206, 236, 242, 244, 253
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 403, 454, 463, 492
Levy, David M., 184, 206, 336, 351, 496
Levy, M. J., 70
Lewin, Kurt, 8, 143, 225, 230
Lewis, Nan A., 339, 341, 349
Lewis, Oscar, 96, 113, 132, 340, 351
LI An-Che, 99, 132, 340, 351
Lienhardt, G., 50
Lifton, R. J., 496

Lincoln, Jackson S., 298, 301, 302, 313, 330
Lindesmith, A. R., 114, 132
Linton, Ralph, 12, 15, 18, 142, 150, 158, 180,

200, 201, 206, 236, 355, 379, 443, 444, 454,

496
Lipset, S. M., 179, 201, 202, 206
Longmore, Laura, 69, 90
Lord, Edith, 241, 253, 495
Loudon, J. B., 81, 90
Lowenfeld, M., 496
Lowie, Robert H., 297, 313, 314, 330
Luomala, K., 317—319, 331
Lurie, Walter A., 177, 178, 206
Lynd, Robert and Helen, 222
Lystad, M. H., 64, 70, 90

M

MacGregor, Francis C, 143, 160, 170, 351
MacGregor, G., 103, 108, 132
MacMillan, Donald B., 263, 267, 293
Madariaga, Salvador de, 122, 174, 206
Maki, Y., 43, 44

Malinowski, Bronislaw, 5, 61, 139, 140, 142,
150, 169, 335, 344, 351, 403, 454, 464, 496
Mandelbaum, David G., 258, 293, 425, 454
Mannheim, Karl, 206
Maretzki, T. W. and H. S., 37, 45
Maritain, Jacques, 195, 196, 206
Marriot, McKim, 455
Marshall, A. W., 495
Marvick, D., 188, 205
Marwick, M. G., 78, 79, 90
Masland, R. L., 166, 169
Maslow, A. H., 95, 132
Masserman, Jules, 11, 15
Masuda, K., 46
Maurois, Andre, 122
Maxwell, J. P., 269, 293
Mayer, Philip, 74, 90, 409, 454
McClelland, David, 198, 200, 206, 345, 347,

351. 370. 37i> 379

McClosky, Herbert, 89, 207

McDougall, W., 138, 170

McGranahan, D. V., 190, 207

McGregor, F. M. C, 340, 351

Mead, Margaret, 12, 18, 95, 97, 123, 132, 139—
146, 151, 158— 161, 163, 164, 167, 169, 170,
179, 180, 183, 207, 320, 330, 340, 351, 355,
379. 390, 398. 418, 435. 454. 4^3. 4^9. 493.
496

Meadow, Arnold, 46

Meek, C. K., 444, 446, 455

Meggers, Betty J., 113, 132

Meiklejohn, A. P., 294

Mekeel, H. S., 496

Mering, Otto Von, 230

Merriam, Charles E., 181, 182, 207

Merritt, H. Houston, 294

Merton, Robert, 242

Messing, Simon D., 83, 90

Metraux, Rhoda, 170, 496

Michels, Robert, 179, 207

Michotte, A. E., 335, 351

Miller, Daniel R., 384, 385, 391, 394, 398

Miller, Neal E., 170

Miller, W. E., 203

Mills, C. W., 179. 207

Minami, Hiroshi, 23, 24, 46

Miwa, Tadashi, 46

Miyagi, O., 305, 306, 329

Moloney, J. C, 37, 46

Moore, Harvey, 305, 329

Moore, Henry T., 181, 207

Morgan, William, 302, 303, 330

Mori, ShigetoshI, 45

Morris, Charles, 192, 207, 226, 230

Mowrer, O. H., 3, 14

Muensterberger, W., 496, 497

Mukerji, D. Gopal, 428, 455

Muller, F. Max, 430, 455

Mulligan, D. G., 148, 170

Murakami, Taiji, 2:1, 26, 30, 47

Muramatsu, Tsuneo, 22

Murdock, George P., 52, 90, 3:1, 323, 326, 330,

345, 352. 358, 359. 3^58. 37i- 379. 3^2. }^-i,

398, 402, 403, 455, 484, 49.
Murphy, Gardner, 455
Murphy, Lois B., 455
Murray, Henry A., 3, 14, 67, 131, 180, 205,

238, 245, 254, 339, 352
Murray, Veronica F., 154—156, 168, 241, 254
Myers, C. J., 138, 170
Myrdal, Gunnar, 212, 230

N

Nadel, S. F., 6-S, 15, 51, 74-79, 81-83, 9°. 9i.

99, 132, 445
Naes;ele, Kaspar D., 390, 397
N.igai, Michio, 21, 42
Neugarten, B., 64, 108, iii, 130
Nivedita, Sister, 430, 431, 455
Norbeck, Edward, 17, 19, 29, 36, 46
Norbeck, Margaret, 29, 46
Northrop, F. S. C., 114, 132
Nottingham, Elizabeth K., 220, 230

o

Oberg, K., 446, 455
Offenkrantz, W., 331, 352
Okano, M., 43, 44, 46
Ombredane, Andre, 68, 91
Opler, Marvin K., 2, 36, 496
Orlansky, H., 114, 133
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 175, 207
Ovesey, L., 205, 495

AUTHOR INDEX
R

505

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 50, 119, 133, 382, 398,

440, 455, 464, 471, 485, 492
Radin, P., 96, 133, 314, 331,497
Rasmusscii, Knud, 263, 293
Rattray, Robert S., 73
Raum, O. F., 62, 91
Read, Margaret, 63, 91
Rechtschaffen, A., 331, 332
Redlich, F. C, 276, 293, 495
Reisman, David, 390, 391, 394, 398
Richards, Audrey I., 49, 51, 65, 74, 91
Richardson, H. B., 497
Rickman, John, 204
Riesman, David, 72, 242, 243, 244, 309, 391,

394. 398
Ringer, Benjamin B., 188, 189, 207
Ritchie, James E., 148, 151, 152, 158, 168, 170,

236, 252
Ritchie, Jane, 148, 170
Ritchie, J. F., 49, 91, 148
Rivers, W. H. R., 5, 138, 146, 170, 497
Roberts, John M., 379
Rodahl, K., 267, 293
Rodnick, D., 497
Roffenstein, Gaston, 300, 331
Roheim, Geza, 9, 114, 133, 138-140, 170, 300,

302, 304, 331, 497
Rokeach, Milton, 188, 207
Rokkan, Stein, 192
Roscoe, J., 444, 455
Rose, Edward, 346, 352
Ruesch, J., 497

Panofsky, H., 51

Pareto, Vilfredo, 173, 177

Parsons, T., 70, 25, 254, 474, 492

Passmore, R., 294

Paul, Benjamin D., 336, 352

Payne, Ernest A., 431, 455

Payne, R. W., 187, 203

Peak, Helen, 207

Peary, Robert E., 263, 293

Peterson, Donald B., 271, 293

Pettitt, George A., 335, 336, 352

PfeifFer, John, 295

Piaget, J., 64, 142, 165

Pierce, Charles, 461, 492

Polanyi, Karl, 394, 398

Polanyi, Michael, 133

Porteus, S. D., 138, 145, 146, 149, 158, 164, 170

Potter, 173

Powdermaker, H., 70, 9 i

Prothro, E. Terry, 368, 379

Sachs, Wulf, 85, 91

Sahlins, Marshall D., 394, 398

Sapir, E., 93, 97, 133, 139, 143, 147, 463, 497

Sarason, Seymour B., 156, 165, 166, 168, 169,

240, 253
Sargant, William, 295
Sargent, S. Stansfeld, 352
Schaffner, Bertram H., 190, 207
Schapera, I., 445, 455

Schneider, David, 14, 180, 305, 310—313, 331
Schneirla, T. C., 474, 492
Schwartz, T., 141
Scotch, N. A., 83, 91
Sears, Walter E., 305, 331
Seligman, C. G., 46, 301, 331, 444, 455, 497
Selye, Hans, 260, 294, 295
Senghor, Leopold, 72
Seward, G. H., 36, 46
Sforza, Carlo, 175, 207
Shapiro, A., 307, 329
Sharp, R. L., 310-313, 331
Shelling, D. II., 271, 273, 294

506

AUTHOR INDEX

Sherwood, E. T., 68, 69, 71, 91

Sherwood, Rae, 72, 91

Shils, E. A., 242, 254

Siegfried, Andre, 174, i75> ^08

Sikkema, Mildred, 29, 46

Silberfennig, Judith, 46

Sills, David L., 188, 189, 207

Simmons, D., 62, 91

Simmons, Leo, 96, 133, 390. 3 98

Simmons, Ozzie G., 497

Smith, Allan H. and Ann G., 38

Smith, M. B., 236, 254

Smith, T. C, 40, 47

Soddy, K., 497

Sofue, Takao, 23, 29, 30, 47

Southall, A., 69, 92

Spaulding, William B., 294

Spengler, O., 98, 133

Spicer, R. B., 108, 131

Spiegelman, Marvin, 156, 157, 169, 240, 254

Spindler, G. D., 114-116, 133. ^49. 254

Spindler, L. S.. 133

Spire, Melford E., 12, 14, 133, 154-156, 168,
171, 236, 242, 253, 254, 336, 338, 339, 346,
352. 357. 379. 471. 474. 479. 49^. ^97

Spitzer, H. M., 47

Spoehr, Alexander, 403, 455

Spranger, Eduard, 177, 208

Stagner, Ross, 205

Steed, Gitel P., 428, 429, 455

Steinschriber, L., 307, 329

Stephens, William N., 361, 364. 3^7, 379

Stevenson, H., 380

Steward, Julian, 403, 405, 455

Stewart, Kilton, 317, 318, 331

Stoetzel, Jean, 21, 47, 191, 208

Stoodley, Bartlett H., 190, 208

Storm, T., 114, i^i. 1^9. 37i. 378. 349

Stouffer, Samuel A., 179, 208, 497

Straus, M. A. and J. H., 241, 254

Strauss, A. L., 114, 13^

Strodbeck, Fred, 230

Strong, E. K., 47

Sue, Hiroko, 30, 47

Sullivan, H. S., 497

Swanson, Guy E., 384, 385, 391, 394. 398

Tago, A., 305, 306, 329

Taylor, C. R. H., 137, 171

Taylor, Norman B., 294

Tcgnaeus, Harry, 441, 456

Tcitelbaum, Samuel, 224, 230

Thomas, A., 54, 177

Thompson, L., 108, 109, 133, 497

Thompson, V. J., 57, 85, 88

Thorndike, T. T., 335

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 172, 195, 196, 201, 208

Toffelmier, G., 317-319, 331

Tooth, Geoffrey, 80, 85, 92, 257, 294

Toynbee, Arnold, 339

Tresman, H., 332

Triandis, Leigh, 338. 346, 351, 357, 372, 377,

379
Tschopik, H., Jr., 105, 133
Tsukishima, Kenzo, 47
Tuden, A., 55
Tyior, Edward B., 297

u

Underwood, F., 113, 134

V

Veroff, Joseph, 114, 121, 129, 199, 349, 371,

378
Vinacke, W. Edgar, 137, 171
Vogel, Ezra, 30
Voget, F. W., 119, 134
Vogt, E. Z., 115, 134, 236, 238, 254

w

Wapatsuma, Hiroshi, 22, 23, 27, 36, 43, 47

Wagner, G., 440, 445, 456

Waitz, Theodore, 179

Wallace, Anthony F. C., 12, 102, T14, 115,

117-119, 134, 236, 237, 254, 276, 278, 294,

317, 320, 321, 332, 375, 497
Wallas, Graham, 181, 208
Warner, Lloyd, 138, 215, 217, 222, 230
Washburn, S. L., 463, 492
Watrous, Blanche, 240, 253, 495
Watson, R. L, 425, 456
Weber, Max, 39, 242
Wcllisch, E., 336, 337, 352
West, James, 171
Whitaker, S., 187, 203
White, Leslie A., 2, 3, 15, 382, 298
Whiting, Beatrice B., 345, 352, 370, 379
Whiting, John W. M., 12, 56, 59, 60, 65, 92,

114, 134, 153, 171, 3^^. 3-23. 326, 332, 334,

337. 339. 341. 345-348, 352, 356-358, 360-

371, 377. 379. 380, 385, 388, 392, 396, 398,

399. 497
Whitney, Harry, 263, 294
Wilbur, G. B., 497
Williams, F. E., 5
Williams, J. S., 148, 171
Williams, Robin M., 210, 211, 212, 220, 221,

222, 230
Williams, Roger J., 295
Willoughby, Gary, 346, 352
Wilson, Monica, 442
Winch, Robert F., 346, 350
Wolf, Margery, 338, 346, 351, 357, 37^. 377.

379

AUTHOR INDEX 507

Wolfe, Alvin W., 448, 456 y Z

Wolfenstein, M., 64, 123, 132, 170, 208, 497

Wolpert, E. A., 332 Yarrow, M. R., 277, 292

Wright, George O., 345, 352, 369, 380 Znaniecki, Florian, 177

SUBJECT INDEX

f

Abnormal, lo, n; see also Mental illness;
Psychopathology

Abortion, 55, 75

Abyssinia, 442

Accra (Ghana), 64, 70, 71

Acculturation, 95, 100—102, 108, 115, 125; in
Africa, 69—73, ^5; *f"i expressions in pro-
jective techniques, 248, 249; of Japanese
abroad, 33-36, 39, 40, 41; and mental illness,
80, 82, 83, 342; reflected in dreams, 314;
and stress among Kibei, Nisei, 34-36, 41; see
also Kibei, Nisei

Achelenese, 301

Achievement, and independence training, 370,
371; Japanese drive toward, 27, 34-37, 39,
40; and projective systems, 371

Acquisitive culture patterns, 53

Acting out, 261

Action, national character as, 174

Adaptation, level, 341—344; socialization viewed
as adaptive, 387

Adjustment, 102; of Japanese to foreign cul-
tures, 33—36

Adolescents, 49, 86, 87, 340; and delinquency
in Japan, 32; Hopi, in; Japanese, responses
to Rorschach tests, 26

Adrenal cortex, 259, 260

Adult-child relations, 335-337; communication
in, 144; see also Mother-child relationship

Africans, 437-449; see also tribal names

Age grades, 336; in Africa, 76

Aggression, 100, 102, 103, 105, 124, 274, 367;
among Africans, 27, 53, 73, 74; among the
Comanche, Plains, Cheyenne, 383; Dakota,
102; Eskimo, 120; Japanese, 27, 28, 32, 37;
Kaska, 105; Menomini, 116; Ojibwa, 100;
reflected in dreams, 312; training, 62, 63

Ainu, projective tests of, 25

Aitutaki, 149, 165

Akan, 84, 85

Alaskan Eskimo, 263, 267

Alcohol, 102, 105

Algonkian hunters, 257

Alienation, 178, 188, 193

AUport-Vernon Scale of Values, 177, 192

Alor, 150, 151, 304

Amami Oshima Islanders, personality of, 36

Amatongo, possession by, 281, 282

Ambition; see Achievement, Japanese drives
toward

American character, 190-192, 194, 195, 209-
229

American Indians, 78, 336; Southwest, 64; use
of peyote by, 278; see also tribal names, In-
dians

American national character, difficulties in
studying, 209—212

American society and socialization, 384, 385

Amhara, 83

Ancestor cult, 53, 412—413, 422, 430, 447; see
also Supernatural

Andamese, 402

Angmagssalik Eskimo, 263, 266

Animism, in; dreams as genesis of, 297—299,
447; in reasoning, 143

Ankole, 445

Annam, 409

Anomie, 178, 188, 193

Anthropology, applied, 108, 109; contribution
of, in studies of socialization, 397; cultural,
93> 97'> evolutionary school of, 460, 461; re-
lationship to psychology in socialization, 397;
scope of, 450, 459; and theory, 461, 462, 464

Anuak, 445

Anxiety, 102, 112, 113, 116, 249; in middle-
class Africans, 72; as reflected in dreams re-
garding isolation and independence, 320—327;
resulting from social roles, 74; in socializa-
tion, 364, 374; in Zulus, 81

Apollonian, 98, 112

Arabs of Algeria, compared with Japanese-
Americans, 35

Araucanians, 301

Archaeology, in Oceania, 135

Arctic hysteria, 263, 264; see also Pibloktoq

Aristotle, 177, 178, 181, 196

Art, 410, 42 I, 433

Arthritis, 260

Ashanti, 64, 71, 83, 84, 87, 442; dreams, 301

Asia, 263

Asians; see Chinese, Koreans, etc.

Assimilation, 109

Associations; see Relationships

Attitudes, toward mental illness, 260

Australians, 139, 145

Authoritarian personality, 182, 187-189; 198

Authoritarianism, 178, 188, 189, 193, 194;
rulers, 63, 64, 86; see also F Scale

Authority, attitude toward, 180, 183, 189, 190,
'93) 196, 197, 199, 200, 202; Japanese pat-
terns of, 28, 39; symbols of, 338

Autocracy; see Rulers

Autonomy, personal, 196

Avoidance, 484, 485

Avunculatc, and Oedipus complex, 335, 345

Azande, 59

509

510 SUBJECT INDEX

B

Bahaism, 424

Baiga, dreams of, 302, 303

Balinese, 141, 143, i47> 160

Bantu, 66, 81, 439, 440

Bapcnde, 68

Barotseland, 49

Basic personality, 235

Basuku, 68, 447

Bathing, Japanese, 31, 32

BaVanda, 443

Beniba, 49, 65, 74, 444

Bena, 442

Benedict, Ruth, 258

Benin, 442

Bias, in judgment and methodology, 339, 341,
343, 347; see also Bigotry, Prejudice

Bibliographies, Oceania, 137

Bigotry, religious, and insecurity, 219, 220,
222-225; and racial prejudice, 222, 223; as
values, 226-228; see also Prejudice, Psycho-
logical attitudes

Biology, and mental illness, 109; in personality,
143, 161

Birds, as a source of calcium, 267

Birth, order of, 337

Blood, chemical analysis of, 259, 262, 266

Brazil, Japanese in, 36

Bridewealth, in Africa, 53

Britain, 180, 181, 449

British Columbia, Japanese in, 36

British social anthropology, 49-5 i

Buddhism, as basis of Japanese psychotherapy,

38
Bureaucratic roles and socialization, 384, 385

Calcium, 266-268, 272, 273

Camba, 442

Canadian Eskimo, 263

Capelin, as a source of calcium, 267

Capitalism and socialization, 384, 385, 395

Caste, 224, 436-437

Catholicism, 422-424; and prejudice, 449

Causality, problems of inferring, regarding so-
cialization practices, 375-377, 382, 383

Central Africa, 55, 65

Central Asia, 81

Central Nyanza (Kenya), 71

Cerebral arteriosclerosis, 256

Cerebral cortex, 259

Ceteris paribus laws, 345, 347

Cewa, 78, 79

Ceylon; sec Sinhalese

Chagga, 59, 62

Change, centrifugal, 419, 432, 433, 437; cen-
tripetal, 409; conservatism, 490-411; cul-

tural, 117; and cultural pressure, 414, 437,
443, 451; imitative, 413, 424; impetus to-
ward, 413-415, 423, 424, 437, 448, 449;
instability, 449; migration, 409, 419, 420,
432; and natural pressure, 414, 437, 443,
451; restrictions on, 413; revolutions, 414,
424, 437, 448; see also Culture change,
Rulers
Character structure, 148; Japanese, described,

21—24
Character types, 177, 178, 182, 183, 194, 195;
see also Psychological characteristics, Para-
noia, American character, etc.
Cheyenne, socialization and values, 383
Child care, defined, 387, 388
Childhood, 107, 335—338; and adult world, 404,
408, 409, 417, 418, 424, 425, 439; and dis-
cipline, 417; dreams, 310; identification in,
335; mother dominance, 427, 428, 430, 431;
rivalry in, 336, 337; significance of, 104;
socio-psychological environment, 417, 425;
see also Child-training, Infancy, Socialization

Child rearing, defined, 338; see also Socialization

Child spacing, in Africa, 56

Child training, in Africa, 62-64, 439-441; in
China, 407—409; cultural influences on (in
Africa), 53; defined, 335-338, 388; and
economy, 326; in Euro- America, 417—419;
in Hindu India, 425-432; Japanese, 28-33,
37. 38; Japanese and American compared,
i9~3 2; Japanese class differences in, 29, 30;
Japanese, Hindu, French, and Canadian child
relations. Childhood, Socialization

Children's paintings, 64, 65

China, 192, 218, 219, 224, 229

Chinese, 301, 402, 406-415, 420, 422, 425,
429, 430, 433—435, 451; in foreign countries,
226, 409

Chiracahua, 301

Christianity, 103, 220; contradictions in, 220-
222; and persecution, 220-222

Chfi, Japanese concept of, 21

Chuckchee, 301

Circumcision, 53, 59, 65, 66

Citizenship, 187, 191, 194, 195

Class, American middle-class fathers, 390

Class conflict; see Intercultural relations

Class differences in personality, Japanese, 19-23,
26, 28, 38

Clinical chemistry, development of, 262

Clitoridectomy, 53, 65, 66

Coding, bias, 347

Cognition, nature of, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148,
149, 164, 166; psychology, 335

Cognitive process, 260, 274

Comanche, socialization and adult roles, 383

Combat neuroses, 259

Combat psychiatry, 270

Comendi, 442

SUBJECT INDEX 511

Community, attitude toward in democracy, 197

Comparative method, 77, 85, 86, loi, 114, 341,
343, 344, 355; in study of socialization, 396

Comparative research, 186, 190—192, 202

Competitiveness, 340; among Ryukyuan chil-
dren, 37

Compulsion, among Japanese, 29

Concepts, in culture and personality; see Cul-
ture-and-personality

Conditioning, 335, 336; see also Learning,
Learning theory

Configurationalism, 98

Conflict, acculturative, for Japanese; see Ac-
culturation, Values, familial, in Japan, 24,
26, 27, 31

Conformity, in Japanese culture, 27, 28, 34;
motivation of such behavior, 243-246

Congo, 51, 64, 66, 68—70

Congolese, 69

Conscience, 106, iii; see also Guilt

Conservatism, 181, 189

Consistency, in child training; see Relation-
ships

Content analysis, of dreams, 305; in Rorschach
studies, 239; see also Thematic analysis

Contrast effects, 341-344

Convulsion, in Pibloktoq, 264, 265

Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian An-
thropology (CIMA), 154

Correlation, analysis, 343-348; see also Causal-
ity

Cortisone, 260

Couvade, 362

Cradle board, 109

Cradling practices, Japanese, 30

Creativity, in dreams, 306

Crime, 370, 373, 374

Cross-cultural differences in personality, 240,
241; need for such studies, 214; quantitative
studies, 235-348

Cross-national measurement; see Comparative
research. Measurement, Tests

Cross-validation, 346; see also Reliability, Rep-
lication studies

Crow, and culture pattern dreams, 313, 314

Culturally constituted defenses, 484-489

Cultural history, 461

Cultural relativity, 334, 460, 461

Culture, change and personality, 94, 100-103,
108, 109, 115, 125, 481; change of, 71, 72;
conflicts in, 257; as a dependent variable, 468;
and dreams, 308—315; fragmenting, 346;
heterogeneity, 88; as an independent variable,
464; in Japan, 19—21, 23, 26—29, 37—41;
mental illness and, 255, 274, 275, 283, 284,
286, 287, 290, 291; regional differences in
Japan, 19, 21, 23, 26, 29, 38, 41; response
to mental illness as an index of, 284, 286,
287; study of at a distance, Japan, 21; va-

riety in, 52; see also Change, Intercultural
relations, Learning, Relationships

Culture-and-personality, 93, 113; behavioral
variability, 466, 467; criticism of, 381, 382;
definition of, 1-4; differences from clinical
sciences, 10, 11; differences from cultural
anthropology, 6-13; differences from and
relationship to social psychology, 11 — 13; dif-
ferences from social anthropology, 6-13; his-
torical development, 96, 98, 256, 258, 260;
interdisciplinary approach to, 258; interest in,
125, 126; statistical approach to, 114, 115;
substance of, 97

Culture area, 52

Culture theme, national character as, 174

Cuna, 301

Curing ceremonies and dreams, 317, 318, 319

D

Dahomey, 58-61, 73, 336, 337, 439, 440, 446

Daka, 442

Dakar (Senegal), 54

Death, Japanese attitudes toward causes of, 27,
28

Defense mechanisms, 74, 103, 120, 121, 259,
274, 275; in dreams, 308, 313

Deity, attitudes toward, deriving from relations
with parents, 338; see also Socialization, Su-
pernatural

Democracy, 178, 179, 182, 183, 189, i93-i99>
201, 202; see also Rulers

Democratic character, 189, 193-199

Dependence, 106; sec also Psychological char-
acteristics

Dependency needs, of Japanese, 33; see also
Child training

Depression, in Africa, 79, 84

Deviance, legitimation by dreams, 317; motiva-
tion of, 245; see also Nonconformity

Diegueno, dreams of, 318, 319

Diet, 259, 271, 272

Dilling, 82

Dinka, 50

Dionysian, 98

Discipline, effects of, 335, 336; permissive and
restrictive, 56, 62, 63; see also Psychological
characteristics. Sanctions, Socialization

Disease; see Illness, Psychosomatic illness

Djaga. 442

Dobuans, 146, 403

Dogmatism, 178, 193; scale, 188

Dogs, Pibloktoq, 264

Dominance-submission patterns, 63, 64

Dream interpretation, 344, 345

Dreams, cultural material in, 308; culture pat-
tern in, 313, 314; degree of reality distortion,
313; dream symbols, universality of, 299;
effect on social structure, 319; ethno dream

512 SUBJECT INDEX

theories, 315—317; hypnotic, 300; latent con-
tent is manifest content, 204, 205; night-
mares, 297, 298; as omen, 301; psycho-
therapy, 317—319; and self-reliance, 320;
and social isolation, 320

Drinking, alcoholic, see Intoxication

Drives, 476, 480, See also Achievement, Motiva-
tion

Drugs, see Intoxication

Drunkenness, see Intoxication

East Africa, 55

Economic organization and aims of socialization,

3 94

Economy, related to dream quest, 325

Education, effect of on African values, 71, 86,
87; as an index of acculturation in Africa, 69

Efik, 62

Ego defense, and culture, 483; mechanisms,
481-483; see also Culturally constituted de-
fenses

Eidos, 164

Ejiko cradle, 30

Electroencephalograph, 259, 260

Electrolyte disturbances, 261, 288

Electroshock therapy, 259, 262

Emotion, in Africans, 65, 73, 74; emotionality,
98, 100, 106, 112; in Japanese, 23, 24, 26-28,

32> 37
Emotional disturbances, among Japanese adults,

31, 34—38; among Japanese children and

adolescents, 32, 33
Encephalitis, virus, 266
Enculturation; see Child training. Learning,

Socialization
Entrepreneurial roles and socialization, 384, 385
Epilepsy, 263, 266, 271, 285; in Africa, 82
Epileptotentanoidal disease, 263, 264, 267
Equality, in democracy, 196, and prejudice, 228
Eskimo, I 19-121; Nunivak, 119, 121,262-270,

402
Ethnic groups and socialization, 384
Ethnocentrism, 213; see also Authoritarianism
Ethiopia, 83

Ethnohistory, 102, 103, 118, 123
Ethnology, 93, 97, 119
Ethnoscience, affects dreams, 314, 315
Ethos, 164, 340

Europe, 79, 259, 263, 271, 272, 415
Europeans, 415-424; see also "Western peoples
Experimental psychology, 262
Expiation, in Japan, 27
Extremism, 185, 188, 189, 193, 194, 201; see

also Change, Psychological characteristics

F Scale, 187, 188, 192, 199

Falling sickness, 263

Familial relations, Japanese, 24, 27—33, 37) 4°

Family, 335—338; relation to political system,
183, 200, 201

Family cultures, 96, matrilineal, 60, 61; patri-
lineal, 60, 6i; polygynous, 61, 62

Fanti, 444

Fascism; see Nazis, F Scale

Fatalism, among Japanese, 24

Father, 335, 336; role of in Africa, 58-61

Fear, of failure; see Anxiety

Feedback systems, in cybernetics, 147

Feeding, of African infants, 55

Fiction, analytic studies of, as reflecting Japa-
nese cultural themes, 22, 23

Field work, research design for, 341—344

Fijiano, 402

Filial piety, among Chinese, 407—408; among
Japanese, 35, 36; see also Mother-child rela-
tions

Films, 99

Fingo, 66, 80, 81

Fixation, Freudian, 337; and severe socializa-
tion, 366

Folktales, 53, 121; relation to T.A.T. responses,
66, 67; use made of in culture and personal-
ity, 369-371

Food poisoning, 266

Ford, C.S., 368

Formosa, use of projective tests in, 25

Free association, and dreams, 299

Freedom, and insecurity, 228; and prejudice,
228

French, 64

French character, 175

Freud, Sigmund, 258, 264, 271-273, 335, 337,
338; reinterpretation, 344; see also Psycho-
analysis

Freudian, 49, 59, 75, 78, 81, 357

Frigidity; see Impotence

Frustration, 335-337

Fulani, 52

Function, 489, 490

Future, attitudes toward; see Psychological
characteristics

Ganda, 54, 55, 57, 7i> 44i> 444

Gandhi, 432

Genitals, 300, 3 12

Germany, 174, 175, 178, 179, 184, 185, 189,

190, 200, 259, 429, 449
Gestalt psychology, 98, 256
Ghana, 64, 70, 84
Gibande, 442

G/ri, Japanese concept of, 21
Gissi, 442
Glossolalia, 265

Goals, 475, 476

"God" 336, 338; see also Deity, Religion, Su-
pernatural

Gogo, 442

Gossip, 105, 112

Government, 410—412, 421, 422, 435, 436, 444-
447; allegiance to, 421; domain, 444; kinship,
411, 412; rank, 410, 433; revolution, 414;
stability, 422, 433; states, 410, 421, 433, 444;
and the supernatural, 433, 444-446; see also
Rulers

Griqua, 66

Group identity, of the Chinese and Japanese,
226; of the Jews, 225; of Latin Americans,
226

Guardian spirit, in dreams, 320, 321

Guatemala, 113

Guilt, 365, 366, 482; in Africans, 72, 84; in
Japanese, 26—28, 39; see also Shame

Gungu (Congo), 68

Gusii, 60, 62, 63, 65, 74, 409

Gwari, 75, 76

H

Ha, 442

Habits, 335; see also Learning

Haiti, culture pattern dreams of, 314

Hallucination, 278, 290, 291

Harvard values project, 114, 115

Healing, see Psychotherapy, Illness

Heiban, 77

Hemorrhage, in Eskimo, 266

Hindu, 406, 421, 424-437, 439, 447-449

History, role in shaping political institutions,
201; use of in defining national character, 174

Hitler, 227

Homosexuality, in Africa, 77

Hona, 442

Hopi, 390; dependency in dreams, 320; dreams
of, 304, 305

Hostility, 105, 112, 120, 482; intergenera-
tional, 335-337; sibling, 336; and suicide,
482; see also Aggression

Human Relations Area Files, 347

Humanism, in anthropology, 338, 339

Hydrotherapy, 259

Hypocalcemia, 266—268

Hypochondriasis, Japanese, 32

Hypoglycemia, 261, 288

Hypothesis verification, 335-339

Hypoxia, 261, 288

Hysteria, 81, 82, 87; psychoanalysis, 272, 273;
psychoanalytic theories of, 272; relationship
to culturally determined changes in Western
society, 271—273; serum calcium deficiency,
271, 273; study of, 271-273; tetany, 271-

273
Hysterical flight, 263, 265

SUBJECT INDEX 513

I

latmul, 146, 147

Ibo, 52

Ideal versus actual behavior, 427

Identification, 362, 364—366

Identity, of minorities in U.S., 225-226

Ideology, 197

Igara, 442

Ila, 55

Illness, 365, 366-368, Japanese interpretations
of causes of, 27, 28

Immanent justice, 11, 64

Impotence, predicted from dream, 301; see also
Sex training

Impulse gratification, among Japanese, 31, 32

Incentive for performance of roles, 476

Incest taboo, reflected in dream activities, 3 1 1-
315; and socialization, 364

Independence, 365, 367, 372, 373; see also
Psychological characteristics

India, 192, 224, 248, 249, 424-437

Indian Education Research Project, loi, 108

Indian Personality and Administration Project;
see Indian Education Research Project

Indians: Algonkian, 124, American, psychologi-
cal homogeneity of, 124; Apache, 122;
Athapaskan, 124; Cheyenne, 123; Chippewa,
see Ojibwa; Comanche, 104, 122; Dakota,
102, 103; Hopi, 96, 108— 112, 122; Iroquois,
102, 123, Kaska, 95, 104—107, 123; Kwakiutl,
98, 104, 123; Lac du Flambeau, loi, 102;
Menomini, 114— 116; Navaho, 96, 108, 115,
117, 122; North Pacific coast, 122; Ojibwa,
100—102, 123, 125; Papago, 108, 122; Peyote,
116; Plains, 98, 104, 122; Pueblo, 98, 112;
Seminole, 123; Sioux, 102—104, ^o&; Siriono,
113; Tuscarora, 115, 117; Zia, 108 ; Zuni, 97,
98, 104, 108, 117; see also other tribal names

Individuality, in Americans, 191; see Psycho-
logical characteristics

Indulgence, 337

Industrialization, in Africa, 72; in Japan, fac-
tors behind, 39-40

Infancy, significance of, in Africa, 54—60; in
personality formation, 161, 335—338; see also
Childhood, Child training. Socialization

Informants, use of in field work, 349

Initiation rites, no, 337, }62—}64; in Africa,
5}> 59> 60, 65, 66, 74, 86; in Hopi culture,
III

Inner direction, in Africa, 72, 73; in Japanese,
34; see also Shame, Tradition direction

Insecurity feelings; see Security feelings

Institutional pattern, national character as, 173,

174
Instrument decay, 341
Insulin coma therapy, 259, 262

514 SUBJECT INDEX

Intelligence, 52, measurement of, 145, 146, 165,
166

Intercultural relations, in Oceania, 136, 137

Interdisciplinary relations, between psychology
and anthropology, 333-335. 338, 339

International Children's Centre, 54

Interpersonal relations; see Adult-child rela-
tions

Interpretations, problems of in projective test
analyses, 238, 239; of Rorschach scoring
categories, 239

Intersubjective verifiability, 339-341

Interview, as used in measurement of personal-
ity, 184, 188

Intoxication, drug and alcoholic, 275

Intrapsychic conflict, 257

Introjection of guilt, Japanese, 27, 28, 40

Intuition, 122

Involutional melancholia, 275

Inyanga, 282; see also Shaman

Iran, 188, 189

Ireland, 419

Iroquois, dependency and dreams, 320, 321;
dream theory, 317

Islam, 424, 434

Isolationism; see Conservatism, Right-wing po-
litical attitudes

Issei, personality traits of, 31, 34"3 6

Italy, 449

Kavirondo, 445

Kede, 445

Kenya, 48, 65, 71, 73

Kgatla, 445

Kibei, personality of, 31, 36

Kikuyu, 49, 52, 444

Kimbu, 442

Kin groups, 48, 53

Kinship, 402—409, 415-419, 425—432; basic re-
lationship, 405, 407, 415-417, 425-433, 438-
443; content, 403-405, 407, 417, 418, 435,
438-442; solidarity, 408, 411, 412; structure,
403-406, 415—417, 425, 438; unilineal
groups, 408, 409, 419; way of life, 402—405,
450

Kipsigis, 65

Koalib, 82

Koki, 442

Kolwezi (Congo), 69, 70

Konde, 442

Konongo, 442

Korea, 265

Korean War, 270

Koreans, 406, 409, 421

Korongo, -76

Kpelle, 442

Kuba, 442

Kuria, 65

Kwoma, 153, 337

James, William, 462

Japan, 183, 191, 224

Japanese, 406-411, 413, 414, 420, 421, 425,
429, 433, 434; dreams of, 305, 306; in for-
eign countries, 32—36, 41, 226

Japanese-Americans; see Kibei, Nisei

Japanese-Hawaiians, 28, 33

Japanese language, as an expression of Japanese
psychology, 33

Java, 248

Jews, 224, 225, 226, 227, 419

Johannesburg (South Africa), 54, 69, 85

Jukun, 442, 446

Juvenile delinquency, in Japan, 32

K

Kabinda, 442

Kafiitsho, 442

Kalmuk Mongols, 391

Kam, 442

Kampala (Uganda), 54, 55, 69

Kanakuru, 442

Kardiner, A., 356

Kaska, dreams of, 300, 301

Katanga (Congo), 68

Katangese, 68

Lango, 445

Laws, scientific, 346, 347

Leadership, in Africa, 53, see also Authority

Learning, 335—338; deutero, 164; in personality

formation, 143, 144, 148, 151-153, 159— 161;

theory, 256, 335-338; see also Education,

Roles, learning, Socialization
Levels of personality; see Personality, levels of
Life history, 96
Limmu, 442

Literature, 410, 421, 433
Loango, 442
Lolo, 301
Lovedu, 63
Lozi, 446
Luba, 442

Luhyia, 66 '

Lunda, 442
Luo, 66, 71

M

MacArthur, General, 410

Magical thinking and dreams, 299

Maintenance systems, defined, 356; and indul-
gent socialization, 358—360; and post partum
sex taboo, 364, 36s; and projective systems,
360, 366; and socialization, 365, 366

SUBJECT INDEX 515

Maladjustment, 95, 102; of American-Japanese,
34-36; of Jews, 223—225

Malayans, 301

Male initiation rites and socialization, 385, 396

Manchu, 402

Manuw, 140-143; dependency and dreams, 320

Maoris, 148

Marriage, cultural strains in, 75; forms of and
socialization, 385; Japanese attitudes toward,
27, 28

Masai, 52, 443

Masculinity, in Africa, j6

Masturbation, 56

Maternal behavior, Japanese; see Mother-child
relations

Mathari Mental Hospital, 48

Matriliny, 60, 61, 65, 76, 78, 79

Mau Mau, 49

Mazeway, 278

Mbata-Kondo (Congo), 68

Mbum, 442

Mead, G. H., 401

Mead, Margaret, 258, 260

Measurement, of personality, 176-178, 181,
184—188; see also Tests, personality

Mental illness, 109-124; in Africa, 48, 49-85,
87; anthropological theories of, 256, 257,
262, 263, 288; biocultural approach to, 274,
288, 289, 291; biological approach to, 256,
287—291; class differentials in conception and
treatment of, 277; community's response to,
276, 284, 286, 287, 289-292, and theory of,
276; cultural definition of and response to,
276, 284, 286, 287, 289-292; culturally in-
stitutionalized theories of, 274—276, 284, 286,
287; desemantication, 274, 275, 289, 290;
interdisciplinary approach to, 261, 262, 288;
of Japanese, 31, 35—38; model for analysis of
individual's theory of, 278-280; patient's
theory of and application to clinical case
material, 282, 283; response of victim to,
274—276, 289—291; societal differences in
style and frequency of, 255; stages of, or
process in becoming, 288-291; a Zulu theory
of, 281, 282; see also Abnormal, Psychopa-
thology

Mesakin, 76

Me:caline, 278

Methodology, 333-348; in culture-and-person-
ality research, 186, 202, 333-348, 396, 397;
of modal personality study, 235, 236

Metrazol convulsive therapy, 259

Mgwato, 445

Midwest children, 1 1 1

Mimicry, in Pibloktoz, 264

Modal personality, 117; See Personality, modal

Mohave, 298

Monotheism, 422, 434

Moral standards, in dreams, 304; learning of,
64

Morita therapy, 38

Mormons, 117

Morocco, 186, 187

Moslem, 406, 421

Mossi, 52, 442

Mother, role of in Japan; see Mother-Child rela-
tionship

Mother-cliild household, 53, 61; See Residence

Mother-child relationship, in Africa, 54—60, 87;
among Japanese, 27, 31—33; among Nupe and
Gwari, 75, j6; see also Childhood, Socializa-
tion

Motivation, toward achievement in Japan, 39,
40; for conformity, 476, 477, 491 ; dominant,
105; of social behavior, 242, 243; see
Achievement, Japanese drives toward. Drives,
Learning

Motor development, in Africans, 54

Mountain Maidu, dreams of, 314

Movies, analysis of, Japanese, 23

Music, 410, 421, 433

Mythology, 336

Myths, 99, 1 19-12 1 ; sec also Folktales

N

Naga, 301

Names, confusion of, 337

Narcotics; see Intoxication

Natal (South Africa), 71

National character, definitions of, 173-176; of
Japanese, 21—24; measurement of, 176-178;
methods and problems of studying, 17-18;
relation to democracy, 183; role in political
science, 181; see also Character structure.
Democratic character, under individual coun-
tries

National Institute of Mental Health, 277

National populations, psychological character-
istics of, 175, 176, 185; sec also under in-
dividual countries

Navaho, 78, 250, 390; dreams of, 303, 305, 318

Nazi Germany, 220

Nazis, 180, 182, 184, 185, 189, 190

Needs, biological, 356; see also Maintenance
systems

Negritoes (Philippines), dreams of, 318

Negritude, 72, 73

Nerve gases, 260

Nerve impulse, 261

Neurology, 258

Neuropsychiatry, 262

Neurosis, among Japanese; sec also Accultura-
tion and stress. Hypochondriasis, Oral de-
pendency

New Haven, epidemiology of mental illness in,
276

')16 SUBJECT INDEX

Ngoni, 63, 444

Nguni, 80, 81

Nietzsche, F. W., 339

Nigeria, 66, 74, 78; northern, 75

Nisei, 29, 31, 34-36, 40, 41; personality of, 31,

34—35; toilet training among, 29
Nkole, 442
Nonconformity, motivation for, 476-478; sec

also Deviance
Normandy Island, 139
Normative factors in personality studies, 244,

245
Norms in projective tests, 246
Norsemen, in Greenland, 269
Northern Rhodesia, 55, 70, 73, 78
Novels, 127
Nuba, 76, 77, 81, 82
Nudity, attitudes toward, in dreams, 305, 306;

Eskimo, 264, 265
Nuer, 50, 52, 59, 61, 63, 445
Nupe, 74-76. 445
Nursing, 114; among Japanese, 29, 30, 81;

among Ryukyuans, 37
Nutrition, in food anxiety, 161; infant, 57;

nutritional deficiencies, 87
Nyakyusa, 442, 444
Nyamwezi, 442
Nyima, 81, 82
Nyoro, 441, 442

o

Objectivity, 339, 340; need for, 215

Oedipal motivation, reflected in dreams, 303,

304
Oedipal rivalry, 361
Oedipus complex, 103, 335-}37. 344, 345; '"

Africa, 58-61; in Australia, 139; in Trobri-

ands, 140
Ojibwa, dreams of, 314
Old age, learning in, 144
On, Japanese concept of, 21
Optimism, 191, 192
Oral dependency, in Japan, 33
Orientals, 406-415, 424, 425, 432, 434, 436,

439, 443, 444, 446-449; see also Chinese,

Japanese
Osteomalcia, 268, 269
"Other directedness," 72, 242; among Japanese,

35 ; see also Guilt
Other view, 400, 401
Ottawa, dreams of, 314
Ovambo, 66

Pain-pleasure principle (hedonism), 335, 3 37
Paranoia, in Africa, 84, 87
Paranoid delusions, 255, 274
Pare, 441

Parental image, and sleeping arrangements, 360—
363; and socialization, 365; and supernatural,

357, 358

Parents, conflict with, 335-337; see also Child-
hood, Father, Mother, Socialization
Passivity, 107

Pastoralism, among Africans, 52, 55

Pedi, 63

Peers, role of among Ryukyuan children, 36

Perception, 335, 338, 339

Perdlerorpoq, 263; see also Pibloktoq

Personal documents, 96

Personal equation, of observer, 343

Personality, and change of social systems, 470-
472; functional requirement, 472, 473; levels
of, 192, 197; and maintenance of social sys-
tems, 470—472; measurement of, see Measure-
ment, Tests; modal, defects in studies of,
199, 200; new definition of, 7, 8; persistence
of, 100, 10 1, 125; relation to political sys-
tems, 179, 181—193, 200—202; in a democ-
racy, 193 — 199; socially required, 242, 243;
study, incompleteness of, 238; supernatural,
357, 358; variability, 236, 237; variables,
356; see also Authoritarian personality, Dem-
ocratic character. Extremism, National char-
acter

Peru, Japanese in, 36

Pessimism, 191, 192, among Japanese, 24

Peyote, 278, dreams of cult members, 305

Philippines, 190

Photographic techniques, in Japanese research,
22, 32

Physiology, 261, 262

Pibloktoq, calcium deficiency hypothesis of,
265—269; course of the syndrome, 263; cul-.
tural aspects of, 264, 265, 269, 270, 285;
ecological aspects of, 267; epidemiological
parameters of, 263, 264; hysteria hypothesis
of, 264, 265

Plato, 173, 177, 178, 181

Play, in childhood, 62

Polar Eskimo, 257, 262, 263, 266-268

Political institutions, in Africa, 53

Political organization and obedience training,
295, 296, 392; and socialization, 394

Political relations, degree of elaboration and
socialization, 395, 396; learning of, 63, 64,
86

Political roles, 182, 184

Political systems, classification and differentia-
tion of, 178, 179; effectiveness of, 201, 202;
history's role in shaping, 201; relation of
family to, 183, 200, 201, and personality to,
179, 181—202

Polygyny, 336; relation to childhood experience,
53, 56, 61, 62, 86

Polytheism, 412, 434

Population, density and size, 52

SUBJECT INDEX 517

Positivism, 126

Possession, 265, 281, 282

Potassium, 266, 268

Power, need for, 178

Prejudice, and authority, 224, 225; and Chris-
tian faith, 214, 215, 220-224; different ex-
pressions of, 227; and fear of inferiority, 223,
224; in northern U.S., 227, 228; race, 220-
225; religious, 202—225; and rugged indi-
vidualism, 216—220; and violence, 226, 227;
see also Psychological characteristics. Super-
natural

Premenstrual tension, 275

Prestige economy, 53

Productivity and socialization, 385, 386

Projection, 336, 337; in dreams, 312

Projective systems, defined, 356

Projective tests, 48, 148, 152, 155-157. use on
Japanese, 22, 23, 25-28, 34-36; see aho
Rorschach, T.A.T.

Prophets, 118

Protein, 268

Protestant ethic, in Japan, 40

Protestantism, 422-424; and prejudice, 449

Proverbs, 53

Psychiatrists, 48, 49, 80, 81, 87

Psychiatry, functions of, 10, 11; organic ap-
proach to research in, 258-262; organic
methods of treatment in, 258, 259; psycho-
analytic theory in, 258; relationship: to
anthropology, 1)7, 256, 262, to culture and
personality, 10, 11, 256, 258, 260, to endo-
crinology, 259, to physiology, 259, 260, 262,
to sociology, 262; use of psychic energizers
in, 259, 261; use of tranquilizers in, 259,
261; see also Psychopathology, interdiscipli-
nary approach to, Psychopharmacology

Psychoanalysis, 103, 104, 107, 114, 127; de-
velopment of, 258, 259; and dream inter-
pretation, 302; and dream processes, 299;
reinterpretation, 335-338; theory of, 140,
150-153; see Freud, Freudian, Psychoanalytic
theory

Psychoanalytic theory, in African beliefs, 71),
81; applied to African cultures, 73, 74

Psychogenic stress, 261

Psychological characteristics, 404, 405, 410,
424, 430; competitiveness, 413, 438, 444;
concern with time, 401, 407, 413, 416-419,
430, 438, 443; dependence, 425; extremism,
413, 417, 419, 420, 423; independence, 419,
420, 440; individualism, 417, 418, 422, 430,
438; mutual dependence, 407, 408, 413, 426,
432, 438; prejudice, 423, 436, 437, 447, 449;
relativism, 409, 414; romantic love, 408, 416;
self-reliance, 4 17, 4 1 B, 426, 43 i ; supernatural
dependence, 426-432, 438; sec aho Change,
Prejudice, etc.
Psychological lag, in Japanese, 27

Psychology, Fifteenth International Congress
of, 51; relation to anthropology, 51

Psychopathogenic substances, 262

Psychopathology, interdisciplinary approach to,
256, 262; see also Abnormal, Mental illness,
Psychiatry

Psychopharmacology, 259, 261

Psychosis, 48, 79, 80; adrenal cortex theory in,
260; in Japan, see Mental illness; in non-
European culture, 156; theories of etiology
of, 259, 283; see also Paranoia, Schizophrenia

Psychosomatic illness, 81, 83, 86; in Japan, 32

Psychosurgery, 259

Psychotherapy, and dreams, 317; in Japan, 38

Psychotomimetic drugs, 259, 261

Puberty rites; see Initiation rites

Pueblo, western, 403

Pukapuka, dreams, 316

Punishment, 335, 336; see also Discipline, Re-
inforcement

Quantitative methods in, 345-348
Questionnaires; see Tests, personality

R

Racial prejudice, 48, 49

Racial psychology, national character as, 175

Radicalism, 181; see also Change, Extremism,
Psychological characteristics

Rakau, 148, 151, 152

Rank; see Government

Rape, 60, 106

Recovery, in Pibloktoq, 263

Reinforcement, 338

Relationships, age grade, 440; associations, 414,
421, 435, 443, 444, 448; blood brotherhood,
440; continuous, 407, 436, 450; discontinu-
ous, 415, 425, 436, 438, 444, 450; exclusive,
415, 436; fraternal equivalence, 446; inclu-
sive, 407, 425, 436, 438; secret societies, 440;
sexuality, 408, 416, 417, 436; way of life,
401; see also Government, Kinship, Rulers

Relativism; see Psychological characteristics

Relativity; see Adaptation level, Cultural rela-
tivity

Reliability, 340, 341; see Replication studies

Religion, in Africa, 53, 77, 80-83; in America,
221-223; psychological theories of, 50, 51;
in Tokugawa Japan, 40; Zen Buddhism and
Japanese psychotherapy, 37; see also Bud-
dhism, Ritual, Supernatural

Replication studies, 340, 344, 347, 348; ^(^
also Cross-validation, Reliability

Repression, 482

Reservations, Indian, 95

Residence patterns, and personality, 358-360,

518

SUBJECT INDEX

365, 366, 368, 370, 375; related 10 dream
quest, 322—324

Responsibility, assumption by children, 386,
387

Restraint, in Japanese; see Impulse gratification

Revitalization movements, i 10

Revolution; see Government

Reward; see Reinforcement

Rickets, 269, 271, 272

Right-wing political attitudes, 187, 188; see
also Conservatism

Rigidity, in Japanese, 16, 34, 35

Rites of passage, 396, 397; see also Initiation
rites

Ritual, 486, 487; and hostility, 487

Role theory, 490

Role training, 389-391

Roles, ambiguity and tension, 77; of Japanese
mothers, see Mother-child relations; learning,
63, 64, 85, 86; political, see Political roles;
sex and age in Africa, 74-78, 87; social, 475-
477; see also Role theory. Role training, Sta-
tus

Romantic love; see Psychological characteristics

Rorschach test, 103, iii, 112, 114, 115, 117,
121, 150, 155-157, 185-187; interpretation
by Klopfer and Beck systems, 238; Japanese
responses, 26; Japanese scholars' modifications
of, 25

Ruanda, 442

Rulers, allegiance to, 421, 433; authoritarian,
410, 421, 433; autocratic, 410, 433; change
of, 411, 441-443; democratic, 421, 433, 446;
limitations on, 410, 411; opposition to, 411,
446, 447; and the public, 410, 421, 433, 446,

447
Rundi, 442

Russia, 178-180, 253; refugees, 185, 186
Ruthenian, 402
Ryukyu Islanders, personalities of, 36, 37

Safwa, 442

Saipanese, 154, 155

Samoan, 340

Samples, of national populations, 183, 188, 190,
199

Sampling, 117, 237, 238, 348; error, in per-
sonality studies, 238

Sanctions in Japanese culture, 26-29, 34, 35,

40. 479
Sango, 442
Santa Claus, 336
Sapir, Edward, 258, z6o
Saramo, 442

Schi/mogenesis, 146, 147, 158
Schizophrenia, 109; electroshock treatment in,

259; genetic studies of, 260; insulin coma

treatment in, 259; metrazoi convulsive ther-
apy in, 259; typical dreams of, 306, 307

Science, 99, 126, 127, 421, 433; contrasted with
descriptive humanism, 338, 339

Scientific method, in anthropology, 338—348;
in psychology, 333—338; see also Methodol-
ogy

Scotland, 263

Scurvy, 263

Security feelings, 400, 401, 408—411, 413, 414,
417, 420, 423, 425, 443, 448

Selective retention of customs, 336

Self, value of in democracy, 195, 196

Self-image, as affected by dreams, 315

Self-orientation, of Japanese, 3 5

Self-reliance, 216—219; as difiFerentiated from
individualism, 217; and insecurity, 219, 220;
see also Psychological characteristics

Self-view, 107, 400, 401

Semantic problems, 343—345

Senegal, 54

Senegalese, 55

Senoi, dreams, of, 318

Sentence completion test, 69, 70, 185

Sentimentality, Japanese, 24

Sex, 106, III, 112; antagonism, 73, 75, 76;
avoidance, 60; behavior of Africans, 55, 60,
71, 74, ~6, 81, 87; behavior in childhood,
59; differences, as brought out in dreams,
309, 310; relations in Japan, 24, 28; roles,
63, 69, 70, 74-77

Sex training, 367—369; among Africans, 49, 77;
sexual taboos, post partum, 56, 59

Shaman, 336; use of dreams by, 318, 319

Shamanism, 264, 282; in the Nuba mountains,
81-83

Shambala, 442

Shame, in Africans, 72; in Japanese, 25—27, 38;
see also Guilt

Shilluk, 442, 444

Shona, 442, 445

Siamese, 406, 407

Sibling rivalry, in Africa, 58, 59, 61, 62; and
birth order, 336, 337; and Oedipus complex,
336, 337

Sinhalese, 301

Sioux, dreams and deviance, 316, 317

Siriono, dreams of hunger, 310

Sleeping arrangements, 356, 360—363; see also
Socialization

Sociability, 400, 401

Social Anthropology, 6-9, 463, 464

Social character, 242

Social class, and socialization, 384, 390

Social control, 478, 479, 480

Social integration, 243

Social organization, and socialization, 394, 396,
see Socialization

Social personality, 117

SUBJECT INDEX 519

Social structure and personality, 124

Social systems, 479, 490; change of, 470—472;
disruption of, 481; equilibrium in, 479;
maintenance of, 470—472; normative dimen-
sion of, 474; prescriptive dimension of, 475

Socialization, 48, 86, 107, 117, 125, 161; age
of, and guilt, 365, 366; agent, defined, 388;
aim, defined, 388; defined, 387; Hopi, 109—
112; Kaska, 107; later, 372—374; projective-
maintenance systems, 355; severity of, 366,
and maintenance systems, 368—372, and pro-
jective systems, 366, 371; starting age, 365;
technique, defined, 388; techniques, bogey-
man, 392; timing, defined, 388; see also
Childhood, Child training, Enculturation,
Learning, Parental image

Soga, 442

Solidarity, 408, 414, 424, 443

Songs, analysis of, Japanese, 23, 24

Sorcery, 369, 370; in Africa, 53, 87; see Witch-
craft

Soul loss, 265

South Africa, 51, 55, 66, 68, 71-73, 80

South African, 55

South America, Japanese in, 36, 41

Sove, 442

Spain, 449

Spanish Americans, 117

Sphincter training; see Toilet training

Spirit possession, in Africa, 83, 87

Spirits, 338

Stability; see Government

Starvation, among Eskimo, 265

State; see Government

Statistical measures of, 235, 236, 238

Status, 400, 401, social, in Africa, 53

Stimulus equivalence, 336—338

Stratification, see Caste, Class

Stress, acculturative, among Japanese, 33—35

Structural analysis, 485—487, 490

Stupor, in Pibloktoq, 263

Sublimation, 488; in Ifaluk, 488, 489

Subsistence, and personality, 124

Suburbia, 335

Success; see Anomie, Competitiveness

Suicide, 261; in Africa, 85; in Japan, 37

Sullivan, 401

Superego, 120; see Guilt

Supernatural, ancestors, 408, 412, 413, 418,
419, 422, 439, 440; animism, 447; attitudes
toward parents and, 338; austerity, 432, 436;
borrowing, 412, 447; extremism, 432; and
kinship, 422; monotheism, 422, 434; persecu-
tion, 412, 423; polytheism, 412, 434; powers,
as related to dream, 321; punishing agent,
422, 423; relativism, 412, 434; sects, 422,
434; socialization aid, 336, 391, 392; theol-
ogy, 412, 422, 423, 434, 447; utilitarianism,
412, 435, 447; witchcraft, 439, 447, 448;

witchhunt, 437; see Government, Religion
Supernatural, genesis of in dreams, 297
Survivals, 342
Sutho, 66

Sweat baths, in Eskimo, 264
Symbolism, in dreams, 299—302, 312, 313

Taboo, menstrual, 364, 367; post partum sex,
363-365; violation, 265

Tallensi, 62, 402, 445

Tanala, 446

Tangerians, 301

Taos, 402

Technology, and age of first work, 386, 387;
and socialization, 393, 394

Tembu, 80, 81

Temne, 442

Tepoztlan, 113, 114

Tests, personality, 183; of significance, 347,
348; see also AUport-Vernon Scale of Values,
Comparative research. Dogmatism scale, F
Scale, Interviews, Rorschach Ink-blot test.
Sentence completion, T.A.T.

Tetany, 266-289, 271-273

Thai, 301

Thailand, 246

Thematic analysis, Japanese, 23, 24

Thematic Apperception Test, 156, 185, 199;
administration of, 68, 70; perceptual aspects
of, 6y, 68; use in Africa, 66— yo

Themes, in Japanese culture, 23, 24, 26—28

Theology, 412, 422, 423, 434, 447

Theory, 127; testing of, 333, 338, 339

Therapeutic techniques, 366, 367

Thonga, 59

Thule district (of northern Greenland), 262,
263

Tikai, 442

Tikopia, dreams of, 301, 314, 315, 451

Tiv, 59, 445

Toilet training, 367, Japanese, 28-31, 33; Japa-
nese class differences in, 29, 30, 33

Tokugawa religion, 40

Toma, 442

Tonga, 442, 445

Toro, 442

Totemism, and socialization, 363

Tradition direction, 72; see also Inner direction

Training; see Aggression training. Child train-
ing. Discipline, Sex training, Toilet training

Transfer, of learning, 336—338

Translation, problem of, 343, 344

Transvaal, 67; northern, 63

Transvestism, 317

Trobrian Islanders, 139, 140, 335, 344, 403;
dreams of, 3 i 5

Trukesf, 156, 165

520

SUBJECT INDEX

Truth, nature of, 107, 108
Trypanosomiasis, 257
Tshikapa (Congo), 68
Tsonga, 67
Tswana, 66
Turkey, 179
Typology, 404, 405

u

Ufufunyana, 8 i

Uganda, 54, 69, 71

Ulithians, 156, 157

Umbundu, 440, 442

Umundri, 442

United States, 79, 210, 220, 222, 225, 229, 415,
418, 420, 430

Urban and rural differences in personality, Japa-
nese, 2 1—2}, 28—30, 36, 37

Urbanization in Africa, 69—72, 86, 87

Volksgeist school, 96
Voodoo death, 277

w

Weaning, 109, no, 365, 367; in Africa, 49,
54—58, 85; delayed and socialization, 385; in
Japan, 29, 30, see also Socialization

West Africa, 52, 64, 73

Western peoples, 412, 415-424, 431-433, 435,
443, 444, 446—449; American dreams, 305-
30/) 309; dreams, 300, 301

White Russian, 419

Windigo psychosis, 257

Witchcraft, 112, 437, 439, 447, 448; in Africa,
53> 75. 76, 78. 79, 84. 87

Withdrawal, 275

Work therapy, 259

World view, 107; see Character structure

World War II, effect on research on Japanese
culture and personality, 19, 20, 34

Wydah, 442

Values, 114, 115; African students, 70, 71;
causes for conflict of, 213-220; conflict of
values in America, 209—213; internalization
of, 26, 27, 35, 37; of Japanese, 21, 23, 26,
27, 34—37; Japanese internalization of, 26,
27, 3 5, 37; of Ngomi, 63; operative, con-
ceived, and object, 226; relation to political
orientation, 190, 191; role in observation,
too; in U.S., India and China, 192

Variables, 356

Vende, 442

Vienna, 335, 344

Virus encephalitis, 266

Vitamin D3, 267-269, 272

Vocational aspirations, comparison of American
and Japanese school children's, 35

Xosa, 52, 66, 67

Yankee, 402

Yao, 445

Yir-Yoront, dreams of, 310—313

Yoruba, 439, 442, 444, 446

Youth, 190; see Adolescents

Zeguha, 442
Ziba, 442

Zulu, 52, 56, 66, 6j, 71, 77, 78, 81, 281, 282,
442, 445; dreams of, 301, 309, 310

This book has been set on the Linotype in 12
point and 10 point Garamond, leaded i point.
Part numbers and titles and chapter titles are in
18 point Garamont, chapter nnmbers are in 14
point Garamont. The size of the type page is
2 J by 4^/4 picas.

1

■ 136>A5

Psychological anthropology; ap main
136.45H873pC.3

3 lEbE D3ETT 1E7M

r

Date Due

DUE

RETURNED

DUE

RETURNED

) :

Fr ') 1 ^M

...•

..■-I.. /

■■ / :■-

KEEP CARD IN POCKET