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Culture and Personality

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Jamal Ahmad
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16 views10 pages

Culture and Personality

Uploaded by

Jamal Ahmad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Culture and

Personality
Definition of personality by
Anthropologist
 "Personality is a more or less enduring organization of
forces within the individual associated with a complex
of fairly consistent attitudes, values, and modes of
perception which account, in part, for the Individual's
consistency of behavior" -- Victor Barnouw, Culture and
Personality, 1985, p.

 Study of personality is important study in psychological


anthropology, thus culture and personality studies, also
called psychological anthropology.
Personality

 Personality reveals itself in varied


settings( rest, play, work , creative activities
and interaction).

 Different personalities:
 Genetics(except identical twins)
 Varied experiences(schema theory)
Cont..

 Cultural diversity and psychological


universals
 Universal experiences
 Birth
 Stages of physiological development
 Interaction with parents, sibling and others
 Experience of hot and cold, light and dark
etc.
Psychological anthropologists

 Main focus on:


i) Studying diversity of personalities
ii) Within a society as well as between cultures

 Using Techniques of psychologists


 Observing behaviors across various settings
 Administering psychological tests
 Life histories
 Child rearing and personality formation(region,
socio-economic)
 Looking for deviant/atypical behavior
EARLY CULTURE AND PERSONALITY
RESEARCH

 Margaret Mead Studies 1930-1961


 (Book = Coming of age in Samoa)
 Study method = personal observations
 Psychological changes of puberty and relation of culture
determinism
 American culture versus Samoa culture
 Psychological changes are culturally determined
 Samoans girls do not face sexual stresses
 Criticism on Mead’s ethnography
cont..

 Ruth Benedict: (research based on published


work)
 2 dominant Psychological themes

 Labeling of the entire culture


North American,Dionysian(God of wine):South
American, Apollonian(God of light)
Cont..

 Configurationalism
The configurational approach posited
that culture adopts the character of the
members' personality structure. Thus,
members of a culture display similar
personalities.
 Ruth benedict got convinced for advocating
studies on cross-cultural “distinctive”
features rather than cross-cultural
“comparisons”.
Abram Kardiner

 Cross-cultural studies: Basic personality structure


 Cultural institutions

 Primary institutions(personality development)

Kinship, childcare, sexuality and subsistence

 Secondary institutions

Religion, rituals and folk-tales

 Later research in cross-cultural studies of personalities.

Tanala VERSUS Betsileo

Anxieties associated with society’s issues related to subsistence


Worldview & Personality

 Worldview = A worldview is a culture's


characteristic way of perceiving,
interpreting and explaining the world
 Peasant worldview
 Image of limited goods
 The sub-culture of poverty(two sets of
values)
 The protestant ethic and capitalism(Marx
Weber)

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