Mind is the condition of human being in the world; it follows that mind, and the processes that constitute mind, should be of central interest to any human scientist, including any anthropologist. Certainly the French sociologist Emile Durkheim thought so, as did Franz Boas, the founding father of cultural anthropology. Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) enquired at once into the origins of religion and the sources of the logical categories of mind; Boas, in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), argued for the psychic unity of humankind even while he celebrated the different cultural forms to which mind gives rise. Both men had been (like Malinowski) pupils of the great German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, one of whose later works (the ten-volume Volker-psychologie [Ethnic Psychology], published between 1900 and 1920) was devoted to an attempt to derive psychological explanations of ‘folk mentalities’ from ethnological data. Nevertheless, mind as an object of anthropological theorizing came to be relegated to the subdisciplinary area of psychological anthropology. How this came about is by and large the consequence of our Western intellectual inheritance of Descartes’s distinction between mind and matter and the subsequent gradual institutionalizing of scholarly investigation into discrete human sciences: biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, law.
Descartes’s distinction between mind and matter still informs theory in each of these disciplines. In anthropology, we find a prevailing acceptance of a distinction between culture and biology which is mapped onto other binary distinctions such as society and individual, mind and body, structure and process, rationality and emotion and so on. What distinguishes psychological anthropology as a subdisciplinary domain is an explicit concern to reconcile psychology’s focus on the individual with anthropology’s focus on culture and society; but how, precisely, this objective is to be achieved is the subject of continuing debate. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the terms of this debate are themselves problematic and so, in contemporary anthropology, there is a shift away from psychological anthropology to a more general concern with how to derive an anthropological theory of mind that is able to realize its own historical specificity, even while it attempts to analyse mind as the fundamental condition of human existence.
Defining psychological anthropology
The definition of psychological anthropology and its proper concerns have been more closely associated with American anthropology than with anthropologists elsewhere in the world, who appear to be less inclined to define their interests in subdisciplinary terms. Indeed, it can be argued that the carving out of such a domain led mainstream anthropologists to consider psychological anthropology a parochial concern, of only marginal interest to themselves.
Psychological anthropology was initially an outgrowth of culture and personality studies — the new title for the subdiscipline having been proposed by Francis L.K. Hsu in his 1972 introduction to his edited collection, Psychological Anthropology. There Hsu argued that:
[a] sound theory which aims at explaining the relationship between man and culture must not only account for the origin of psychological characteristics as they are molded by the patterns of child rearing, social institutions, and ideologies, but must also account for the maintenance, development, and change in the child-rearing practices, institutions and ideologies.
Nevertheless, even while he argued that cultural, social and psychological anthropology were all concerned ultimately to study the same phenomenon — human behaviour — he also maintained that: [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 … the field worker who shifts from one viewpoint to another . is likely to bring back little that is of coherent signficance.
So those who continued to define themselves as cultural anthropologists tended to take the view that, in so far as psychology was an attribute of ‘the individual’ and culture an attribute of ‘society’, they were, by definition, covering more ground than any psychological anthropologist possibly could – a view that appears to be endorsed by psychological anthropologists themselves. In general they accept the characterization of psychology and culture as phenomena that occur at different ‘levels’ — a position that has militated against any attempt to forge a psychological anthropology that denotes a coherent theoretical perspective. So ‘psychological anthropology’ is most often used as a catch-all which, in broad historical terms, takes in culture and personality studies, socialization theories, psychoanalytic approaches, ethnosemantics, ethnopsychiatry and cognitive anthropology.
Bock’s survey of the development of psychological anthropology makes the problems inherent to the subdiscipline clearly apparent. He begins his topic with the statement that ‘all anthropology is psychological’ and ends with a discussion of the limitations of a psychological perspective: ‘Failure to recognize the origins of Western psychology in our own cultural tradition, with its unconscious values, biases and habits of thought, is the crudest kind of ethno-centrism’ (1988: 212). In other words, as Bock points out, ‘all psychology is cultural’. One of psychological anthropology’s most influential theorists, Melford E. Spiro, has struggled throughout his career to overcome the problems posed by the Cartesian separation of matter and mind. In 1978 he argued that:the nature/history dichotomy is a false dichotomy . even a radical cultural determinism does not imply a radical cultural relativism; however much societies may differ, they must all cope with man’s common biological features.
Despite this eminently useful insight, however, Spiro continued to hold to ‘culture’ as an analytical category, a position that inevitably rendered ‘biology’ and ‘the individual’ as analytical categories in their own right. So, some years later, we find him asserting that:’culture’ designates a cognitive system, [but] it is not the only . source of the cognitions and schemata held by social actors. The other source, of course, consists of their own experience.
This distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘experience’ implies that a set of historically specific concepts exists independently of the people whose behaviour at once constitutes and expresses them. So, in so far as it refers to a system of meanings, ‘culture’ can only be an abstraction. But this is problematic, because meaning does not reside anywhere ‘out there’. Rather, meaning is manifest in behaviour — in what people do and in what they say (and write) — only in so far as living persons make it so.
That psychological anthropologists still hold their domain of investigation to be distinctive is clear in White and Lutz’s assertion in their introduction to .New Directions in Psychological Anthropology that ‘psychological anthropology … remains the field most centrally concerned with putting people and experience into theories of culture and society’ (Schwartz et al. 1992: 1). But this is a tall order, because ‘people’ and ‘experience’ refer us not only to actual persons’ actual lives and to their ideas about themselves and the world, but to their engagement in the world as visceral, passionate, lived. And because living seems to us to be more about process and transformation than it is about static structures, we are thrown back on the problem of how, exactly, we can deal with the messy complexity of living in terms of theoretical abstractions like ‘ culture ‘ and ‘ society’ .
It is thus unsurprising that the papers in the .New Directions collection (referred to above) are characterized by pleas for the necessity of addressing problems arising from a continuing inability to deal effectively with Cartesian distinctions. So, for example, we find discussions of the theoretical schism between biological and psychological anthropology (James S. Chisholm), the relationship between ‘knowledge structures and their conceptual and situational contexts’ (Janet Dixon Keller), the question of how ‘cultural models get elaborated during the course of human development’ (Sara Harkness), and ‘the divide between views of human behaviour as determined or emergent’ (Carol M. Worthman).
Cultural psychology and social construction theory
Neither have the problems inherent to psychological anthropology been solved by the creation of the new subdisciplinary domain of ‘cultural psychology’. Here the intention is to acknowledge the validity of other people’s understandings of the world and themselves and to use these understandings as the basis for analysis. Even so, and despite a good deal of fascinating ethnography that suggests otherwize, Descartes’s emphasis on conscious thought as the existential ground of knowledge by and large continues to be taken for granted by cultural psychologists. In Stigler et al.’s (1990) edited collection, this emphasis is evinced in the very titles of the papers, for example, ‘Culture and Moral Development’ (Shweder et al. 1990), ‘The Socialization of Cognition’ (Goodnow), and ‘The Relations between Culture and Human Cognition’ (D’Andrade). And this despite the fact that, in an introductory essay, Shweder claims ‘cultural psychology’ to be distinct from ‘psychological anthropology’:
Cultural psychology is the study of intentional worlds. It is the study of personal functioning in particular intentional worlds. It is the study of the interpersonal maintenance of any intentional world. It is the investigation of those psychosomatic, sociocultural and, inevitably, divergent realities in which subject and object cannot possibly be separated and kept apart because they are so interdependent as to need each other to be.
But if realities are ‘inevitably divergent’, then where exactly can the analyst locate any ‘particular intentional world’? Yet again, as the titles of the papers indicate, we find outselves willy-nilly caught in the distinction between the ‘personal functioning’ of the consciousness of particular actors and an abstraction — that is, the ‘intentional world’ that is the artefact of the anthropologist’s analysis.
Any analysis of what is known inevitably requires an analysis of how it comes to be known and this implicates concepts of the person. Shweder, elaborating his arguments for cultural psychology, suggests that we should view concepts of the person as ‘social constructions’:
The ‘constructive’ parts of a social construction theory are the idea that equally rational, competent, and informed observers are, in some sense, free … to constitute for themselves different realities; and … that there are as many realities as the way ‘it’ can be constituted or described . The ‘social’ parts of a social construction theory are the idea that categories are vicariously received, not individually invented; and . that the way people divide the world into categories is, in some sense, tradition bound, and thus transmitted, communicated and ‘passed on’ through symbolic action.
But if, as studies of child language demonstrate, we do not passively acquire our native language, but have rather (each one of us) to constitute its very categories, then language as ‘structure’ cannot be separated from construction as ‘process’; rather structure and process have to be conceived of as aspects of one another — a point that is taken further below. In locating the constructive process in the person and what is social in an abstract space between persons (i.e. in language categories), social construction theory reproduces the very theoretical impasse it pretends to dismantle.
Even so, there have been attempts to arrive at genuinely synthetic theories able to grapple at once with the subjective experience and understandings of actors and the analytical description of the anthropologist observer as itself a form of subjectivity. But while the authors of such works may justly be said to be concerned with mind, they are unlikely to characterize themselves as psychological anthropologists or even as cultural psychologists. Rather, they are concerned to understand ‘embodied mind’ as an emergent, historically constituted and, at the same time, universal condition of human existence through an examination of its inevitable particularity.
Mind and habitus
One of the key texts to prompt a re-examination of anthropological theories of mind, at least among European anthropologists, has been Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). He argued that the anthropologist observer was bound to produce a distorted account because, in making the lives of others an object of analysis, the anthropologist reordered the dynamic flow of people’s day-to-day practice into a set of explicit ‘representations’ or worse, ‘rules’ for behaviour. But in going about our own everyday lives, in doing the things we do and saying what we say, our behaviour is so highly nuanced, so subtly accommodating to novel situations, that we cannot be following ‘rules’ or acting in terms of ‘representations’; it follows that there is no reason to suppose that others are doing so. Bourdieu proposed the idea of the habitus, a set of predispositions to certain behaviours inculcated in the course of socialization, to account for the way that people everywhere come to have a ‘sense’ of how to behave, and thus to take for granted their own ideas and practices as right, as the only proper way of being in the world. But Bourdieu’s habitus, while it almost managed to collapse the mind—body distinction, was not sufficiently well theorized to bring about a paradigm shift in respect of theories of mind.
Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus as embodied practice has been fruitful in forcing anthropologists to recognize that mind is constituted in practice by persons relating to one another as subjects. In other words, I do not relate to others as if they were simply objects in my world, but as persons who, like me, are the active subjects of their own actions. Moreover, I do not have to reflect continually upon what I do because my habitual mode of being in the world — for example, the way I walk, eat, talk, feel and in general relate to others is constituted by me over time and embodied in me as taken for granted, as ‘the way I am’, and as such may never be made the object of conscious scrutiny.
But how, exactly, is ‘the taken for granted’ (or what Bourdieu calls doxa) constituted in active, intersubjective relations between particular persons? Lave (1988) on arithmetic as social practice and Toren (1990) on cognitive development as a microhistorical process offer ethnographic attempts at an answer.
Embodied mind
The focus on practice has developed alongside attempts to use the insights of phenomenology to analyse ‘embodied mind’. Here the theoretical emphasis is on the body as ‘the existential ground of culture’ and thus as at once manifesting and constituting mind (see, for example, Csordas 1990). A phenomenological perspective is becoming increasingly important for theory in contemporary anthropology and biology, and is beginning to penetrate academic psychology (see, for example, Varela et al. 1991).
As a school of philosophy, phenomenology strives at once to render transparent the validity of the variety of human experience of the world and to show how this variety is referrable to the processes through which mind is constituted. Anthropological studies that take a phenomen-ological perspective tend to focus on how human beings ‘live their world’, on how they come to embody their consciousness of that world as a function of experience that is always mediated by meaning, even while it is always concrete and material — that is to say, real and lived. By the same token the reality of lived experience crucially informs the processes by which we make meaning.
So, for example, Bruce Kapferer (1986) shows how, in Sinhala (Sri Lankan) exorcism, the elaborate performance of the rite is crucial not merely for the patient but also for all the other participants, including the exorcist. The performance frees all the participants from ‘the solitude of subjective experience’, but at the same time it ‘demands that they take a variety of standpoints on the world as experienced and as it achieves its diverse meanings’. In other words, it is through performance as embodied experience that any given participant renders the rite personally meaningful and comes to understand what it might mean for any other participant.
A remarkable ethnographic example of the relevance to anthropology of a radical phenom-enological approach is provided by Jadran Mimica’s work on the counting system and conception of number of the Iqwaye of Papua New Guinea. Mimica shows how the binary mathematic of the Iqwaye ‘is generated on human fingers and toes … [and] although this systematic expression has a very concrete, indeed substantial, form, the number is simultaneously constituted in it as an abstraction’ (1988: 7). Moreover he is able to show how the cognitive structures that are constitutive of the Iqwaye system of counting ‘became entangled and developed as a unified mathematical form in relation to the Iqwaye view of the cosmos, their system of kinship and marriage’ (p. 140).
By virtue of his analysis of the specific characteristics of Iqwaye rationality, Mimica’s anthropological theorizing is also a systematic critique of Western mathematics as a form of cultural knowlege. By demonstrating the validity of the Iqwaye conception of number, Mimica throws into question the taken-for-granted Western assumption that our vaunted ‘scientific objectivity’ is the only valid form of knowing the world.
This critical perspective is intrinsic to an understanding of mind as embodied for, as the phenomenological psychology of Merleau-Ponty makes plain, perception is immanent in consciousness (see Merleau-Ponty 1962 [1945]). In other words, if perception is not, as most cogni-tivists assume it to be, an autonomous process that precedes and is theoretically separable from conscious experience, then we can no longer hold to the idea that the facts and, more particularly, the scientific facts are ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, intentionality as a function of embodied mind has to be considered as historically constituted.
History and embodied mind
An understanding of historical continuity and transformation is central to the anthropological endeavour; it requires an investigation of how the history of our social relations enters into the constitution of meaning over time by each and every one of us. This brings us to the problem of how we conceptualize ‘history’ and its significance for the study of embodied mind.
The prevailing tendency in the social sciences makes history inhere in ‘social structures’, in ‘institutions’, in ‘ideologies’, in ‘collective representations’ — which are represented as independent of the living persons whose actions make these abstractions material (see e.g. Spiro 1987 [1978]). Here history is conceived of as what is past but persistent, as inhering in the products of human action as divorced from their producers: in the environment as modified by human practice, in technologies, in ritual, in oral traditions, in what has been written down, in the very categories of language. And because these alienated products of the past are understood to pre-exist any given human being, they are taken for granted as ‘ready-made’ — the implicit assumption being that in so far as they carry meaning, that meaning declares itself. Thus "Sahlins, in his influential attempt to synthesize structure and process, refers to a ‘cultural totality’ which he conceives of as ‘the system of relations between categories without a given subject’ (1985: xvi—xvii); here cultural categories are received ready-made, open to being transformed only when they are ‘risked in action’ (cf. Shwe-der 1991). But this cannot be so for people have actively to constitute the categories in whose terms they understand and act in the world, and each one of us does this rather differently as a function of a unique set of relations with others (see e.g. Bowerman 1982). It follows that even while the past inheres materially in the present, it can manifest in the present only as the constituted, but never finished, always emergent product of particular human minds.
Redefining mind
Thus one can argue that mind is the fundamental historical phenomenon because each one of us, over time, constitutes mind anew and manifests it in intersubjective relations with particular others. In this view, mind cannot be an isolated function of the nervous system or, more narrowly, of the brain; neither can it be located in ‘culture’ or ‘collective representations’ or ‘social constructions’ or ‘cultural models’. Rather, mind is manifested in the whole person, considered as a particular person with a particular history in relation to other persons who are similarly constituting themselves over time — from birth to death — as unique manifestations of mind.
In this perspective, each one of us is the locus of manifold relations with others that inform the endogenous constitution of embodied cognitive schemes; so each one of us constitutes cognitively the social relations of which we are the transforming product. Humans have a common biology, are subject to the same general physical conditions and the same physiological processes, and all of us are compelled to make meaning of the world by virtue of engaging with the meanings others have made and are making (for language is a condition for what we call mind). And it is because we have, all of us, to live in and through the world that we constitute our categories as guarantors of the world in which we live — that is, as valid. So while we all live the same world, we have no choice but to live it autonomously as a function of our own, always unique, histories as particular persons. It is common to us all, therefore, to be different from one another.
This assumption of the commonality that resides in our difference informs participant observation as the fundamental research method of anthropology. Moreover, it brings us to the heart of the human existential dilemma: that we assume and act on the assumption that meanings made by others (and especially by intimate others) can be rendered as ours; but it is in the nature of mind that this can never entirely be achieved. Nevertheless, because sociality is the very condition of our human autonomy, we can come to understand others, even radically different others, to the extent that we allow their meanings to inform, and thus transform, our own.
Thus any given person is at all times at once a manifestation of his or her history and an historical agent. He or she at once maintains the continuity of meanings and transforms them by virtue of actively constituting an understanding of the world in and through relations with others (see e.g. Toren 1993).
So, in contemporary anthropology, distinctions between body and mind, individual and society, biology and culture are beginning, at last, to be discarded as inadequate to encompass the complex data with which anthropologists have to deal; and a new analytical vocabulary is being forged to address new formulations of the anthropological endeavour. A growing awareness of the central importance of ideas of the person for ethnographic analyses have made anthropologists more generally aware that their own analyses are bound to implicate a particular, Western, theory of person and mind. Thus our attempts to explain ideas of the person and of mind held by others have thrown into relief the necessity for a re-examination of our own taken-for-granted anthropological concepts.
