Culture and Personality Flashcards
What are the basic premises of the Culture and Personality movement?
Culture and personality movement was a core of anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. It attempts to find general traits repeating in a specific culture to lead to a discovery of a national character, model personality types and configurations of personality by seeking the individual characteristics and personalities.
How are culture and personality seen to be related?
Culture and personality are interdependent and track along an interconnected curve.
Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist and the most influential psychological theorist of 20th century. He emphasizes childhood experiences and unconscious motives shape personality.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist and the most influential psychological theorist of 20th century. He emphasizes childhood experiences and unconscious motives shape personality.
Erik Erikson
He is a neo-Freudian Danish-German-American psychoanalyst. Erikson is more society and culture-oriented than Freudians. He is known for his socio-cultural theory and its impact on human development.� Erikson theorizes eight stages of human socialization. He elaborates Freud�s genital stage into adolescence plus three stages of adulthood. He coins the phrase identity crisis, a adolescent period of intensive role confusion and exploration of different ways to see oneself. Erikson also emphasizes mutuality in generation influence. Unlike Freud�s emphasis to dramatic parental influence on children, Erikson believes that children impact on their parents� development as well.� He integrates information from cultural anthropology about the role of culture in human development.
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was born in Germany. When he was five years old, his family came to the United States. Sapir was the head of the Department of Anthropology at the Yale University. He was a close colleague of Ruth Benedict and studied under the tutelage of Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, another student of Franz Boas. Dr. Sapir was recognized as one of the first to explore the relationship between language and anthropology.� He perceives language as a tool in shaping human mind. He describes language is a verbal symbol of human relations. His key work concerns ethnography and linguistics of native American groups. He is noted for exploring the connection among language, personality and social behavior. His illuminating exploration in language, culture and personality has been collected in the book entitled Language, Culture, and Personality published in 1949 by the University of California Press.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
He is an American linguist.� Whorf was interested in the American Indians and the Hopi language. He was Edward Sapir�s student.� Whorf believes in linguistic determinism, that is, language shapes thought and language structure affects cognition and behaviors of language users. He has been seen as the primary proponent of linguistic relativity. Linguistic relativity means the differences in various languages reflect the different views of language speakers. Linguistic relativity often refers to “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, named after his mentor Edward Sapir and him. He uses observation techniques to perceive linguistic differences and their consequences in human thoughts and behaviors.
Ruth Benedict
- Work tied to Boas.
- Also fought against racism and embraced cultural relativism.
- A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture there came into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to these purposes, each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behavior take more and more congruous shape
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia. She is a student, a lifelong friend and collaborator of Ruth Benedict. They both study the relationship among the configuration of culture, socialization in each particular culture and individual personality formation. Her works explore human development in a cross-cultural perspective and cover the topics on gender roles and childrearing in primitive cultures and American own. Her first work, Coming of Age in Samoa, is a best seller and built up Mead as a Leading Figure in Cultural Anthropology. The book tells that individual development is determined by cultural expectations. Human development experiences differently in each culture.� As she points out “…man made for himself a fabric of culture with which each human life was dignified by form and meaning…Each people makes this fabric differently, selects some clues and ignores others, emphasizes a different sector of the whole arc of potentialities.”(
Abram Kardiner
Kardiner was born in New York City. His mother died when he was young and his childhood experienced loss and isolation. He was offered as a clinical professor at Columbia University in 1949. His contribution concerns the interplay of individual personality development and the situated cultures. He develops a psycho-cultural model for the relationship between child-rearing, housing and decent types in the different cultures. He distinguishes primary institutions (e.g. child training, toilet behavior and family structure form individual basic personality) and secondary institutions. He explains that basic personality structures in a society further influences the product of secondary institutions as religion and arts. His interpretations were documented into his the Individual and His Society (1939) and Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945). He is noted for studying the object relations and ego psychology in psychoanalysis.
Ralph Linton
Ralph Linton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the basic personality structure theory. He is committed to ethnographies of Melanesians and American Indians. Linton studies the distinction of role and status. His texts, The Study of Man (1936) and The Tree of Culture (1955) establishes Linton as a leading figure in anthropology. He was offered to succeed Boas as head of the anthropology department at Columbia University in 1937.
Cora Dubois
Cora Dubois states that individual variation within a culture exists and each culture shares the development of a particular type which might not exist in its individuals. She is also the author Social Forces in Southeast Asia (1949). Cora Dubois, Abram Kardiner and Ralph Linton coauthored the book, the Psychological Frontiers of Society, published by Columbia University Press in 1945. The book consists of careful descriptions and interpretations of three cultures, namely, the Comanche culture, the Alorese culture, and the culture of an American rural community. It explains the basic personality formed by the diversity of subject matter in each culture.
Clyde Kluckhohn
- Kluckhohn initially held the view of the biological equality of races. Later he reversed his position to the belief that humans are the product of a mix of biology and culture.
- Studied the Navajo “to the foot of the rainbow”
Basic Personality Structure Approach
This approach was developed jointly by Abram Kardiner and Ralph Linton in response to the configurational approach.� Kardiner and Linton did not believe that culture types were adequate for differentiating societies.� Instead, they offered a new approach which looks at individual members within a society and then compares the traits of these members in order to achieve a basic personality for each culture
Configurational Approach
Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict developed this school of thought early in the culture and personality studies.� The configurational approach believes that culture takes on the character of the members’ personality structure.� Thus, all members of a culture display similar personalities that are further collected as a form of types.� Patterns within a culture are linked by symbolism and interpretation.� A culture is defined through a system of common ideas and beliefs.� Individuals are integral components of culture.
