A Companion to Psychological Anthropology:  Modernity and Psychocultural Change.  Casey Conerly and Robert B. Edgerton, eds.  Blackwell Companions to Anthropology.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.  xxiii + 523 pp.

What a wonderful surprise!  Having edited, reviewed and contributed to many anthologies, I approached this Companion skeptically, noting its unusual organization and the weighting towards UCLA (both editors and the authors of seven or more chapters).  But the uniformly high quality of the writing soon won me over.  Cross-referencing indicates that most authors were able to read other contributions before publication.  Like a Companion from another publisher (Ingold 1994), this volume achieves its goals of introducing new readers to psychological anthropology and of contributing to “its growing vigor” (p. 11).  The table of contents includes a synopsis of each chapter which provides a useful sample of what is to come and the notes on contributors give important information about the authors.

The text itself is divided into 25 chapters under the following headings: Sensing, Feeling, and Knowing (6), Language and Communication (3), Ambivalence, Alienation, and Belonging (12), and Aggression, Dominance, and Violence (4) plus an Afterword by Catherine Lutz.  Though quite different from my own Handbook which followed seven historical studies with 12 chapters presenting “The Evidence” from, e.g., Primate Ethology, Discourse, the Arts, Dreams, and Initiations (Bock 1994), the chapters are quite comprehensive and the editors explain why some topics are “missing” (p. 11).

The initial chapter by Kevin Birth shows some of the ways that globalization has affected concepts of time.  Most subsequent chapters deal with modernity and global changes. Charles Lindholm provides an excellent history of studies of emotion, suggesting that anthropologists need again to think about “crowd psychology” in this era of “ethnic revivalism and cultic zealotry” (p. 44).  Linda Garro, building on the ideas of Fredrick Bartlett and A. I Hallowell, as well as  her Stirling Prize essay (Garro 2000), considers recent developments in the study of perception, memory and cognition, insisting that there can be no division between process and content in thought.  This is a useful antidote to narrow conceptions of cognitive anthropology and “consensus theory.”

In a stunning chapter, Patricia Greenfield reviews studies of culture learning, showing how research has moved from imposed tests to analysis of everyday cognition. Using her own varied work from Africa in the 1960s through many kinds of laboratory experiments and through her last 30 years of work with weavers in Chiapas she comments on global changes in child development due to schooling and new media.  It is too bad that her most recent book illustrating (with photos and videos) the dialectic of tradition and novelty in weaving did not make it into the bibliography (Greenfield 2004).

Completing the first section, Douglas Hollan demonstrates changes in “Dreaming in a Global World.” He introduces the concept of “selfscape dreams” in which “aspects of self, desire, and fantasy become intertwined with the experience of body, world, and people” (p. 99).  And Jennifer Cole’s chapter, “Memory and Modernity,” draws (like Garro) on Bartlett’s concept of “schema” (plus Vygotsky and others) to stress the study of  memory “as a historically situated, individual, cultural, and social phenomenon [which] no single theory can encompass” (p. 112).

Part II deals largely with the “tensions between language improvisations and structures,” and asks how “new language forms shape shared subjectivities and identities” (p. 121).  James Wilce discusses these processes under the heading of “Narrative Transformations.”  This is a very rich chapter and, for me, the most striking examples were of traditional laments: “Grief is universal” but the feelings surrounding it “vary markedly” as people use their stories of tragedy (in Lebanon,  Bengal or Bali) for social support; and globalization affects the telling of stories in unpredictable ways.  I am picky enough to note that the concept of superorganic was coined by Alfred—not Theodore—Kroeber (p. 187 and index), an interesting ‘back-formation”).   The chapter by linguists Elinor Ochs and Olga Solomon shows that many autistic children “have a heightened awareness of how mastery of certain social practices is critical to being perceived as...normal” (p. 141) and that this awareness can teach us a great deal about “practical logic” and agency.  Susan Reynolds Whyte writes of the impact of global discourses on the perception and treatment of “disabilities.”

Part III has the greatest number of chapters so I will have to be brief in showing their diversity.  Daniel Linger discusses contemporary studies of identity that call for a new “model of the person.”  David Napier considers conservative ideas of the “self” in postmodern anthropology.  Katherine Ewing looks at the ways in which clinical settings provoke emotional responses and affect the identities of immigrants.  Geoffrey White writes of “emotive institutions,” settings (like Wilce’s laments) in which various forces converge to produce particular kinds of emotional experiences with specific social functions.  (An example he does not give would be an AA meeting.)

Setha Low presents material from interviews with people about their reasons for (and feelings about) living in gated communities, primarily their fear of urban crime.  Atwood Gaines provides an analysis of “race” as “local biology” demonstrating the totally unscientific nature of racial categories and their associated features in the U. S., Europe, Japan and South Africa., as well as the fallacies involved in discourse about race-specific diseases.  Margaret Lock continues this line of argument with her analysis of organ transplants (especially of organs from brain dead subjects) and patented cell lines, showing that now “the body and body parts must be understood as both self and other and . . . .as potential commodities” (p. 302).

Thomas Weisner and Edward Lowe survey some effects of globalization on childhood, especially when it leads to the “disintegration of local communities” (p. 318).  The chapter on “Drugs and Modernization” by Michael Winkelman and Keith Bletzer, is fascinating, showing the systematic sanctioning of previous “sacraments and medicines” as “harmful drugs” during modernization (p. 337).  The connection of drugs with colonial and economic processes is clearly depicted.  This is a very thoughtful essay; though I do wish they had included reference to the remarkable study of alcohol in Mexican history and culture by Tim Mitchell (2004).

Don Seeman goes beyond Freud and Functionalism in his account of “Ritual Practice and Its Discontents,” using fascinating examples to critique contemporary approaches including “cultural psychology.”  Erika Bourguignon provides new examples to reinforce her well-known views about spirit possession, while René Devisch reconsiders the categories and mechanisms of witchcraft and sorcery (though without reference to Tanya Luhrmann’s research).

Part IV begins with Alex Hinton’s discussion of “Genocide and Modernity,” a good summary for those not familiar with his work on the Cambodian genocide or with Z. Bauman’s book on the Holocaust.  Similarly, Howard F. Stein writes of “Corporate Violence,” especially the anxiety and guilt associated with “downsizing” in medical and educational and industrial organizations, with his usual flare and insight. His observations on Holocaust imagery in the fantasies of people threatened with dismissal and the “survivor guilt” of those who are spared are striking.  Christopher Colvin comments on the difficulty of defining “Political Violence” and he follows Franz Fanon in describing the psychic effects of colonial brutality in producing “its own violent and, ultimately, liberating reaction” (p. 458). 

Colvin’s essay leads into the last and, I think, the best of the chapters—certainly the most moving of the entire set.  I have long been a fan of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, from her early publications about mental illness in western Ireland (which I taught for years) through her work with mothers and children in northeast Brazilian (which I could hardly bear to read).  After the heartbreak of that research she sought a change, going to South Africa in 1993, “the most violent year” in the civil war!  There she witnessed massacres and their aftermath, returning to study Afrikaners after apartheid in relation to the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), interviewing survivors and perpetrators of racial violence.  She discusses how South Africa had become “a land of ‘spoiled identities,’” in Erving Goffman’s sense, and asked how new identities and narratives of self and suffering were being constructed (p. 473).  She details the politics and failures of “remorse” as the TRC went about its work with striking vignettes from all sides of the conflict.  This essay is first among many fine chapters.

Finally, I must agree with Catherine Lutz in her Afterword, that this Companion “demonstrates how many ways psychological anthropologists have found. . .to understand how what is taken for knowledge about selves and self-processes is emergent, politicized, and culturally grounded” (p. 496).  I learned something new on virtually every page.

REFERENCES CITED

Bock, Philip K., ed.       

  1994  Handbook of Psychological Anthropology.  Westport, CN: Greenwood    Press.

Garro, Linda C.

  2000  Remembering What One Knows and the Construction of the Past: A Comparison of Cultural Consensus Theory and Cultural Schema Theory.  Ethos 28: 275-319.

Greenfield, Patricia        

  2004  Weaving Generations Together.  Santa Fe: SAR Press.

Ingold, Tim, ed.

  1994  Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology.  London and New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, Tim

  2004  Intoxicated Identities: Alcohol’s Power in Mexican History and Society.  New York and London: Routledge.