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After over three decades of continual publication in multiple editions, the Third Edition of Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, now with coauthor Stephen Leavitt, describes the latest interests, concepts, and approaches in the field with the inclusion of four new chapters and updates to earlier topics. The premise of the previous editions remains: that all anthropology is psychological and that the interplay between anthropological methods and the psychological theories existing in different times is dialectical.Psychological anthropologists have grappled with changing trends in both disciplines, including psychoanalytic, holistic, cognitive, interpretive, and developmental approaches. It is important to appreciate these currents of thought to understand the state of the field today. This text is thus a guide to that history along with a critique that may lead to a new synthesis. It is an ideal choice for courses in psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, and the history of anthropology.
After over three decades of continual publication in multiple editions, the Third Edition of Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, now with coauthor Stephen Leavitt, describes the latest interests, concepts, and approaches in the field with the inclusion of four new chapters and updates to earlier topics. The premise of the previous editions remains: that all anthropology is psychological and that the interplay between anthropological methods and the psychological theories existing in different times is dialectical. Psychological anthropologists have grappled with changing trends in both disciplines, including psychoanalytic, holistic, cognitive, interpretive, and developmental approaches. It is important to appreciate these currents of thought to understand the state of the field today. This text is thus a guide to that history along with a critique that may lead to a new synthesis. It is an ideal choice for courses in psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, and the history of anthropology.
Passage to Manhood is a groundbreaking and beautifully written ethnography that addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and AIDS as they intersect in a new "rite-of-passage" among young ethnic-minority males in contemporary China.
This volume, first published in 2001, presents research in psychological anthropology, including person-centred ethnography, activity theory, and cultural schema theory.
In this thought-provoking book, preeminent scholar Stephen Houston turns his attention to the crucial role of young males in Classic Maya society, drawing on evidence from art, writing, and material culture. The Gifted Passage establishes that adolescent men in Maya art were the subjects and makers of hieroglyphics, painted ceramics, and murals, in works that helped to shape and reflect masculinity in Maya civilization. The political volatility of the Classic Maya period gave male adolescents valuable status as potential heirs, and many of the most precious surviving ceramics likely celebrated their coming-of-age rituals. The ardent hope was that youths would grow into effective kings and noblemen, capable of leadership in battle and service in royal courts. Aiming to shift mainstream conceptions of the Maya, Houston argues that adolescent men were not simply present in images and texts, but central to both.
Cargo cults have long exerted a remarkable attraction on Westerners, and the last decade has seen the publication of much new work on the subject. This collection of original essays is based on fieldwork in Melanesia, Fiji, Australia, and Indonesia by scholars who are influential in the contemporary debate on cargo. Conceived as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, the volume offers an up-to-date view of the subject and the debates it arouses among contemporary anthropologists. Some contributors plead for the abolition of "cargo" because of its troublesome implications, but also because, in the authors’ view, cargo cults do not exist as identifiable objects of study. Others arg...
Polarization often results from deficient forms of social belonging, caused primarily by stark social inequalities. These inequalities then generate psychological responses that both create and worsen polarization. Yet social stability is possible. In this provocative and original book, Nilson Ariel Espino argues that our current ideological polarizations can be best analysed as springing from the contradictions of modernity and its obsessions. Using culture as a founding and organizing dimension, the author disassembles the typical dichotomies of left versus right, or conservatism versus progressivism, and reveals the opposing sides as mutually interdependent positions that struggle with cultural paradoxes they are ill-suited to address. Written with clarity and verve for the general reader, this book brings classic concepts of cultural anthropology to bear on the key preoccupations of today's world, from poverty and inequality, to political instability and the environmental crisis.
The many different localities of the Pacific region have a long history of transformation, under both pre- and post-colonial conditions. More recently, rates of local transformation have increased tremendously under post-colonial regimes. The forces of globalization, which rapidly distribute commodities, images, and political and moral concepts across the region, have presented Pacific populations with an unprecedented need and opportunity to fashion new and expanded understandings of their cultural and individual identities. This volume, the first in a new series, examines the forces of globalization at different levels, as they manifest themselves and operate across cultural, cognitive and biographical dimensions of human life in the Pacific. While posing familiar questions, it offers new answers through the integration of cultural and psychological methods. The contributors draw on practice theory, cognitive science and the anthropology of space and place while exploring the key analytical rubrics of human agency, memory and landscape.
Rituals have always been a focus of ethnographies of Melanesia, providing a ground for important theorizing in anthropology. This is especially true of the male initiation rituals that until recently were held in Papua New Guinea. For the most part, these rituals have been understood as all-male institutions, intended to maintain and legitimate male domination. Women's exclusion from the forest space where men conducted most such rites has been taken as a sign of their exclusion from the entire ritual process. Women as Unseen Characters is the first book to examine the role of females in Papua New Guinea male rituals, and the first systematic treatment of this issue for any part of the world...
Provides an unrivelled overview of intellectual development in anthropology.