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Anthropological Psychologizing
Anthropological Psychologizing
Anthropological psychologizing
and what we need to do about it
Charles Whitehead
15 minute presentation
Affiliations and research:
Department of Anthropology, University College London
Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London
Harrow School of Computer Science, University of Westminster
Correspondence:
Email: charles@socialmirrors.org
Website: www.socialmirrors.org
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING
1. Core problem
For over a hundred years field anthropologists have been confronted with people who do not
seem to think the way we do. Some have inferred that, if other people represent the world
differently, their representational processes must be different. That's a bit like explaining a
photograph of a UFO by arguing there must be something wrong with the camera. In fact, if
you think of all the ways anyone might react to a photograph of a UFO, what you get is a
synchronic metaphor for 150 years of anthropological thought.
THE CAMERA
OTHERWORLDS
Faulty
Political
Platonic world
Normal
Theatrical
Denial
CHARLES WHITEHEAD
Slide 2.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING
So, we have a suitably unidentifiable object in the middle, lots of people can see it, and there
are no clues to what it might be.
1.
2.
Others will think it's something real - maybe something sinister concealing vested
political interests, or just people fabricating an illusion.
3.
Others will say its from another world, inaccessible to science; or deny that anyone
can ever explain anything - the terminal Kantian position.
1.
`Faulty-camera' theorists, from Boas and Lvy-Bruhl, to J.V. Taylor and Hallpike, variously
describe the non-literate mind as primitive, emotional, childlike, or pre-logical, so dividing
humanity into two ideal types - `primitive' and `modern'.
Well we can't talk like that any more, so we have to assume the camera is normal:
that's the approach taken by the intellectualists in the 19th century; and the structuralists and
cognitive anthropologists in the 20th. The traditional approach in cognitive anthropology has
been to say `Let's ignore the UFO, and explain all the ordinary photographs instead.'
Pascal Boyer tackles the UFO head on. He accuses us all of ad hoc psychologizing.
There have been major advances in the cognitive sciences: it's time we took note of that
instead of continually reinventing psychology ex vacuo just to suit ourselves. But he ends up
arguing that animism is natural precisely because it's not natural. All cameras take photos of
UFOs precisely because they are designed not to.
You cannot explain cultural difference on the grounds that people are all the same,
without reference to real-world experience, history, and so on. And the reason Boyer attempts
the impossible is because the cognitivist paradigm itself ignores real world experience. We
need to export anthropology into cognitive science so they will know what it is we all need to
explain. Simply importing cognitive science into anthropology is not good enough. We need
cross-fertilization between disciplines, not a one-way transfusion.
2.
Let's look at real-world explanations. Real-world theorists tell us the UFO is not what it
appears to be it's false consciousness, society projected onto the sky, or an anti-structural
inversion of society. Marx made an interesting observation when he said: We become
CHARLES WHITEHEAD
conscious by acting on the world. But he inferred therefore we create ourselves through
labour. Acting on the world, however, does not begin with labour it begins with childhood
play. Marxist anthropologists focus on the world of work; the collective-representation/
liminal anti-structure schools focus on play. If you ignore childhood, like the forces-andrelations-of-production theorists, you ignore everything that makes us human. And if you
ignore competition, like pantomime-and-performance theorists, you ignore everything that
makes us monsters. We are both at the same time, so we need to combine these two
approaches.
3.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING
So, I've been unforgivably negative, and presented a range of anthropological views as a
series of denials:
1.
There are camera-based theories, which are reductionist, ignore real-world experience, and
explain difference in terms of sameness because they have:
3.
At the opposite pole we have anti-reductionists who deny psychology, deny explanation, and
emphasize
But meanings are always grounded in real world experience. A baby is learning what wet and
dry mean every time it has its nappy changed. It doesn't need to read Mythologiques to
understand binary oppositions. We don't invent symbols then look around for something to
attach them to. Meanings are there first, rooted in experiences which are real because they
cause pleasure and pain.
We need to ground human meaning in embodied experience; we need to know the
universal substrates of symbolic behaviour, biological and psychological, as an antidote to
relativism - a universal basis for etic accounts of cultural difference.
2.
In the middle we have real-world theories which do acknowledge embodied experience, and
allow both reductionist and expansionist accounts to coexist. What Marxist anthropology
lacks is an account of childhood, of how we become conscious through childhood play. What
`performance' theorists need is an operational account of liminality, which is the same thing,
because childhood is the major liminal stage in human development.
So all these denials reflect a common problem and require a common solution: we need to
CHARLES WHITEHEAD
Play
Performance
Implicit
Gesture calls
Embodied
Song-and-dance
Mimetic
Iconic signals
Role-play
Ritual
Conventional
Approval and
Games with
Economic
disapproval
rules
exchange
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING
2.
Social mirrors make us conscious. It is ironic that collective representations, which exploit
social mirroring behaviour, should turn us into representationalists, more or less blinded to
the real-world orientation of our childhood.
4. Mapping role-play in the brain
I propose a collaborative approach between anthropology and cognitive science, which aims
to investigate and understand human social mirroring abilities and social adaptations of the
brain.
My own programme has begun with a brain-mapping study of role-play, with Robert
Turner at the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology* in London. The main findings
were:
1.
2.
Maintaining the non-role state also involved significant activity in contrast to roleplay states [Slide 5].
3.
Role-play itself, however, and switching role-play on, did not show robust activations
relative to controls [Slide 6].
CHARLES WHITEHEAD
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING
CHARLES WHITEHEAD
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING
2.
3.
Research into the social brain seems likely to provide insights with theoretical relevance in
anthropology.