Exam 8: Culture and Psychology

Psychological anthropologists during the 1940s attempted to explain Japanese atrocities in wartime in terms of Japanese infant toilet-training practices.

Anthony F.C. Wallace's research shows that personality type in small-scale societies are indeed largely homogeneous, but that the notion of a basic personality structure does not hold for large-scale industrialized societies.

According to Géza Róheim, the Australian practice of sub-incision was rooted in the Oedipal complex as expressed in that culture's sleeping arrangements between mothers and their male children.

Boas's student A.L. Kroeber focused his attention on how exceptional individuals influence and reshape the cultures in which they participate.

In the film Vertigo, when Scotty falls in love with Judy, who resembled the deceased Madeline, he is exhibiting the psychological process of transference.

Benedict's notion of cultural relativism entailed the idea that cultural practices must be understood in the context and traditions within which they occur, but not the idea that all cultural practices are equally valid.

Among the Tchambuli of New Guinea, Margaret Mead claimed to have found a society in which western standards of gender roles were essentially reversed.

Benedict's Patterns of Culture suggested that the interpersonal behavior, mythology, aesthetic styles, and conceptions of the supernatural all express the dominant psychological orientation of a given culture.

Malinowski argued that the Oedipal complex was absent in the matrilineal Trobriand Islands, where a young man has an ambivalent relationship with his mother's brother, not his father.

Following her research in Samoa, Margaret Mead engaged in a prolonged and fierce debate with Derek Freeman over her ethnographic research on the island.