Blackwell Reference Online

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Self-consciously or not, intellectual work is always constituted in relationship to history and culture. Scholarship in psychocultural studies is no exception. North American ideologies of self, including especially the assumptions of individualism and fascination with self-awareness, have both nurtured the field of psychological anthropology and marginalized psychological anthropology in relation to psychology and psychiatry. Much work in psychological anthropology, as in other disciplines, was done to explicitly or tacitly address culturally defined problems in, and use cultural categories of, the United States, where most psychological anthropologists do their work. From the famous early example of Mead's work on the newly turbulent adolescence associated with young people's new dependency and place (or lack of such) in a changing educational and economic system (see di Leonardo 1998 ) and the World War II work of Benedict and others in managing understandings of the enemy at home and abroad, this tendency extends to Scheper-Hughes's (1992) work critiquing both the effects of universalized attachment theory and how extreme privation and exploitation affect relationships between mothers and their children. From nearly constituting the field of US anthropology in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, psychological anthropology became a sub-field with the turn to history and politics ... log in or subscribe to read full text