Synopses & Reviews
History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each of which treats a theme of major importance in both the history and current practice of anthropological inquiry. Drawing its title from a poem of W. H. Auden's, the present volume, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others (the fourth in the series) focuses on the emergence of anthropological interest in "culture and personality" during the 1920s and 1930s. It also explores the historical, cultural, literary, and biological background of major figures associated with the movement, including Bronislaw Manlinowski, Edward Sapir, Abram Kardiner, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Born in the aftermath of World War I, flowering in the years before and after World War II, severely attacked in the 1950s and 1960s, "culture and personality" was subsequently reborn as "psychological anthropology." Whether this foreshadows the emergence of a major anthropological subdiscipline (equivalent to cultural, social, biological, or linguistic anthropology) from the current welter of "adjectival" anthropologies remain to be seen. In the meantime, the essays collected in the volume may encourage a rethinking of the historical roots of many issues of current concern. Included in this volume are the contributions of Jeremy MacClancy, William C. Manson, William Jackson, Richard Handler, Regna Darnell, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, James A. Boon, and the editor.
Review
" . . . tells of the brilliant American thinkers Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and how the latter two moved into the center stage of history as planners/thinkers for American society during and after WW II. Vignettes reveal Malinowski, John Layard, Abram Kardiner, Melville Herskovits, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo. . . . This book deserves a far wider audience than its obvious target. . . . It should be held in every community college and university library, in every town and city."--Choice
About the Author
George W. Stocking, Jr., editor of this volume, is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. Since the appearance of his Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology in 1968, he has been the author of numerous articles and reviews in this field, including The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader. His most recent book is Victorian Anthropology.
Table of Contents
Essays on Culture and Personality
Anthropology and the Science of the Irrational: Malinowskis Encounter with Freudian Psychoanalysis
George W. Stocking, Jr.
Unconventional Character and Disciplinary Convention: John Layard, Jungian and Anthropologist
Jeremy MacClancy
Abram Kardiner and the Neo-Freudian Alternative in Culture and Personality
William C. Manson
Melville Herskovits and the Search of Afro-American Culture
Walter Jackson
Vigorous Male and Aspiring Female: Poetry, Personality, and Culture in Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict
Richard Handler
Personality and Culture: The Fate of the Sapirian Alternative
Regna Darnell
Science, Democracy, and Ethics: Mobilizing Culture and Personality for World War II
Virginia Yans-McLaughlin
Between-the-Wars Bali: Rereading the Relics
James A. Boon
Index