Projecting Play: Culture and Personality

Abstract

While British ethnographers were busy reacting to the exaggerated induction of the historical particularists, new developments were taking place in America. During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of researchers, inspired by the linguist Edward Sapir, became interested in investigating relationships between the individual and culture. Although this concern differentiated this school from the British social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown (although not from the psychological functionalism of Malinowski), there were several points of similarity between them. According to Langness (1974:85), both structural-functionalism and culture and personality studies “attempted to be scientific and nomothetic as opposed to historical and idiographic. They also attempted to consider wholes rather than merely parts. And they were avowedly theoretical.” Along with Sapir, a number of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have come to be associated with the culture and personality approach, including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Cora DuBois, Géza Róheim, Erik H. Erikson, Clyde Kluckhohn, Francis L. K. Hsu, John W. M. and Beatrice Whiting, Melford Spiro, Anthony F. C. Wallace, and Robert LeVine.

And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There