Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself

Abstract

This Introduction addresses some expectations about the book, leaving to its Conclusion the task of summarizing its claimed advances. It is important to appreciate that this is a mid-stream assessment, not a final synthesis, which would be premature. The achievements to which it points are, first, the kinds of institutional structures and human proclivities psychological anthropologists need to be exploring. These institutional structures are exemplified by D’Andrade’s concept of lifeworlds in Chapter 2, and Paul’s revision of Dual Inheritance Theory in Chapter 3. Lowe’s Chapter 4 offers a bridge between this discussion and the second question, about internalization, addressed in the following five chapters. All chapters reflect how psychological anthropologists have recruited ethnographic methods to these theoretical problems. Reviewed briefly next are the contrasting background literatures on which each chapter begins, reflecting these authors’ widely diverse starting points and prior lack of a common discourse. The book attempts to initiate the kind of sustained conversations with one another, among this group of authors and potential readers, needed to overcome this present shortage of common understandings. The introduction closes by briefly laying the groundwork for the arguments to come, about lifeworlds and about internalization.