Clinical Psychoanalysis as an Ethnographic Tool

Abstract

Recently anthropologists concerned with the analysis of culture as a symbolic system have taken up the self' as an important issue. They recognize the self as a cultural construct, expressed through symbols, images and metaphors that are socially shared and publicly communicated (Geertz 1974; Marriott 1976, 1980; Levy 1973; Rosaldo 1983). They have captured some of the underlying, organizing principles of such indigenous theories of the self, but have had difficulty in capturing the ambiguity and creativity of ongoing social processes, particularly in explaining how inconsistent concepts of the world and self are used, juxtaposed, and modified during social interaction. Anthropological studies of the self generally focus on the content, what linguists would call the referential meanings, of informants' accounts about themselves and their culturally organized world. The self' that is referentially encoded, that is, the self that informants can explicitly talk about, can be understood as an indigenous theory, an ethnopsychology. Many of these studies of ethnopsychology imply an overall coherence of the culture and of the ex-