Culture and Personality

Abstract

“Culture and personality” (also known as “personality and culture” and “culture-and-personality studies”) was an interdisciplinary movement seeking to unite psychology with anthropology in American social science of the mid-20th century. The movement gained exceptional renown and then fell into disrepute in the decades after 1950, while nevertheless providing a basis for modern psychological anthropology. The movement was initiated by three students of Franz Boas’s (founder of academic anthropology in America)—Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict—who included, in different ways, a psychological dimension in the study of culture. Bestselling books written by Mead (e.g., Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies; see Mead 1928, Mead 1930, and Mead 1935, all cited under Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) and Benedict (e.g., Patterns of Culture, see Benedict 1934a, cited under Ruth F. Benedict) introduced anthropology to the American reading public, and in the late 1940s, when the books were reprinted in paperback editions, became the public face of anthropology itself. In 1947, Mead and Benedict launched a “national character” project on modern cultures at Columbia University, partly funded by the US military to study cultures “behind the Iron Curtain.” Their first book, The People of Great Russia, by Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman (see Gorer and Rickman 1949, cited under National-Character Studies at Columbia University), suggested that tsarist and Soviet authoritarianism had psychological roots in the swaddling of Russian infants; it was widely ridiculed and harshly criticized, creating a stigma from which the culture-and-personality movement as such never recovered. Yet, by the 1950s the movement had generated other, less visible research projects directly and indirectly influenced by Edward Sapir that were refashioned as “psychological anthropology” and continue to the early 21st century. The movement’s renown brought with it the publication of biographies of its founders, and a division between its image in public discourse and those aspects known only to the academic world. The less visible aspects were recovered only after 1990 through the work of historians of anthropology, especially Regna Darnell with her biography of Sapir and Judith Irvine’s posthumous reconstruction of Sapir’s lectures on the psychology of culture. Culture and personality was never a centralized movement and lacked a consensus on theory and method; diverse approaches were formulated and tried out. If its theoretical orientation was generally post-Freudian, its methods ranged widely across ethnographic and individual case studies (including life history approaches), the Rorschach and other projective tests, and statistical analyses, both within and across cultures. Topics such as childrearing, individual variations in adult personality, and the relation of culture to mental disorders were examined anew and in most cases, for the first time, gave rise to research traditions that remain influential in modern psychological anthropology.