Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Psychological Anthropology: A Reader On Self In Culture, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Robert LeVine has not only conducted an important body of child development research and trained many students (of whom I was one). He has also written and edited several volumes that introduce students to psychological anthropology. His latest reader fills a real need: I am aware of no other collection of current work in psychological anthropology for undergraduates. Aside from a few quibbles and some annoying typesetting errors, Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self in Culture is a first-rate compilation that demonstrates the relevance and excitement of psychological anthropology.

Blaming For Columbine: Conceptions Of Agency In The Contemporary United States, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Modern Westerners are supposed to embrace a notion of unfettered personal agency. An analysis of public commentary (interviews, editorials, and online message boards) in the United States about the Columbine school shootings shows that the voluntarist cultural model of persons as autonomous agents, while certainly very important, is just one of a number of cultural models Americans use to explain human action and has particular political and interpersonal uses. We might think that conceptions as basic as those of personhood and agency would be hegemonic: both singular and internalized as unexamined, taken for‐granted assumptions. In some contexts, voluntarist ideas about …

Commentary: Borders As Sites Of Pain, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

I consider Walkerdine's second point that social borders -- especially those of class and work -- are sites of pain. She illustrates that contention with stories of working-class British women who had university educations and moved into the middle class but never felt they fully belonged, of workers in South Wales who are dislocated by the closing of their central mine or manufacturing plant, and of Australian manufacturing workers who are trying, sometimes with great difficulty, to remake themselves as flexible service and sales workers. I was intrigued by the implication for theories of motivation. Generally, we focus on drives …

Comment On James M. Wilce, "Magical Laments And Anthropological Reflections", Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Wilce draws our attention to the formulaic nature of anthropologists ethnographies, both considered as a distinctive genre and as inflected by larger modernist discourses of destruction and loss (which he terms neolament). His intriguing discussion of the laments that end many anthropological texts helped me to recognize similar laments that I heard when I conducted interviews in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The latter examples raise issues about the politics of lamenting modernity and questions about what makes a lament effective.

Is Empathy Gendered And If So, Why? An Approach From Feminist Psychological Anthropology, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Difference feminists have argued that women have special virtues. One such virtue would seem to be empathy, which has three main components: imaginative projection, awareness of the other's emotions, and concern. Empathy is closely related to identification. Psychological research and the author's own study of women's and men's talk about poverty and welfare use in the United States demonstrate women's greater empathic concern. However, some cross-cultural research shows greater sex differences in empathy in the United States than elsewhere. This combination of findings (women tend to demonstrate greater empathic concern, but this typical difference varies cross-culturally) requires a complex biocultural …

Diversity And Homogeneity In American Culture: Teaching And Theory, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

In teaching, as in any kind of cultural production, you can look at content, or you can look at reception. Here I want to talk about both: the content of what to say about diversity and sharing in U.S. culture, and how that may be received.

Cultural Standing In Expression Of Opinion, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

This article explores an underappreciated pragmatic constraint on the expression of opinions: When expressing an opinion on a topic that has been previously discussed, a speaker should correctly indicate the cultural standing of that view in the relevant opinion community. This Bakhtinian approach to discourse analysis is contrasted with conversation analysis, politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and analysis of epistemic modality. Finally, indicators of four points on the cultural standing continuum (highly controversial, debatable, common opinion, and taken for granted) are illustrated with examples from American English usage.

Motivation And Culture, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of this changing field.

This particular work is one of 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, …

Partly Fragmented, Partly Integrated: An Anthropological Examination Of "Postmodern Fragmented Subjects", Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

It has become commonplace for anthropologists, historians, and other researchers to discuss the cultural and historical construction of "selves." One now-classic description of this sort is the historian E. P. Thompson's account (1963, 1967) of the way industrial capitalism created a greater time consciousness among English factory workers. More recently, the literary critic Frederic Jameson has written about the psychological effects of late-20th-century capitalism. Using as his evidence works of architecture, poetry, music, and other artistic and intellectual productions, he has argued that (at least in the United States, the focus of his description) the standardization of our environment, saturation …

Review Of: Australian Rock Art: A New Synthesis, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Rock-art studies have now come of age, and are among the most fertile explorations of expressive culture. Through an interdisciplinary approach to its study, we have expanded our knowledge into the realms of aesthetics, belief systems, and social structures. Australian rock an is particularly significant, since it is a visual expression that has been practiced by contemporary as well as prehistoric Aboriginals. Robert Layton's most recent book -his "new synthesis" of Australian rock art- is an ambitious and successful analysis of Aboriginal rock art from across the continent.

The Taman Negara Batek: A People In Transition, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Batek Negritos from the vicinity of Taman Negara National Park in West Malaysia are a hunting and gathering people presently experiencing rapid encroachment by the modern world. Under the authority of the Malaysian government, they are being encouraged to settle and to emulate Malay subsistence farming communities. Unfortunately, this strategy has had a number of adverse effects on the Batek.

Beyond 'Formal' Vs. 'Informal' Education: Uses Of Psychological Theory In Anthropological Research, Claudia Strauss

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

For at least the last ten years cross-cultural research on the cognitive consequences of education has been dominated by the theoretical dichotomy between "formal" and "informal" education. The paradigm of formal education is the style of schooling developed in the industrialized West. It has been defined as any form of education that is deliberate, carried on "out of context" in a special setting outside of the routines of daily life, and made the responsibility of the larger social group. "Informal education" refers to education that takes place "in context" as children participate in everyday adult activities. It is the predominant …