Psychological Anthropology

ANSS Subject and Bibliographic Access Committee Question/Answer on Cataloging Issues – February 2011
What subject headings are applied to works on psychological anthropology?

Predating the LCSH term “Ethnopsychology,” was what was known in anthropology as “Culture and Personality” and defined by Anthony C. Wallace as: “Culture-and-personality is thus significant in the field of cultural anthropology because it is concerned with certain aspects of the theory of culture process, including intergenerational transfer of culture . . . culture change, and the institutionalization of modes of coping with individual diversity (1970).” Culture and personality, a subfield of cultural anthropology, originated with the work of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Bronislaw Malinowski in the 1920s. The subfield grew through the Great Depression and WWII when “national character” studies were in vogue. By the 1950s, anthropologists including Ralph Linton, Cora Dubois, and Weston Labarre were increasingly incorporating psychoanalytical theory into their work. In the 1960s, larger cross-cultural studies such as Beatrice Whiting, et. al.’s Six Cultures project and Harvard University’s Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures Project were looking at bigger questions with more sophistication. Not surprisingly, considering the times, studies of altered states of consciousness in different cultures also became more prominent in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the term “Psychological Anthropology” was gaining in popularity (e.g., Erika Bourguignon’s 1979 textbook, Psychological Anthropology). Today neither culture and personality (USE personality and culture) or psychological anthropology (USE ethnopsychology) are used by the Library of Congress:

Personality and culture (May Subd Geog)

UF Civilization and personality

Culture and personality

BT Civilization

Culture

Ethnopsychology

NT Ethnomethodology

–-Cross-cultural studies

Ethnopsychology (May Subd Geog)

SA subdivision Psychology under names of racial or ethnic groups, e.g. African Americans–Psychology

UF Cross-cultural psychology

Ethnic groups–Psychology

Ethnic psychology

Folk-psychology

Indigenous peoples–Psychology

National psychology

Psychological anthropology

Psychology, Cross-cultural

Psychology, Ethnic

Psychology, National

Psychology, Racial

Race psychology

BT Psychology

RT National characteristics

NT Art and race

Cognition and culture

Cultural psychiatry

Cultural relativism

Ethnocentrism

Guilt and culture

Personality and culture

Race awareness

Subculture

Related LCSH terms:

Psychoanalysis and folklore (May Subd Geog)

UF Folklore and psychoanalysis

BT Folklore

Primitivity (Psychoanalysis)

UF Primitiveness (Psychoanalysis)

BT Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis and anthropology (May Subd Geog)

UF Anthropology and psychoanalysis

BT Anthropology

Psychoanalysis and culture (May Subd Geog)

UF Culture and psychoanalysis

BT Culture

Cultural psychiatry
Here are entered works on the branch of psychiatry concerned with the influence of culture on mental health. Works on the branch of psychiatry concerned with the comparison of mental health and disorders in different cultures are entered under Psychiatry, Transcultural.

UF Culture and psychiatry

Ethnopsychiatry

Psychiatry, Cultural

Psychiatry and culture

BT Ethnopsychology

Social psychiatry

NT Psychiatry, Transcultural

Psychiatry, Transcultural
Here are entered works on the branch of psychiatry concerned with the comparison of mental health and disorders in different cultures. Works on the branch of psychiatry concerned with the influence of culture on mental health are entered under Cultural psychiatry.

UF Cross-cultural psychiatry

Cultural psychiatry–Cross-cultural studies

Psychiatry–Cross-cultural studies

Psychiatry, Cross-cultural

Transcultural psychiatry

BT Cross-cultural studies

Cultural psychiatry

NT Psychology, Pathological–Cross-cultural studies

Schizophrenia–Diagnosis–Cross-cultural studies

Robert LeVine wrote in 1974, that “Culture and personality research draws upon and contributes to the growing specialties of cross-cultural psychology and transcultural psychiatry, but it is not reducible to them. Its distinctiveness, now as in the past, resides in its focus on continuities and complementarities between (a) the normal and abnormal, (b) childhood and adulthood, (c) the personality system and the social and cultural systems, and on the connections between (a), (b), and (c). Its province, though not sharply bounded, may be defined as the interrelations between life cycle, psychological functioning and malfunctioning, and social and cultural institutions.” In recent years, LC has favored psychology over anthropology and personality over culture, so now the LCSH term which most adequately covers what was once known as “culture and personality” is “Personality and culture.”