Surging Seas

Estimates sea level rise and risk of floods from storm surges in fifty-five low-lying coastal areas in the contiguous United States; land, populations, and housing at risk; and humanitarian and economic implications. Links to interactive map

Review of Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self in Culture

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

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 agency are taken for granted, but in others they are promoted quite deliberately. A particularly interesting phenomenon in the United States at this time is the presence of a discourse that may be called defensive voluntarism, an explicit, argumentative version of voluntarism invoked to combat other widely circulating views of behavior. The very need for emphatic pronouncement betrays speakers\u27 awareness that voluntarism needs to be defended. These findings point to the need for a person‐and‐context‐centered approach to social discourses instead of one that assumes discourses to be constitutive

Cultural Standing in Expression of Opinion

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

Partly Fragmented, Partly Integrated: An Anthropological Examination of Postmodern Fragmented Subjects

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\u27s 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 of our consciousness by mass media, and local dislocations caused by the globalization of production have produced a new dominant consciousness: a postmodern schizo-fragmentation (1991:372) characterized by floating emotions, inability to organize . . . past and future into coherent experience” (1991:25), and compartmentalization of diverse bits of information in unconnected mental regions.1 Jameson\u27s discussion, like Thompson\u27s, has become an influential account of the psychological effects of political-economic change. His stimulating analysis deserves a thorough investigation. How well does it fit late-20th-century U.S. Americans? On the basis of my interviews with some urbanites and suburbanites in the United States, I will argue that Jameson\u27s account of postmodern schizo-fragmentation is only partly right. Each person whose talk I have analyzed did have disparate schemas that can be traced to heterogeneous social discourses and practices.3 However, emotionally salient life experiences mediated their internalization of social discourses and led to a partial cognitive integration of them. This was true across boundaries of age, ethnicity, color, class, and gender for my interviewees, suggesting problems with not only Jameson\u27s account but also others that expect a rupture of narrativity among marginal or exploited groups in this society (e.g., Ortner 1991). My research also throws suspicion on studies that infer general forms of consciousness from art works or theories created for an elite audience

Comment on James M. Wilce, Magical Laments and Anthropological Reflections

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

Diversity and Homogeneity in American Culture: Teaching and Theory

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

Commentary: Borders as Sites of Pain

I consider Walkerdine\u27s 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 or the pull of desired goals, but Walkerdine\u27s examples remind us that action is not only impelled by positive desires but also can be inhibited or deflected by guilt, anxiety, and melancholia. I am thinking of Susan, who does not take full-time lectureships because she wants to remain connected to her parents through shared poverty, or Jim, downsized out of his manufacturing job, who is willing to make a midcareer change to contract cleaning work, but balks at taking on the personality of an enthusiastic salesman for his services and so cannot get work. Her interview excerpts effectively illustrate her contention that the celebration of such class and work identity crossings as “hybridity” overlooks the psychological conflicts that can ensue from changed or mixed identities

Beyond \u27Formal\u27 vs. \u27Informal\u27 Education: Uses of Psychological Theory in Anthropological 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 form in many nonindustrialized societies (Scribner and Cole 1973:555). Research guided by the formal/informal dichotomy typically has taken tests of memory, tests of logical reasoning, and other tests standardized on Western schoolchildren to a society where schooling is not universal. There schooled (formally educated) and unschooled (informally educated) children\u27s performance on the tests are compared, and, time and again, the unschooled children\u27s performance is found to be inferior. A reasonable conclusion to draw from this research would be that formal education (or, at least, Western schooling) improves cognitive abilities across the board and should be encouraged in international development efforts. Recent comparative education research has been much more culturally sensitive (see, e.g., Lave 1977; Scribner and Cole 1981). Yet, the formal/informal dichotomy remains the model by which these findings have been interpreted (Greenfield and Lave 1982; Cole and D\u27Andrade 1982). Lave probably expressed the frustration of many others when she wrote recently, We cannot afford to hold as our principal basis for comparing educational forms the schoolcentric, simplified dichotomy of formal and informal education (1982: 185). I agree with Lave that the formal/informal dichotomy needs to be replaced. My primary aim in this paper is to propose a less ethnocentric taxonomy in its place. However, I disagree with Lave\u27s contention that psychological theory has nothing to offer here; in fact, my replacement is drawn from recent research in cognitive psychology. An additional goal of this paper, therefore, is to defend the use of psychological theorizing in anthropological research. Although my discussion will be focused on cross-cultural cognitive research, some of my points are intended to have more general applicability

Is Empathy Gendered and If So, Why? An Approach From Feminist Psychological Anthropology

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\u27s emotions, and concern. Empathy is closely related to identification. Psychological research and the author\u27s own study of women\u27s and men\u27s talk about poverty and welfare use in the United States demonstrate women\u27s 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 explanation, drawing on cognitive, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. Explanation, and not just description, is a prerequisite for change