Psychological and cognitive anthropology

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Psychological and cognitive anthropology

• Studies of emotional development
• Cognitive development
• Cultural factors in variation of psychological
  factors
• The cross-cultural study of mental illness

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Piagets studies

• Sensorimotor 0-2 years. Nonverbal learning
  through personal exploration and experience with
  concrete objects
• Preoperational 2-7 years. Children acquire
  vocabulary and tag objects with words
• Concrete operational 7-12 years. Children
  classify objects by similarities and differences
  in qualities. They learn to use multiple
  dimensions simultaneously in making
  classifications. These include length, number,
  weight, area, volume

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• Formal operational (scientific) 12-adult. Formal
  logic, use of syllogisms, deductive reasoning.
  hare tortoise as fast slow
• During the concrete operational stage, children
  acquire concepts like conservation and
  reversibility, while during the formal
  operational stage, the ability to think in
  hypothetical terms is developed.
• Are these stages universal?

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Primitive means technology

• Most work has been on the shift from operational
  to abstract reasoning stage
• Are preindustrial people preoperational? Consider
  the two-week hunting treks of the Yanomamo the
  trans-Pacific canoe trips of the people of Yap
  the eight-section kinships system of Australian
  peoples the distribution of meat among the
  !Kung and so on.

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No culture-free tests

• The problem may be the supposedly culture- free
  tests and schooling as training for certain kinds
  of tests
• Marc Irwin studied rice farmers in Liberia and
  compared them to U.S. undergraduates.
• Used rice bowls and geometric cards for the two
  groups. Abstract thinking was at the same level
  in both groups.

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The instrument effect

• The Porteus Maze and Australian aborigines
  (1917). There are hundreds of studies of
  Aborigine cognition.
• The false debate over culture vs. nature in
  explaining the results.
• The instrument effect beakers and triangles are
  not part of everyone's experience.

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The conservation principle

• Douglas Price-Williams used familiar materials
  and found no differences in the concrete
  operational stage between Tiv children in West
  Africa and European children, in terms of
  conservation of earth, nuts, number.

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Literacy and cognition

• Literacy is literacy a factor in cognition.
• But Vai and Cree readers, who have their own
  scripts, were more affected by schooling than by
  literacy on cognitive tests.

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Field independence

• People who rely on hunting develop field
  independence.
• Embedded Figures Test
• Two examples Mexico and Greece

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Child-rearing practices

• Breast feeding
• In 70 of societies, children are weaned after
  two years. Children may be fed 20-40 times per
  day. Almost all American women stop by 10 months.
• Holding and touching
• In H/G societies, children are held up to 50 of
  the day.
• In both the U.S. and Japan, children are touched
  from 12-20 of the time that they are awake.
• In the U.S., babies are usually held than 10 of
  the day and spend a lot of time alone in cribs.

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The Logoli of Kenya

• Lee and Ruth Munroe found
• infants held more by their mothers become more
  trusting by age 5.
• the number of different holders adds more to
  trust in toddlers than time held by mothers.

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Response to crying

• ite pinai, ite ponai in traditional Greek if a
  child is crying, its either hurting or hungry.
• In many societies, like the Efe (of Congo) a
  3-month old gets a response within 10 sec of
  crying, 75 of the time
• In U.S., we ignore crying 45 of the time
• Infant mortality 1 in industrialized societies
  vs. up to 35 in nonindustri-alized societies.

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Collective vs. individualistic values

• Agricultural and herding societies stress
  obedience.
• Hunting and gathering societies stress
  self-reliance and individuality.
• We are foragers in the U.S.
• The correlation is inexact and the mechanism of
  cause remains a subject of wide interest and
  study.

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Culturally specific mental illnesses

• Windigo psychosis among Ojibwa, Cree
• men of these societies are said to be possessed
  by cannibal giant wiitiko.
• Pibloktoq
• Eskimo adults of Greenland. Women strip naked and
  wander across ice until they collapse.
• Amok
• Malaya, Indonesia, New Guinea. Depression,
  followed by brooding and withdrawal, and then a
  wild, berserk frenzy of destruction.
• Are these illnesses patterned? Are they
  expressions of the same mental illnesses?

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Marano's explanation of windigo psychosis

• Under conditions of stress, the Ojibwa and Cree
  triaged their population and increased the chance
  for survival of all.
• There is never documentation of the behavior of
  the accused.
• But all accused were sickly, senile, non-Ojibwa.
• Emic vs. etic explanations The etic requires
  positing a universal fear stimulated by specific
  conditions.
• The fear of being eaten was concocted as a way to
  overcome the fear of killing.

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Edgertons study mental illness in Africa

• Sebei of Uganda, Pokot of NW Kenya, Kamba of SC
  Kenya, Hehe of Tanzania
• Kichwaa Swahili for severe mental illness.

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Free list of traits of kichwaa

• Goes naked
• Sleeps or hides in the bush
• Shaves head and bites self
• Eats and smears dirt and/or feces
• Runs wildly
• Destroys property
• Wanders aimlessly

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Five key traits

• Five traits accounted for about 60 of all traits
  listed.
• The Africans in these four societies, said
  Edgerton, do not regard a single behavior as
  psychotic which could not be so regarded in the
  West.
• Schizophrenia is biochemically based, but it is
  expressed differently across cultures.

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Hallucinations

• Hallucinations were almost never listed (lt1) by
  Edgertons informants.
• Hallucinations about being controlled by robots
  emerged after a 1921 play by Karel Capek.
• Schizophrenics only began hallucinating about
  being controlled by electric rays at the
  beginning of the 20th century.
• Schizophrenics in the U.S. tend to have visual,
  while schizophrenics in India tend to have more
  olfactory hallucinations.

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Rosenhans study of labeling

• 3 female and 5 male pseudopatients
• 7 of 8 admitted to a total of 12 hospitals. One
  was diagnosed as manic depressive. All others
  diagnosed as schizophrenic.
• Released between 7-52 days later with diagnosis
  schizophrenia in remission or asymptomatic or
  improved.
• note-taking and oral-acquisitive behavior
• One patient saw through it and accused the
  researcher of being a journalist.
• None of the staff saw through it.

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Spitzers critique

• Was it ethical to dupe the hospital workers?
• If people come to an emergency room with intense
  stomach pains, wouldnt they be diagnosed as
  suffering from gastritis?
• Eventually, the same duped psychiatrists
  diagnosed that rarest of events, "schizophrenia
  in remission" (Spitzer 1976461).

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Science is a human activity

• Still, this research reminds us that medicine,
  like any human endeavor, is populated by humans,
  who are fully equipped with egos and with
  ambitions.
• Without these qualities, we would have no modern
  medicine, no miracle cures, no computer-driven
  prostheses.
• But with these qualities, we know that we have to
  be vigilant against the potential arrogance that
  comes from success.