ABSTRACT

If there is one thing which traditionally unites most British social anthropologists it is their fierce antagonism towards psychology and psychiatry and their disregard for the psychological aspects of the social phenomena which they study. In common with their intellectual ancestor Durkheim, they seem to feel a positive obligation to relegate the scope of psychology to individual abnormalities, and thus misrepresent it as a field of study which is generally irrelevant to their preoccupations. In fact, of course, most anthropological theorizing is shot through with ill-considered, and usually unacknowledged psychological assumptions (cf. Lewis, 1977, pp. 1-24; Johoda, 1982). Some leading anthropologists have even developed quite sophisticated defence mechanisms which are designed to protect their Olympian ‘naïveté’ (as the neglect of psychology is disarmingly called), and to preserve their domain from psychological incursion.