ABSTRACT
This book has undertaken a reexamination of the intellectual foundations of research on culture and personality, a diagnosis of its major problems, and an attempt at constructing a coherent framework for their solution. The field of culture and personality is peculiar in that it attracted a great deal of interest in its early days (before 1950) as an area of importance to anthropology, psychology, education, and psychiatry; generated sound theoretical statements and highly controversial research studies; and then lost the interest of all but those who specialize in one of its topical foci, such as the socialization of the child or comparative psychopathology, In the past 20 years each of these specialized areas has produced an extensive research literature, exploring and redefining the complexities of child development, mental disorder, and expressive behavior in cross-cultural terms. Each specialty is on the way to becoming a subdiscipline of its own, as divergent from other branches of culture and personality as psychology is from anthropology. However diverse these research efforts, they draw their inspiration from a common set of problems identified by the original theorists of culture and personality, and they are afflicted by overlapping and interrelated methodological difficulties. In this book, therefore, I have attempted to clarify the premises from which research on culture and personality springs and to explore in detail the bases for an integrating theory and methodology that will provide coherent guidance for diverse investigations. Rather than describe empirical studies and review research findings, I have focused on the goals of culture and personality as a behavioral science and on strategies for attaining those goals.
