ABSTRACT
How should an anthropologist use psychoanalysis? What can it add to our accounts? My starting position here is that it provides a hermeneutic which invites us to reinterrogate our data in order to both challenge and augment the interpretations already made on the basis of more standard forms of exegesis. In the Durkheimian tradition within which I have broadly worked, cultural values are taken to be relatively straightforwardly depicted in cultural symbolism. By contrast, psychoanalysis tells us that the symbolic process is complex, bedevilled by the forces of repression, whereby the manifest becomes a mask or, at best, a distorting mirror to psychic reality. If custom may be taken as symbolic in the psychoanalytic sense, speaking to unconscious fantasy and process, then it has the capacity to turn our accepted interpretative canons upside-down. In so doing, it does not, of course, invalidate the cultural interpretation. Devereux’s postulate of ‘complementarity’ is useful here, though it is today less easy to see, as he did, that the coming together of the two perspectives will give a determinate understanding in either.
