ABSTRACT
The “Levels of Analysis” problem in Cross-Cultural Psychology reflects our discipline’s difficulty in conceptualizing the place of the individual in culture and society. Early in our history, we borrowed an ecological orientation from certain of our cousins in Psychological Anthropology that interpreted cultural differences in personality in terms of human adaptation to the natural environment. In recent decades, we have begun, implicitly and sometimes naively, to follow the theorizing and methodologies of the early, highly personological models of Culture and Personality and of the modern, cognitive idealist approaches of cognitive anthropology. I argue for a materialist, situational approach that places causal primacy on ecological and infrastructural factors rather than on symbolic, idealist, and mentalistic phenomena.
