ABSTRACT
The field of culture and personality includes within its scope some of the major problems of social science: the relations of the individual to social and cultural institutions, of personality to sociocultural change, and of deviant behavior to norms and normality. From the comparative perspective of anthropology, these problems can be summarized by the question posed in Chapter 1, “What are the relations of psychological differences between populations to sociocultural environments?” In this chapter I present the major viewpoints that have developed in attempts to answer this question, which do not fit neatly into the positions outlined in Chapter 3, and criticize some of the extant formulations. The topics involved are so broad and the relevant empirical literature so vast that the chapter is limited to a selective consideration of the most general theoretical issues and positions without reviewing the more specific problems on which research is conducted.
