ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how depth psychology can gain from anthropological inquiry. This is because psychologists have traditionally used the data from cross-cultural similarities to bolster their statements about how human nature and individual minds work. The study of universals in anthropology, however, does not necessitate a return to a dualistic model of a culture-free "human nature", upon which an arbitrary culture is superimposed. It does not require a reduction of culture to psychology or biology either. Cognitive theories of ritual also discuss origins from biology and evolution, but are more specifically concerned with cognitive mental structures, and how they function in everyday development, learning, and functioning they therefore tend to be more proximal than ultimate. Biological adaptations will need to be present to form cognitive structures, and interact with environments to generate various intrapsychic dynamics that will present across a lifetime, and will be in continual feedback with the environment and the culture.
