How is psychoanalysis a mode of self-alteration? Anthropological interrogations

Abstract

Anthropology has a long history of engagement with psychoanalysis, going back to Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas themselves (Stocking 1986; Groark 2019). A number of notable anthropologists have also pursued psychoanalytic training (Alfred Kroeber, Abram Kardiner, Melford Spiro, George Devereux, and Geza Roheim, among others) and contributed to the founding of psychoanalytic anthropology as a specialization in its own right. It is equally true, however, that just as many anthropologists have not been particularly receptive to psychoanalysis. Indeed, “many, the majority perhaps, have rejected its utility for anthropology” (Crapanzano 1992, 137). This ambivalence notwithstanding, anthropologists have drawn on insights in psychoanalysis to discuss a variety of phenomena particularly in the study of kinship, dreams, ritual, symbol formation, and religion more broadly. [excerpt]