Psychological and cognitive anthropology

1. Psychological and cognitive anthropology • Studies of emotional development • Cognitive development • Cultural factors in variation of psychological factors • The cross-cultural study of mental illness

2. Piaget’s studies • Sensorimotor: 0-2 years. Nonverbal learning through personal exploration and experience with concrete objects • Preoperational: 2-7 years. Children acquire vocabulary and tag objects with words • Concrete operational: 7-12 years. Children classify objects by similarities and differences in qualities. They learn to use multiple dimensions simultaneously in making classifications. These include length, number, weight, area, volume

3. Formal operational (scientific): 12-adult. Formal logic, use of syllogisms, deductive reasoning. hare ÷ tortoise as fast ÷ slow • During the concrete operational stage, children acquire concepts like conservation and reversibility, while during the formal operational stage, the ability to think in hypothetical terms is developed. • Are these stages universal?

4. Primitive means technology • Most work has been on the shift from operational to abstract reasoning stage • Are preindustrial people preoperational? Consider the two-week hunting treks of the Yanomamo; the trans-Pacific canoe trips of the people of Yap; the eight-section kinships system of Australian peoples; the distribution of meat among the !Kung; and so on.

5. No culture-free tests • The problem may be the supposedly culture- free tests and schooling as training for certain kinds of tests • Marc Irwin studied rice farmers in Liberia and compared them to U.S. undergraduates. • Used rice bowls and geometric cards for the two groups. Abstract thinking was at the same level in both groups.

6. The instrument effect • The Porteus Maze and Australian aborigines (1917). There are hundreds of studies of Aborigine cognition. • The false debate over culture vs. nature in explaining the results. • The instrument effect: beakers and triangles are not part of everyone's experience.

7. The conservation principle • Douglas Price-Williams used familiar materials and found no differences in the concrete operational stage between Tiv children in West Africa and European children, in terms of conservation of earth, nuts, number.

8. Literacy and cognition • Literacy is literacy a factor in cognition. • But Vai and Cree readers, who have their own scripts, were more affected by schooling than by literacy on cognitive tests.

9. Field independence • People who rely on hunting develop field independence. • Embedded Figures Test • Two examples: Mexico and Greece

10. Child-rearing practices • Breast feeding: • In 70% of societies, children are weaned after two years. Children may be fed 20-40 times per day. Almost all American women stop by 10 months. • Holding and touching: • In H/G societies, children are held up to 50% of the day. • In both the U.S. and Japan, children are touched from 12-20% of the time that they are awake. • In the U.S., babies are usually held than 10% of the day and spend a lot of time alone in cribs.

11. The Logoli of Kenya • Lee and Ruth Munroe found: • infants held more by their mothers become more trusting by age 5. • the number of different holders adds more to trust in toddlers than time held by mothers.

12. Response to crying • “ite pinai, ite ponai” in traditional Greek: if a child is crying, it’s either hurting or hungry. • In many societies, like the Efe (of Congo): a 3-month old gets a response within 10 sec of crying, 75% of the time • In U.S., we ignore crying 45% of the time • Infant mortality: 1% in industrialized societies vs. up to 35% in nonindustri-alized societies.

13. Collective vs. individualistic values • Agricultural and herding societies stress obedience. • Hunting and gathering societies stress self-reliance and individuality. • We are foragers in the U.S. • The correlation is inexact and the mechanism of cause remains a subject of wide interest and study.

14. Culturally specific mental illnesses • Windigo psychosis among Ojibwa, Cree: men of these societies are said to be possessed by cannibal giant wiitiko. • Pibloktoq • Eskimo adults of Greenland. Women strip naked and wander across ice until they collapse. • Amok • Malaya, Indonesia, New Guinea. Depression, followed by brooding and withdrawal, and then a wild, berserk frenzy of destruction. • Are these illnesses patterned? Are they expressions of the same mental illnesses?

15. Marano's explanation of windigo psychosis • Under conditions of stress, the Ojibwa and Cree triaged their population and increased the chance for survival of all. • There is never documentation of the behavior of the accused. • But all accused were sickly, senile, non-Ojibwa. • Emic vs. etic explanations: The etic requires positing a universal fear stimulated by specific conditions. • The fear of being eaten was concocted as a way to overcome the fear of killing.

17. Edgerton’s study: mental illness in Africa • Sebei of Uganda, Pokot of NW Kenya, Kamba of SC Kenya, Hehe of Tanzania • Kichwaa – Swahili for severe mental illness.

18. Free list of traits of kichwaa • Goes naked • Sleeps or hides in the bush • Shaves head and bites self • Eats and smears dirt and/or feces • Runs wildly • Destroys property • Wanders aimlessly

19. Five key traits • Five traits accounted for about 60% of all traits listed. • “The Africans in these four societies,” said Edgerton, “do not regard a single behavior as psychotic which could not be so regarded in the West.” • Schizophrenia is biochemically based, but it is expressed differently across cultures.

20. Hallucinations • Hallucinations were almost never listed (<1%) by Edgerton’s informants. • Hallucinations about being controlled by robots emerged after a 1921 play by Karel Capek. • Schizophrenics only began hallucinating about being controlled by electric rays at the beginning of the 20th century. • Schizophrenics in the U.S. tend to have visual, while schizophrenics in India tend to have more olfactory hallucinations.

21. Rosenhan’s study of labeling • 3 female and 5 male pseudopatients • 7 of 8 admitted to a total of 12 hospitals. One was diagnosed as manic depressive. All others diagnosed as schizophrenic. • Released between 7-52 days later with diagnosis: “schizophrenia in remission” or “asymptomatic” or “improved.” • “note-taking” and “oral-acquisitive” behavior” • One patient saw through it and accused the researcher of being a journalist. • None of the staff saw through it.

22. Spitzer’s critique • Was it ethical to dupe the hospital workers? • If people come to an emergency room with intense stomach pains, wouldn’t they be diagnosed as suffering from gastritis? • Eventually, the same duped psychiatrists diagnosed that rarest of events, "schizophrenia in remission" (Spitzer 1976:461).

23. Science is a human activity • Still, this research reminds us that medicine, like any human endeavor, is populated by humans, who are fully equipped with egos and with ambitions. • Without these qualities, we would have no modern medicine, no miracle cures, no computer-driven prostheses. • But with these qualities, we know that we have to be vigilant against the potential arrogance that comes from success.