casual observation. Yet as Figure 2.4 shows, he was not entirely immune to the beliefs of his contemporaries.
The Rivers Torres Straits adventure undoubtedly left its mark, yet it didn’t take long for critics to recognise the inherent problems involved in trying to set up controlled experiments in what were then regarded as exotic places. Clearly, no two cross-cultural controlled settings are ever the same, so an essential problem of replicability is unavoidable (Titchener, 1916). But the die was cast for the future direction of cross-cultural psychology.
The early part of the twentieth century spawned several Rivers-like studies; empirical cross-cultural com- parisons of the sensory abilities of Europeans and non-Europeans (Bruner, 1908; Woodworth, 1910; Oliver, 1932; Thouless, 1933; Beveridge, 1935). Researchers variously explored differences in hearing (Bruner, Wood- worth), visual (Beveridge) and musical (Oliver) perception. While race-related interpretations of findings didn’t disap- pear, they receded as the archives of cross-cultural data were about to be systematically collated for the first time.
On the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, W.H.R. Rivers broke new methodological ground by designing research procedures that sought to take account of the viewpoint of his participants. Yet even though repeated experimental trials using the Snellen chart (left) showed little difference between European and Torres Straits Islanders in terms of visual acuity, Rivers wrote that:
the acuity of savage and half-civilized people, though superior to that of the normal European, is not so in any marked degree. (1901, p. 42)
If too much energy is expended on the sensory foundations, it is natural that the intellectual super-structure should suffer. (1901, pp. 44–45).
Figure 2.4 W.H.R. Rivers: through the eyes of the Torres Straits Islanders
HRAF: A who’s who and what’s where of psychology across cultures
With any unruly body of knowledge about a new topic, a moment usu- ally comes when someone sits down and tries to organise and classify it. For the emerging enterprise of cross-cultural psychology, this moment came in 1936. The idea behind establishing the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) was to provide a rich seam of data for the use of researchers intending to work in diverse places. Since its begin- ning in the 1930s and its formal establishment (under the auspices of the University of Yale) in 1949, the HRAF has provided an ever-swelling knowledge resource based around two themes.
1 The Outline of World Cultures (Murdock, 1975) is as comprehensive as possible a list of the world’s cultural groups.
2 The Outline of Cultural Materials (Murdock et al., 1971) is a classification of topics that are considered eligible for study worldwide, due to their universal applicability.
This second classification is organised around eight sections, including food and clothing; economy and transport; welfare; religion; science.
Both archives appear in updated form on the HRAF website. Together they help researchers select who and what to study, without having to trawl through innumerable, disparate sources before entering the field.
HRAF is as much a labour-saving device as an archive. Yet despite its obvious uses, it has limitations.
Limitations of the HRAF
1 Though centrally located, data are drawn from diverse sources. The data in the HRAF may be conveniently drawn together in a single bank, yet the reliability of its original sources is far from uniform.
Some of the data stem from social science, others are from journal- ists, missionaries and merchants. Despite efforts at quality control (Narroll et al., 1980), such variable reliability needs to be taken into account by users.
2 ‘World cultures’ are not easily defined. The ‘outline of world cul- tures’ is an attempt to classify and list hundreds of cultural groups worldwide. Yet unlike, say, football teams or brands of chewing gum, ‘cultures’ are not discrete entities that lend themselves easily to classification. For example, membership of one group does not exclude a person from membership of another. Such
lack of mutual exclusivity arguably hampers any attempt at classification.
Despite these drawbacks, the HRAF represents a useful resource and a milestone for the enterprise of psychological research across cultures. While what it offers is certainly no substitute for data gathered first-hand in the field, it has had plenty to offer cross-cultural practitioners who are at the planning and contemplation stage.
Psychology, anthropology – and psychological anthropology
Since the 1930s the HRAF has served as a useful archive for psycho- logists and anthropologists, both to contribute to and to borrow from. At around the same time, with the efforts of some notable twentieth- century pioneers, the neighbouring fields of global psychology and cultural anthropology were making great steps forward. Soon they were both firmly established as academic disciplines in their own right.
Indeed, during this period even the space between psychology and anthropology acquired a label of its own. Unimaginatively, it was known as psychological anthropology. All of which raises three questions:
• What’s the difference between psychology and anthropology?
• What is psychological anthropology?
• Who were the twentieth-century pioneers of these neighbouring disciplines?
Let us answer these questions in reverse order. Figure 2.5 rounds up the most influential pioneers of twentieth-century research across cultures. The contribution of the early twentieth-century school of thought known as psychological anthropology is a key concept. This leaves us with our first question. How do psychology and anthropology differ? Well, nowadays psychologists and cultural anthropologists tend to occupy different departments in most universities (when they are not actively engaged in the field, that is). Psychologists with a particular interest in cultural issues are usually part of a general psychology department, while cultural anthropologists can be traced to a separate department of their own, or to part of a larger cultural studies or sociology department. Yet such segregation belies historical and the- oretical commonalities (Jahoda & Krewer, 1997). Early adventures such as the Torres Straits expedition (outlined above) yielded findings
KEY TERM
Psychological anthropology.
Anthropological investigations that make use of psychological concepts and methods.
Franz Boas (1911) had more say than anyone else in the emergence of twentieth-century cultural anthropology. In his fieldwork along the coast of British Columbia he recorded the linguistic and cultural practices of native people. His methodical approach superseded the casual observation and impressionistic writing that dominated the work of nineteenth- century missionaries and explorers. Boas railed against social Darwinism, which explained away cultural differences by using crude racial and evolutionary arguments. He saw the more subtle notion of culture itself as instrumental in shaping the psychological worlds of those who formed them (Barfield, 1997). Boas encouraged fieldworkers to investigate cultures in their own unique contexts, rather than looking for grand racial or evolutionary models to try to explain behavioural differences. Though he was a founder of anthropology, his teaching and writing had a direct effect on those who carried the torch of cross-cultural psychology into the twentieth century.
Richard Thurnwald (1913) was an Austrian-born ethnographer who contributed to psychological research ‘on the side’. Like W.H.R. Rivers, Thurnwald worked the space between anthropology and psychology. He did fieldwork in Bosnia at the end of the nineteenth century and in Pacific Melanesia between 1906 and 1909. There he conducted small-scale studies into what he called ethno-psychology. He was probably the first fieldworker to employ a technique known as serial reproduction (which mimics the parlour game Chinese whispers and is usually associated with the memory research of Frederic Bartlett) to investigate creative aspects of thinking. Though he is mainly remembered as an ethnographer, Thurnwald’s contribution to the exploration of cognitive functioning across cultures is undersold outside Germany and Austria (Jahoda & Krewer, 1997).
Margaret Mead (1928) was a student of Boas and associate of Sapir and Benedict (see below), yet ultimately she outstripped them all in the popular imagination of anthropology and psychology. Her 1928 field trip to Samoa made her one of the first women to conduct prolonged cross-cultural research (Barfield, 1997; Kuper, 1994). Like Boas she stressed the importance of culture as a formative influence on development. She argued for the cultural construction of gender roles, and of adolescence. The latter, she claimed, was present in her native US yet absent in Samoa. Mead popularised the study of diverse cultures. Her accessible writing brought her celebrity status beyond academia. However, after her death her work was criticised for lacking objectivity, when Freeman (1983) famously claimed that her conclusions were skewed by her own belief in the primacy of culture over nature. This so-called ‘Mead–Freeman’ dispute still rumbles.
Edward Sapir (1929), another student of Boas, made his mark by studying the hotly debated relationship between language, culture and psychology. He applied his classical linguistic training to his fieldwork on North American Indian languages of California. As well as subscribing to the ideas of psychological anthropology, Sapir is best known for his advocacy of the so-called linguistic relativity theory (Sapir, 1929). This suggests that the languages we speak in particular, and our linguistic habits in general, determine – or at least heavily influence – how we think. Thus, learning a new language involves learning a second, unique framework for thought and perception. Linguistic relativity has spawned various cross-cultural research projects, yielding both supporting evidence and counter-evidence (Berry et al., 2002).
Frederic Bartlett (1932) studied under W.H.R. Rivers and rebelled against what he saw as ethnocentric methods for conducting research across cultures. He disliked the imposition of alien, artificial experimental scenarios on indigenous participants. In Swaziland he did innovative research to contend that remembering is not just a cognitive concept, but a social one too. Our ability to bring details to mind, this argument goes, is partly down to the distinct values and beliefs and temperament of the social groups we belong to. So for his Swazi participants, for example, material relating to their day-to-day livelihoods (which revolved around cattle) was remembered more efficiently than other, less pertinent material. Bartlett’s Swazi research is perhaps most innovative for its positioning of the study of memory in the dual arenas of social and cognitive psychology.
Figure 2.5 Twentieth-century pioneers of research across cultures