Anthropology and Psychology

Anthropologists who work at the interface of psychology and anthropology are by and large committed to anthropology as science. The problem for us, however, is that the institutional development of the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries effectively allotted different aspects of what it is to be human to different disciplines. Faced with separate epistemological domains of anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy and biology, scientists in the latter half of the twentieth century found themselves having to work hard to put the pieces back together again – body and mind, for example. As is often the case, however, new subdisciplinary domains intended to overcome conceptual difficulties served rather to entrench them. The 1970s saw the invention of psychological anthropology, the 1980s brought us cultural psychology, in the 1990s we rediscovered the body and phenomenology, and at the same time witnessed the resurgence of cognitive anthropology which, during the first decade of the twenty-first century would appear to dominate the field, contributing to the development of what is today called cognitive science. Whether, over coming decades, cognitive anthropology will continue to dominate our understanding of mind will have everything to do with the extent to which anthropology as an intellectual project is able to realize and come to grips with the real political implications of the ahistorical concept of human being that lies at its heart. The argument put forward in the present chapter is explicitly opposed to cognitivist models because of their inability to come to grips with human historical actuality in general and their own historical nature in particular. Thus, for all the often fascinating work that has been done in the various sub-fields of anthropology, and despite the explosion of knowledge in other sub-disciplinary domains – neurobiology and neuroscience, for example – the interface between anthropology and psychology at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century continues to throw into relief a question that remains fundamental to the human sciences, including anthropology: How are we to conceive of human beings? The answer we give to this question is important because it structures not only what we currently know about ourselves and others but also what we are capable of finding out. As will become apparent, the recognition of our historical nature provides for a resolution of debates concerning the relative validity of representational, social constructivist and neurophenomenological models of mind. This chapter proposes a unified model of human being whose manifold aspects remain entirely open to investigation, even while the model is intended to deal at once with the uniqueness – that is to say, the historical actuality – of what it is to be human and with critical issues at the interface of psychology and anthropology and, in so doing, prove to be a rigorous, explanatory, robust model of what it is to be human.