Psychological Anthropology

Abstract

Psychological anthropology is the anthropological study of people's beliefs, feelings, and motivations in cultural contexts. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, questions about psychic unity and diversity were a central part of anthropology, not a separate subfield. Later, Freudian theory and the growth of the cognitive sciences inspired distinct schools within anthropology: one devoted to psychoanalytic studies of culture and personality and the other to formal models of cultural knowledge. Current research draws on variety of theories, such as relational psychology, activity theory, schema theory, neurobiology, and critical theory, creating possibilities for studies that integrate thought with feeling, mind with body, and psyche with society.

Culture treason theory(CTT) Conceptualization/Behavior Freezing theory.

“…(Andrew, 2021). Strauss (2015) in his writings defined psycho anthropology as "a subfield of anthropology devoted to the way cognition, emotion, and motivation are shaped in sociocultural settings and to the psychological factors that are important in culture learning and expression" (Strauss C. , 2015). Stich (1993) criticized folk psychology as a seriously mistaken theory and highlighted 4 elements (processes of behavior rise; belief and desire are common sense theory of the mind; a mature science that shows how the brain works; the existence of the intentional state of common-sense psychology) which showed that it was not true (Stich, 1993).…”