This chapter discusses studies in psychological anthropology of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of people dealing with material hardship. It provides an overview of several themes: conflicting cultural models of causes of poverty; how low-income people selectively incorporate some models into their self-understandings while rejecting others; ecocultural and biocultural studies of coping with material hardship; how material hardship can shape experiences for mothers caring for infants and children; homelessness and mental illness; and the subjective effects of downward mobility, which may be more disruptive of one’s sense of self and social relationships than chronic economic insecurity. Despite theoretical and methodological differences, these studies reject both Othering attributions of a “culture of poverty” and a-cultural accounts of people as economic maximizers.Cultural meanings matter not because people dealing with economic adversity have a “culture of poverty” but because they matter to everyone. Newer accounts of cultural meaning recognize cultural dynamism, diversity, noncoherence, and individual variation.

This chapter discusses mixing qualitative and quantitative methods as both a tradition in psychological anthropology and an essential strategy to produce important findings. Mixed-methods designs are research question-driven strategies, which contrast with those strategies that begin with a preferred data collection approach and then formulate a question to suit the chosen methodology. Mixed-methods strategies are used to study beliefs and behaviors in context across levels of analysis to represent the world dynamically and holistically. Despite the popularity of qualitative ethnographic methods in anthropology for the past five decades, psychological anthropologists have persisted in using mixed methods. There are four critical reasons for the continuing use of mixed methods. Mixed methods allow greater explanatory depth, mixed-methods research can become more inclusive, mixed methods allow for surprising insights, and mixed methods allow for productive collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. The final section of the chapter reviews recent well-funded and successful research projects that successfully use mixed methods across a wide range of research topics.

Chapter 10 approaches recent research on birth and infancy through a crisis-oriented framework. Birth and infancy are processes of transformations involving caregivers, kin, community, and the state. These take place in sociocultural and ecological contexts, which are many times also changing and adapting to known and unpredictable situations and possibilities. After introducing crisis as a pertinent concept for the study of birth and infancy beyond normative developmental frameworks, the authors describe works on notions of personhood, self, and attachments as processes involving lifecycle and non-lifecycle crises. The chapter approaches crises as disruptions that take place at different levels and temporalities, which are intrinsic to the understanding of birth and infancy contextually, highlighting long-term critical events that permeate societies and are intertwined with policy trends. The final section examines the crises of infancy, including attachment processes entangled in higher-order social crises, such as among socially and economically oppressed populations living with conditions of extreme precarity.

The chapter examines how anthropologists can produce ethically engaged and scientifically rigorous results in their work with people living at society’s social, political, and economic margins. It builds on long-term participatory research with street-involved youth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and elucidates affect-focused methodologies to build empathetic relationships with collaborators and to develop critical theoretical insights. The chapter argues against compartmentalizing the researcher’s affect, feelings, and emotions, which is thought to characterize a rigorous scientific approach. The affect, feelings, and emotions experienced in this challenging work are an invaluable source of ethnographic data, allowing greater theoretical insight into emotional economies, where street-involved youths’ careful arrangements of emotives in social interactions create attention, trust, concern, care, or cooperation. Affect, as forms of discourse and governmentality, can construct orders of feeling, found as emotives present in laws, billboards, and news headlines. These matter for discursive changes implemented by governments to sanitize cities of unwanted communities.

This chapter discusses the development of methods in cognitive anthropology. It documents how these methods developed from a focus on documenting shared cultural knowledge to a period where the person returned as a primary locus of cultural experience. The chapter’s discussion is organized into three overlapping historical periods. The ethnoscience period involved strategies for the elicitation of cultural domain taxonomies, componential analyses, and methods that allowed the identification of prototypical members of a category or subcategory. The cognitive schemas period used more structured data collection methods to document cultural schemas that organize items in a cognitive domain and statistical methods for modeling their interrelations. Cognitive anthropologists also developed ways to document cultural schemas in everyday talk, mainly using the method of semi- and unstructured extended interviews and life histories. The cultural models period used structured and unstructured data collection methods and quantitative and qualitative data analysis from the cultural schemas research period. These methods were used to connect culture to variations in individual experience.

Opening with observations about public anxieties around the effects of rapid social change on children, this chapter offers a model of child socialization developed within psychological anthropology that provides more nuanced ways of thinking about how children are shaped by particular social and cultural contexts and children’s active participation in them. Drawing from experientially close, child-centered ethnographies, this chapter challenges dichotomous understandings of social change that flatten the rich variability and connectedness of societies and obscure the complex historical trajectories and emergent dynamics that shape such variability and connectedness. Alternatively, Chapin and Xu argue that all human communities must contend with the often-conflicted processes of fostering both individuality and sociality in children’s development in locally appropriate ways. The final section of the chapter challenges the view of children as passive recipients of socialization processes, arguing instead that children are agents who actively contribute to processes of social change.

Neuroanthropology aims to understand the interactions between the brain and culture and how such interactions, in part, drive human variation. Current discussions in neuroanthropology aim to understand better how neurological development generates culture and how human sociocultural contexts shape neural development. The chapter described the roots of these discussions in the historical development of anthropology. Anthropology’s holistic approach and emphasis on human variation laid the groundwork for neuroanthropology. The concept of “local neurologies” offers an approach for understanding neural development in interaction with small-scale, situated sociocultural and ecological dynamics. The chapter then discusses how individuals develop within these local constraints using three approaches (developmental systems, embodied cognition, and dynamic epidemiology) that support studies of how sociocultural processes engage with flexible human nervous systems. Ultimately, this chapter contrasts explanations of human behavior and experience that rely on only the neurological or cultural and instead suggests better ways to bridge the gap between the brain and culture.

“Visual psychological anthropology” is a bridging of psychological and visual anthropology. Its approach combines longitudinal person-centered ethnographic strategies with the methods of contemporary ethnographic filmmaking to cinematically represent individuals, their personal relationships, their central concerns, and the array of culturally, politically, and historically situated pressures that act on them. Based on the premise that it is through the expression of emotion, scaffolded by and contextualized within a film narrative, that participant subjectivity will emerge onscreen, VPA leans on a creative, collaborative, and iterative process throughout fieldwork, filmmaking, editing, and screening. The chapter reviews the historical roots for VPA, outlines its theory and describes its practice, as illustrated through examples from Java and Bali on topics such as mental illness, neurodiversity, trauma, stigma, mourning, and gender. The authors advocate for the relevance of psychological anthropology insights to the craft of visual anthropology and the utility of film, as a mode of research inquiry and as a translational ethnographic product, for psychological anthropologists.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of embodiment, or how bodies vary because of their embeddedness in different cultural, social, and material landscapes. Understanding embodiment entails studying the influences of the social–cultural world on bodies, and the influences of biological processes on social, semiotic, and experiential worlds. Drawing on anthropological, feminist, and disability studies scholarship, and those in contemporary biological sciences, we offer some tools for thinking about how bodily states and processes are affected by their perception, representation, and treatment within people’s lived worlds, and vice versa. A processual, “bio-looping” model helps to explain how transformations of body and world in complex embodiment might work. Emerging empirical work in the biological sciences provides evidence for the deep entanglements of social and biological systems. The intersections among meaning and perception (“interoceptive affordances”) highlight how meaning shapes perception of bodily processes and sensations. Canna’s study of demonic possession illustrates how interoceptive affordances contribute to embodied experiences and ways of being in the world.

This chapter delves into the multifaceted dimensions of aging and senescence, given the rapidly aging global population. While aging research traditionally centered on frailty and illness, contemporary discourse emphasizes the concept of “aging well” and preserving one’s youthful vigor. Anthropological studies adopt a comparative lens, recognizing the contextual variations in what constitutes “successful aging.” This chapter underscores the role of local cultural understandings in shaping individual experiences of aging and decline. Care emerges as a central theme, intricately woven within political, economic, and social power dynamics. Sakti’s research, with a focus on contexts of involuntary migration and mobility, sheds light on the challenges faced by older individuals navigating displacement and loss in a post-conflict setting. The Timor-Leste case reveals how older individuals reconstruct their lives amidst upheaval, intertwining notions of care, interdependence, and ancestral connections. This exploration challenges conventional notions of aging well, emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual and collective well-being within broader social and cultural contexts.

William E. Hartmann and Joseph P. Gone use insights from Beatrice Medicine and Vine Deloria Jr., two luminaries in understanding how anthropology might better serve Indigenous peoples, as an evaluative framework to review five recent ethnographies on psychosocial well-being among Native Americans and three areas of Indigenous scholarship.Hartmann and Gone observe commonalities across areas of Indigenous scholarship and variation among ethnographic works in their degrees of theoretical abstraction, affordances for community control, and attention to relationality in knowledge production. Recommendations related to shifting the ethnographic gaze away from Indigenous peoples toward structures of power that constrain Indigenous self-determination are made in hopes of fostering more reciprocal relations between psychological anthropology and Native American peoples.

Psychological anthropology’s research on parenting recognizes not only that it takes a village to support parents to raise a child; it also takes an understanding of the parents’ and children’s places in their local cultural community and in today’s world. Parenting is a pivotal point in the life course as individuals move through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, being nurtured, protected, educated, and socialized. Research documents the variability in parenting practices among human societies and how parenting changes as individuals develop. A critical concept is the “cultural learning environment” that shapes the context for parenting. The chapter discusses problematic aspects of parenting, like child maltreatment. As multinational organizations create universal standards for child maltreatment, anthropologists play an essential role in ensuring that cultural variation is recognized and protected. The chapter reviews recent research on parenting in the context of migration, considering cultural hybridity and translation, parenting at a distance, and the struggles of many migrant parents due to broader structural and state-sanctioned violence to which migrants are subjected.