The chapter reviews and systematizes the scholarly work on how “language” and “narrative” shape culturally mediated psychological processes. A challenge is to consider framings that see “language” as either a cause or effect of “psyche,” framings that limit how we consider how “culture” or “ideology” mediate relationships between language and psyche. The authors develop an approach that considers temporal processes across which language, culture, and psyche are co-constituting. The approach systematizes a broad literature in terms of the varieties of co-constitution proposed for language, culture, and psyche: processes that privilege language or psyche in producing relatively stable relationships across time between these three terms, processes that privilege language or psyche in producing highly emergent relationships, and processes that imagine processes of mediation within interactional events, across events, and/or across generations and historical time. The framework unites discussions that have been disconnected, provides conceptual delimitations for that discussion, and highlights how psychological anthropologists can contribute to an interdisciplinary conceptual space.

This chapter presents a coherent picture of culture as emerging from a distinctive human mind architecture. I consider the mental processes that characterize the components of mind, and the inherently constituting and structured knowledge that represents its content. Grounded in a necessary and eclectic theory of cognition, I propose that culture consists of mental models shared within a community, or cultural models. Both the undeniably universal nature of numerous mental activities and the significantly idiosyncratic contents of an individual cultural mind find a plausible account within this theoretical approach. I explore three fundamental issues related to the investigation of culture as a mental phenomenon. The first regards a brief survey of theories about human cognition – both architecture and processes – that are of value and consequence to the anthropological enterprise. The second concerns the theorizing about the mental organization of knowledge. The thirdcovers the nature and value of cultural model theory in the contemporary anthropological landscape. I close by suggesting the concept of cultural model as a salient and necessary unit of analysis for anthropology.

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 reviews recent anthropological studies of adolescence and youth. Some of the earliest research in psychological anthropology focused on this lifespan period. This early work insisted that social and cultural factors shaped the varieties of adolescent experiences both within and across societies, and that the social problems of youth were a political problem rather than an inevitable outcome of a universal life stage. Systematic research on adolescence and youth did not emerge until the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These studies are organized into four themes: (1) adolescence as a liminal period; (2) adolescent vulnerabilities that result from social, political, and economic disruptions; (3) young people as instigators and innovators of social change; and (4) young people's social worlds as worthy research topics in themselves. The chapter calls for future research on young people that focuses on individual experiences within larger systems of power, such as the historical legacies of Western imperialism. Attending to these larger systems of power will provide greater awareness of how these systems shaped past research.

The anthropology of ethics and morality has become a key area of research and theorization. The “ethical turn” has involved several approaches ranging from Foucauldian studies of ethical self-cultivation and virtue ethics to ordinary ethics and moral experience. Among these approaches, psychological anthropologists have figured centrally, contributing to the development of neo-Aristotelian and phenomenological frameworks. Prior to the current surge of interest, psychological anthropologists were at the forefront of earlier debates on morality. These studies concerned questions of moral relativism, moral emotions, and the socialization of morality in early childhood. This chapter examines psychological anthropology’s engagement with ethics and morality from early work in search of the universal qualities of moral values to contemporary developments in the study of moral experience and relational ethics. The review concludes with a consideration of future directions for engagement with ethics and morality in relation to decolonization, activist anthropology, and the role of nonhuman forces – from cascading disasters to algorithms – in shaping ethical life.

This chapter discusses the role of phenomenology in psychological anthropology, with an emphasis on its ongoing productive potential for the field. The chapter explores how a phenomenological framework has been mobilized in psychological anthropology to illuminate central concepts like subjects and lifeworlds, intersubjectivity, and the aspectual nature of consciousness and experience. The chapter also emphasizes the valuable methodological implications of bringing a phenomenological framework to the practice of anthropology. Throughout, recent ethnographic examples are engaged to illustrate how psychological anthropologists have generated innovative insights through the use of phenomenological approaches.

The chapter chronicles the close relationship that anthropology, from its very outset as a discipline, had with psychoanalysis, and seeks to make a broader conceptual argument: namely that, over the decades, anthropologists moved from applying to their ethnographic material psychoanalytic concepts, which were generated in clinical settings by practicing psychoanalysts, to engaging themselves in psychodynamic encounters with their own interlocutors, and in so doing reaching the point of generating original theory of psychoanalytic value. This was possible due to the increasing conviction that the prime subject of psychodynamic investigation should not be any given society’s cultural material, interpreted and “analyzed” abstractly to deductively reach aprioristic inferences on the members of the respective community. Rather, the subject of such psychodynamic studies could only be the individual, analyzed from within the social norms, values, and idioms constraining the individual’s development. In turn, this idiographic study would yield invaluable elements necessary to adequately understand the dynamics of the social context in which the individual exists to begin with.

This chapter argues that researchers in child development and children’s well-being should take culture seriously by showing how social and cultural settings in which children grow up matter for understanding the varieties of childhoods documented ethnographically. It begins with a historical review of anthropological research on childhood and children’s worlds. Much of the early work on children’s development in culture focused on how children become competent members of their societies. This tended to present children’s development in locally normative terms and social and cultural development as static. Later research focused on the problem of accelerating global social change and documented the struggles children, their families, and communities confronted in the face of social change. It also examined the positive role children played, particularly as sources of innovation in adaptive strategies. Children were seen less as sites of internalization and more as agents of active participation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the strengths that psychological anthropologists bring to childhood studies and possible future directions for new research.

This chapter discusses how individuals approach the end of life within their particular social worlds. Focusing on the subjective processes of traversing transitions between life, death, and an afterlife, psychological anthropology analyzes how such transitions are simultaneously singular and shared, embodied and historical. The chapter highlights five themes. It shows how the end of life is a period in which personhood may be particularly unstable, giving rise to ethical demand to make, remake or unmake personhood. The chapter shows how narrative approaches shed light on the temporalization of living in the face of finitude. The chapter discusses how person-centered approaches reveal that the singularity of loss often exceeds moral and social attempts to contain grief. It discusses political subjectivity in psychological anthropology that highlights how historical inequality and violence settle in embodied disorders, hauntings, and abandonment. Discussing questions of empathy and emotion, the chapter concludes by drawing attention to the potential of ethnographic studies of dying and afterlives to theorize the limits and possibilities of understanding others.

This chapter takes the anthropology of emotion and affect as its central problem, with a particular focus on socialization processes. It starts with an overview of how psychological anthropologists have approached the topic of emotion since the 1980s and outlines the social–anthropological understanding of emotion before it considers the “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities and its impact on anthropology. In the second part of the chapter special attention is paid to the socialization of emotions, first from a cross-cultural and second from a transcultural perspective. Using the example of the socialization of emotions in transcultural settings, it discusses the extent to which the notion of “affect” enhances our understanding of how the transformation of socially learned emotion repertoires might work.

This chapter provides a brief overview of psychological anthropology as a subdiscipline in anthropology. It frames the development of psychological anthropology as a response to crises that emerged in anthropology more generally in the twentieth century and within psychological anthropology itself. There are three primary phases of development in the field, starting with Edward Sapir’s criticism of the “superorganic,” then the collapse of the “culture and personality approach” in the 1950s, and finally, both the interpretive and anti-colonial turns in the 1970s and 1980s. The chapter then summarizes the content of the handbook as a reflection of ways the field developed in the wake of the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century developments in anthropology.

This chapter discusses person-centered ethnography, a methodology that is useful for exploring “complex personhood” as a dynamic field within the social, cultural, historical, and ecological milieus in which humans live. Person-centered ethnographic methods aim to describe human behavior and subjective experience from the point of view of the acting, intending, and attentive subject. They also aim to intentionally explore the emotional and motivational importance of social, cultural, political, economic, and material forces in individual lives. The chapter includes three sections: the development and the varieties of person-centered methods, major person-centered ethnographies published since the mid-2000s, and the central role that empathy plays in person-centered ethnography. A key finding of person-centered ethnography is that our understanding of people’s experiences documents how people live complex lives in dynamic interpersonal worlds.