Chapter 5: Learning to be an Individual: Personality and Gender

The ideal Utku person exhibited kanngu, restraint or shyness or a satisfaction

with being appropriately inconspicuous.
At around age 5, parents start to ignore the childs cries which used to be
showered with love and rather abruptly withdraw affection.
Gradually the older child learned to restrain his or her emotions and to accept
his or her place in the family and society a place of interpersonal equality,
but a place in which no one was particularly special and where emotions were
not overtly expressed.
A society is a system of human individuals in some structured relationships
with each other, relationships that are informed and shaped by beliefs and
values and meanings.
Society is a set of kinds of persons to be
Gilbert Herdt: Cultural ontology: A societys system of notions about what
kinds of things (including kinds of people) exist in the world and their
characteristics and social value. A socially specific way of categorizing and
valuing the physical and social world.
Humans, even within a single society, are born diverse, but culture provides a
combination of increased diversification through enculturation and of
categorization of innate and acquired differences.
We might say that humans learn how to be individuals in the presence of
culture and that culture assigns meanings and value to different kinds of
individuals.
Cultures and Persons, or Cultural Persons
One indicative area is the concept of self.
Self is a key concept in Western cultures.
Society keeps the self-concept front and center by constantly invoking it and
even working on it
Self or person was characterized by Geertz : a dynamic center of
awareness, emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole
and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social
and natural background

Self is not as solid and certain as we like to think: it may not even be a
universal human concept.
Self may not be as exclusively human as we like to think. That is, not all
humans may have the modern Western sense of self, and not only humans
may have some sense of self.
There is at least some reason to conclude that all societies do not conceive or
experience self
Selflessness is a central and formal concept in high Buddhism.
Warlpiri: the individual was not really an individual but part of a social mass
that never completely extricated itself from the society or looked at itself in
isolation.

 Western society may overestimate the solidity of its own selves, as is shown
by the ease with which that self is manipulated and even re-formed in such
circumstances as brain-washing and conversion.
Stockholm Syndrome is a phenomenon in which kidnap victims or captives
come sometimes fairly quickly to identify and empathize with their
captors; by a few simple devices, a persons sense of self can be eroded and
replaced with another.
Finally, the self may not be uniquely human.
The question is whether a non-human animal can have an experience of
me=ness an awareness of what is and is not its particular individuality.
Chimpanzees seem to possess it, at least to a degree.
Gordon Gallup conducted experiments to determine if a chimp knows who
s/he is. With mirrors. Eventually they discovered that the image in the glass
was them.
After they got to know themselves Gallup changed them in a way that would
make them react to their change in the mirror. And they would explore the
difference.
Intersubjectivity: an awareness that other beings have minds and even
what may be in those minds. Guide humans looking for the special hiding
spot of the key.
Blank Slates, elementary ideas, and human nature
What does it mean to be human?
The two major competing perspectives in Western civilization have been the
idealist one (that our ideas or nature are in us from birth) and the
empiricist one (that experience fills our mind or personality over time).
Nature vs. Nurture
The empiricist or nurture position is known by the analogy of the tabula rasa,
the blank slate, which is inscribed by experience.
The idealist or nature position would then be associated with a full slate of
some sort, with the writing already given by such sources as blood or
genes or brains.
Psychology quickly became the study of the inner life of individual
humans, of that allegedly secret and invisible realm of mind.
Anthropology, and its related field of sociology, became the study of external
and collective realities and behaviors.
One of the first important anthropological ideas was offered by Adolph
Bastian (18261905), who used the term elementargedanken to designate
the elementary thoughts or ideas that he believed were found in all humans
in all places and times.
The elementargedanken, few in number and completely universal, were
expressed in various forms in various times and places as volkergedanken or
folk ideas.

 A common shared humanity that merely came out in different ways due to
local environmental or historical circumstances. One phrase to describe this
notion was the psychic unity of humanity
Lucien Lvy-Bruhl (18571939), on the other hand, argued that there were
two radically different ways of being and thinking among humans the
modern or rational mentality and what he called a primitive mentality
that was prelogical and mystical or mythical.
Lvy-Bruhl eventually withdrew his concept of primitive mentality, but ideas
like it have persisted over the years
American culture and personality
American soil is where the seed of psychological anthropology took firmest
roots.
When Margaret Mead (190178) conducted the fieldwork that would
culminate in her book Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of
Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (1928), it is clear not only that she
was conducting psychologically inspired research but she intended it to have
ramifications for Western society.
She expected to find that the maturation process as we know it, in particular
the turbulence of adolescence, was not a universal one but a culturally
particular one.
The implication was not only that humans are psychologically quite malleable
that there are few if any real universals but that Westerners could stand to
learn a thing or two from other, in some ways better, societies.
Closely behind Mead came another influential female anthropologist who
wrote the most popular book ever published in the field, Patterns of Culture
(1934), Ruth Benedict (1887 1948)
Was perhaps even more explicitly psychological in her approach and
interests, and became a leading force in the culture-and-personality school of
thought.
In Patterns of Culture she treated three different societies as each a unique
and complete human reality or configuration
Thus she could sum up a culture with a few key personality or temperament
traits, such as egocentric, individualistic, and ecstatic for the Kwakiutl,
restrained and non-individualistic for the Zuni, and fearful and
paranoid for the Dobuans.
Such sweeping psychological characterizations have largely been abandoned
by anthropology, partly because they are too general and partly because
they overlook other, more large-scale structural aspects of culture
Pierre Bourdieu (1977) offered habitus as the linking concept between the
structures of society and the behaviors of individuals. The habitus is the
personal precipitate of experience with social realities such that individuals in
their actions tend to reproduce those very social realities.
Any culture itself contains certain key terms and concepts through which the
people understand their own practices and values and communicate and

transmit those practices and values to each other what has been called an
ethnopsychology.
Personality as a cultural construction
The individual exists, then, in a complex and dynamic relation to society and
culture.
Let us define personality, rather casually, as the distinctive ways of
thinking, feeling, and behaving of an individual.
Humans are not born thinking or feeling or behaving in any specific way; so,
by definition, ones personality is not exactly or entirely innate.
Humans within a group or society share certain tendencies of thinking or
feeling or behaving

We might express the relation between culture and personality as an

analogy; personality is to the individual as culture is to the society.
If so, culture and personality are intimately, essentially, necessarily linked.
The vast majority of personality comes from outside the individual from
what other people are doing and what they teach or influence the individual
to do.
And the process that links these external (to the individual) realities with the
internal realities of personality is enculturation.
during enculturation, culture becomes part of the individuals personality
Individuals will not be mere cookie-cutter versions of each other because of
this process.
The entire process can occur tacitly, implicitly, subconsciously.

The ways that a society transmits its lessons about normal or appropriate
personality can be identified as its childbearing practices.
These are the things that adults do to or with or in front of children that
provide them with a learning environment within which they reinvent, with
adult guidance, the personality traits of the society. Some are formal, others
informal. Intentional, unintentional.
We can think of these practices as falling within three broad categories:
1. Explicit instruction
2. Modeling (role model)
3. Exercises (providing opportunities for practice)
Whatever human nature may be, it appears to be diverse and malleable; as
Benedict framed it.
Culture is not opposed to the individual or personality, and nurture is not
opposed to nature. Both contribute to the shaping of human individuality.
Basic Personality, for instance, has been used to refer to the structure of
articulated personality characteristics and processes attributable, nonstatistically, to almost all members of some culturally bounded population

 A similar term is national character, which has tended to be applied to

modern state-level societies, as in Benedicts famous World War II study of
Japanese national character
These approaches have been rightly criticized as too generalizing.
. In its place, some observers have suggested modal personality as a
statistical concept; that is, the most frequently occurring personality traits in
a society.

A final, and one of the most interesting and profound questions, is whether
emotions are culturally structured
Lutz further suggests that Western society generally considers emotions
irrational, uncontrollable (we are carried away by our feelings), dangerous,
and frequently female
Not all societies share this conception of emotions nor, so it seems, precisely
the same emotions.
Gender and Person, or Gendered Persons
Sexual dimorphism: the occurrence of two physically distinct forms of a
species, based on sexual characteristics as well as non-sexual ones such as
body size.
This seems to us as a natural, biological, and universal feature of human
existence.
Even if things were as simple and universal as this, it would still be within the
power of culture to culturize the physical differences, with relative values,
meanings, and role assignments for the sexes.
Surveying the cultures of the world, anthropologists find exceptions to all of
these notions
Not all believe that ones sex is set at birth and immutable
Roscoe (1994) tells us that traditional Zuni culture held that a childs physical
sex was a social construction that is, that it required social action (in the
form of rituals and offerings) to ensure that a child had any sex at all, let
alone a particular one, and that a childs sex was not firmly fixed until birth if
not later; if a woman fell asleep during labor, the babys sex might change.
By gender we typically mean the social or cultural characteristics rules,
roles, tasks, values, and meanings that are assigned to people on the basis
of (some or another) sexual characteristics

Gender divisions and differences

Even in societies that simply and firmly assign human beings to one of two
sex or gender categories, there is no absolute reason why those two
categories should be segregated and/or valued unequally.
More often than not women and womens activities are held in lower esteem
than mens sometimes extremely so.

 It may be useful to take the advice of these researchers and consider the
relations between the sexes more in terms of a gendered geography than a
simple and complete division or opposition.
One of the more well-studied domains of gender diversity is in language.
Maltz and Borker (1996) summarize the state of the research into crossgender communication, which finds that women ask more questions,
encourage responses, interject more conversation-promoting utterances like
uh huh and yes, allow themselves to be interrupted, and use interactional
pronouns like you and we.
Men are more likely to interrupt, to argue, to ignore the others comments, to
try to control the topic, and to offer opinions or declarations
Lakoff (1975) among others has interpreted this as an effect of male
domination and female subordination in society.
Maltz and Borker propose, instead, that men and women constitute different
sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in
a conversation. Boys and girls learn to speak differently as children which
develops to this,
While not universal by any means, there is evidence of linguistic segregation
by sex/gender across cultures. Male tend to have exclusive speech.
The oppression of women across cultures
As Rosaldo and just about everyone else have noticed, in the great majority
of human societies, males exercise predominant social power
This can lead, not always, to the oppression and abuse of women
Probably in at least some if not all cases, mens power and dominance is
achieved by the control over women that these institutions afford. Some of
the more conspicuous and important examples include the following:
o Female infanticide: female babies and fetuses are killed or neglected
because male children are more valued.
o Purdah: Is the practice of wearing the veil that is found in many
Muslim societies. The purdah complex seeks to protect women by
shielding them from the lecherous eyes of other men.
o Honour killing: Affronts to honor are often related to inappropriate
sexual behavior of women, such as dating or marrying outside the
religion or having premarital sex. In more than a few instances, the
women have been punished for being raped an ironic case of blaming
the victim.
o Foot-Binding: wrapped in their youth to prevent them from growing
normally. It was often practiced by and on the upper classes. Small feet
were beautiful.
o Sati: In India, widows have been traditionally encouraged to follow
their husbands into death. A woman who voluntarily threw herself into
her husbands funeral pyre was considered a pure one, a sati, and
venerated for her selfless enactment of a famous mythical event. The
alternative to this results them living in the widow ghetto in bad
environments.

Dowry death or bride burning: When asking for dowry after married
and the father cannot afford the husband or mother of husband may
burn the women in the cooking fire or douse her in kerosene. If she
lives, the husband can divorce her, if she dies the husband can find
another wife. (India)
Female circumcision or female genital mutilation: (Africa).
This can range from a fairly minor trimming of the external genitals to
a complete excision of the clitoris and the sewing up of the organs, as
some combination of aesthetics and sexual control. It is also commonly
believed that removing parts of the female genitalia reduces sexual
desire and pleasure, enhancing chastity. Older women are often the
strong advocates of this tradition.

The Construction of Masculinity