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Psychological Anthropology at UCSD
Program DescriptionIntroductionPsychological anthropology places persons at the center of anthropological inquiry, seeking to understand the psychological existence of human beings as an integral and dynamic part of social and cultural life. It explores questions relating to the motives, experience, values, emotions, thought-processes, self-concepts, agency and consciousness of persons. The UCSD Department of Anthropology has been one of the major centers for graduate training in psychological anthropology since the founding of the department in 1968. The program offers students the opportunity to discover what has been learned in anthropology about mind and self, emotion and cognition, agency and experience, motivation and human development. It gives them the opportunity to learn about contemporary questions and new directions in the field. Under the guidance of faculty who have made major contributions to the field, students develop the knowledge of theory and methods needed to conduct their own research. Students who have been trained in psychological anthropology at UCSD have gone on to teach and pursue research at colleges, universities, and research centers across the United States. Graduates of the program have made significant contributions in teaching and research, and have advanced anthropological inquiry regarding a broad range of research topics. Psychological anthropology at UCSD is devoted to understanding human experience from an anthropological perspective. The program at UCSD offers a holistic approach; it pursues an understanding of persons, their lives and experience, based on the knowledge of society and culture, of biology and psychology, that have been developed within anthropology. Training in psychological anthropology is integrated into the graduate program, so that students have the opportunity to take seminars with distinguished faculty in social, cultural, and biological anthropology. All students in the UCSD graduate program take a sequence of three core seminars that focus in the first quarter on individual action and social institutions, in the second on personal consciousness and cultural experience, and in the third on motives, values, cognition and qualities of personal experience. The psychological anthropology program also forges interdisciplinary links with other fields, including cognitive science, psychology and psychiatry, and human development. The program offers students training and resources for conducting research that makes anthropological contributions in these fields. Culture and Experience: Self in Cultural ContextThe program in psychological anthropology allows students to develop research projects focusing on person, self, and experience in cultural context. This focus of the program stresses the integration of approaches that have been developed within psychological anthropology and related fields. Students have the opportunity to pursue research interests in the areas of ethnopsychology, cultural psychology, and psychoanalytic anthropology, among other sub-fields of psychological anthropology that focus on self and experience. Students may pursue studies with faculty who have interests in cultural, cognitive, and psychoanalytic theory as these illuminate the experience of persons. UCSD faculty have made significant contributions to the anthropological study of emotion, motivation, and self-experience. Student research in these areas is encouraged. In developing their own research, students can work with faculty to forge links between different approaches in order to pursue specific research interests. For example, research skills involved in eliciting and conceptualizing cultural models of psychological experience --models of mind, psyche, and person-- are relevant to studies of emotion or psychodynamic processes. Integrating theoretical perspectives and research skills enables students to develop a fuller, more dynamic, view of the self in culture. The faculty help students develop a strong repertoire of research skills and theoretical concepts. The goal is to enable students to use anthropological concepts and methods to explore in depth the psychological existence of persons in culture and society. Training in psychological anthropology at UCSD helps students pursue their psychocultural research in a variety of ethnographic settings in diverse cultures. Moreover, the anthropological focus on persons and self involves investigating issues of central importance to the social sciences. Person-focused ethnographic research addresses questions relating to religion and meaning, culture and identity, gender and sexuality, symbolic and expressive forms, therapeutic institutions and self-transformative practices, the experience of inequality and social change, family life and human development, among other social, cultural, and psychological phenomena.
Human Experience in Complex SocietiesIn placing persons at the center of anthropological inquiry, psychological anthropology necessarily places persons in their social and cultural worlds. At UCSD, the faculty help students conduct research on psychocultural phenomena in a variety of human societies, including the small-scale societies that have long been a special and significant focus of anthropology. In addition to this, the faculty have a special interest in complex societies and in exploring the inter-connections of culture, self, and social formations in such societies. This focus on human experience in complex societies grows out of the research faculty members have conducted in a number of contemporary societies, ranging from India, Nepal, and Burma to Israel, England, and the United States. Researchers who want to illuminate the human condition in such societies must be able to integrate psychological theory with social and cultural theory. At UCSD, the faculty helps students do this: students receive guidance in developing research projects that examine the social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of life in complex societies. Students learn current approaches for understanding persons, self, and experience in relation to the cultural processes and social formations that characterize such societies. Self and its experience can be studied in relation to social stratification, ethnicity, the effects of literacy, media, and education, ideologies of identity, encounters with other cultural traditions, the formation of dissenting social, religious, and political groups, among others features of complex societies. The training students receive, and the models provided by faculty research, are relevant to a range of research topics that take questions of personal experience as central to the anthropology of complex societies. These topics include the shaping of identity, the formation of subjectivity or national character, the emergence of self-concepts in social practice, the structuring of cognition into social processes, the development of psychocultural adaptations to subordination, inequality and social change, among others. Psychiatry and Anthropology at UCSDThe psychiatry and anthropology program provides an introduction to interviewing, diagnostic, and psychotherapeutic techniques in psychiatry and their application to anthropological research. The program enables students to observe people suffering from various kinds of psychological disorders and learn how psychiatrists approach the assessment and treatment of their patients. Students in the year-long program take courses in the training program for psychiatric residents in the Department of Psychiatry at the UCSD School of Medicine in conjunction with a seminar in the Department of Anthropology. Topics covered in the residency training program include psychiatric diagnosis and assessment, schizophrenia, depression, personality, adjustment and dissociative disorders, other forms of mental illness, and forms of psychotherapy. The seminar held in the Department of Anthropology is also open to psychiatric residents. It focuses on the implications of the material covered in the psychiatry courses for anthropological research and introduces students to contemporary psychiatric anthropology. Some students may, upon the satisfactory completion of the psychiatry and anthropology sequence and with the permission of faculty, have the opportunity to conduct supervised interviews in a clinical setting. Cognitive Anthropology at UCSDCognitive anthropology investigates the inter-relationships of culture and cognition: cognitive anthropologists study how human beings acquire and use cultural knowledge, and how this knowledge is organized in the psyche. Since the interactions of culture and cognition are central to human life, affecting social relations and self-experience, cognitive anthropology has relevance to understanding much of human life. At UCSD, training in cognitive anthropology reflects its general relevance to anthropological research. The research of faculty and students at UCSD has contributed significantly to the development of contemporary cognitive anthropology and culture theory. Training at UCSD allows students to master these approaches for use in their own research. Students interested in the fundamental connections of culture and cognition can develop research projects exploring "the cultural part of cognition." Others examine cognition in practice, conducting research into the way cultural knowledge shapes, and emerges from, the activities of cultural life. Training in cognitive anthropology gives students tools for understanding the social, cultural, and psychological phenomena they encounter in the course of ethnographic fieldwork. The broad relevance of the concepts and methods of cognitive anthropology as taught at UCSD make it useful for students with a very wide range of interests. Graduate training at UCSD helps students integrate cognitive anthropology into ethnographic research that sheds light on the ways culture, mind, and experience interact in social life. Cognitive anthropology offers insights into culture's role in mediating the development of the psyche and shaping human motives. It helps illuminate the dynamics of emotion, motivation, and self-experience. The field has an important role in the study of cultural education and human development. Students in the Anthropology Ph.D. program may be eligible to participate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in cognitive sciences. This program allows students in anthropology to study a second discipline relevant to the study of human cognition, such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics or the neurosciences. More information on this interdisciplinary program can be found in the UCSD general catalog and from Prof. Steven Parish. The Ethnography of Human Experience:
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