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ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND PERSONALITY If the history of anthropology were to be made into a television miniseries, one of its "great moments" would surely be set on the Sepik River early in 1933. Reo Fortune and his wife, Margaret Mead, "starved for theoretical relevance " after two long bouts of fieldwork among the Arapesh and the Mundugumor , were just beginning their work among the Tchambuli; Gregory Bateson , Mead's husband-to-be, was "floundering methodologically" after months among the Iatmul (Mead 1972:209). "Cooped up together in the tiny eightfoot -by-eight-foot mosquito room, we moved back and forth between analyzing ourselves and each other, as individuals, and the cultures that we knew as anthropologists"-seeking a "new formulation of the relationship between sex and temperament" (216). During long hours of intense conversation-in which Bateson and Mead began the dialogue of their "amor intellectualis"they worked out several typologies of temperament: one, in which Nijinsky and Diaghilev were opposed as east and west, and Fortune stood at the north pole (caring possessive) opposite to Mead and Bateson (careful responsive) at the south; another, in which the male and female temperaments of six different native groups were ranged around eight points of the compass (218; cf. Bateson 1984:161). Mead later recalled that their speculations were provoked in part by the draft of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) they had just received, and that her own thinking drew on C. G. Jung's Psychological Typeswhich , one may note, seems also a likely stimulus for Benedict's use of Nietzsche 's Apollonian/Dionysian opposition (Jung 1921:170-83; see also Modell 1983:192). But as Jung's account in fact suggested, theories of temperamental typologies were deeply rooted in both the psychological and the anthropological traditions of the West. Thus when Linnaeus brought mankind within the System of Nature in the mid-eighteenth century (Bendyshe 1865), he distributed his four major races around an implicit geographical wheel of color, temperament, and body type, starting in the west and ending in the south: Americanus-rufus, cholericus, rectus; Europaeus-albus, sanguineus, torosus; Asiaticus-luridus, melancholicus, rigidus; Afer-niger, phlegmaticus, laxus (see Fogelson 1985). Linnaeus, ofcourse, was drawing on a system of"humoral" thought that can be traced back through 3 4 CULTURE AND PERSONALITY Galen to the Hippocratic fragments on "Airs, Waters, and Places"-which, in the version of William of Conches, saw the choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic types developing by degeneration from the original sanguine, as the result of "privations imposed ... by life outside paradise" after the Fall (Klibansky et al. 1964:103; see also Temkin 1973). Although ethnological and psychological categories were rarely so neatly linked as in Linnaeus, for two thousand years thinking about human differences had been heavily influenced by the tradition of environmental humoralism: living for long periods in different geographical environments, different groups were assumed to have developed characteristic inborn temperaments (Greenwood 1984:25-43; Glacken 1967). Although temperamental (and other psychological) typologies survived into the twentieth century-as Mead's debt to Jung testifies (see Allport 1937:5597 )-the tendency of anthropology after Linnaeus was to break down any such simple fourfold characterization. But far from reflecting a decline of interest in the mental differences among humankind, this represented rather an explosive proliferation of speculation (phrenological, ethnological, craniological ) on the distinguishing mental characteristics of the various groups which in the nineteenth century were called "races"-and which even for "lumpers" were as likely to be reducible to three or five in number as to the Galenic/ Linnaean four (see Odom 1967). And in the later nineteenth century, thinking about racial temperament tended to be reduced to a simple Spencerian polarity, in which the immediate, impulsive, and concrete responses of darkskinned "savages" were posed against the mediated, considered, and abstract thinking of white-skinned "civilized" Europeans (see Stocking 1968:110-32; 1986). It was to combat Spencerian evolutionary racialism that Mead's mentor, Franz Boas, offered his own interpretation of "the mind of primitive man" (1911). Drawing on his extended and intensive fieldwork among Northwest Coast Indians, he limned the possibilities of an alternative determinism of human mental differences: instead ofreflecting differences in inborn temperament or intelligence between "races" at different points on an evolutionary scale, they were the product of a "common culture" that shaped "the separate lives" of the individuals in any human group (Stocking 1968). As British anthropology , too, turned more and more to the direct observational study of such groups...

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