American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment

Chapter Seven: Psychological Anthropology and Its Discontents: Science and Rhetoric in Postwar Micronesia

225 C HAPTER SEV EN Psychological Anthropology and Its Discontents: Science and Rhetoric in Postwar Micronesia Peter W. Black TWO AWAKENINGS Ifaluk Atoll is as good a place as any (and better than most) to begin considering the rather disconcerting question: What has been achieved by fifty years of research in psychological anthropology in Micronesia? After all, it is the location of the initial fieldwork of two of the most widely cited psychological anthropologists of their respective generations, Melford E. “Mel” Spiro and Catherine Lutz, ethnographers who have made Ifaluk infant bathing practices and Ifaluk emotion terms part of the common currency of the discipline . And 1947 is as good a year as any (and better than most) to use as an entry point. For this was not only the fieldwork year of the first contingent of Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (cima) researchers, including many who had special interests in personality and culture; it was also a year in which David Bidney could remark: “One of the outstanding characteristics of contemporary cultural anthropology is its serious concern with the study of the personality of the individuals participating in a given culture” (1949, 31). Furthermore, 1947 was the year when Laura Thompson republished her ethnography of Guam, a monograph that in several of its strategies for characterizing Chamorro culture (for example, its concern to describe childrearing practices) reveals the penetration of the ideas of the culture and personality school into the standard anthropological practice of the era.1 226 P ETE R W . BL ACK Early morning, Ifaluk, 1947. Mel Spiro, a Northwestern University graduate student, woke up yet again to the screams of his neighbors’ babies being taken to bathe in the cold early morning ocean. Putting aside his annoyance , Spiro focused on the rage and terror he heard in those infantile screams, finding in them the beginnings of an answer to a question that had been troubling him: What was the source of the aggressive feelings that were so evident in the Ifaluk responses to the battery of projective tests he had been administering as well as in the folktales and other cultural materials he had collected? This question was one of a pair; its mate was a question about how those feelings were managed. Where (if anywhere) in the eminently peaceful social life of Ifaluk was aggression expressed? Mel Spiro and field assistant, Ifaluk Atoll, 1947. Photograph courtesy of Mel Spiro. Psychological Anthropology and Its Discontents 227 Spiro’s elegant solution to this puzzle requires no retelling here. Drawing on the Kardiner synthesis, it formed the basis for further refinements of the neo-Freudian paradigm, particularly in the development of the concept of “culturally constituted defense mechanisms.” That analytic device, in turn, has been central to the exploration of the vision of culture and personality advanced by Spiro and others, a vision in which culture and personality is not a “specialty within anthropology but a distinctive theoretical approach to the various problems posed by the investigation of cultural and social systems” (Spiro 1978, 330).2 Fast forward to Ifaluk thirty years later. Once again a young American anthropologist was abruptly awakened on that remote (but by now anthropologically famous) atoll. Night, Ifaluk, 1977. Catherine Lutz, a Harvard graduate student, awakened to the frightening realization that a man had entered her house. Once the excitement caused by her screams died away, Lutz reflected on the amused response of her Ifaluk neighbors to her initial reaction to the danger in which she had thought herself. Lutz heard in their laughter amusement at her misinterpretation of the situation and confirmation of her understanding that the island is a place of security, its people remarkably peaceable . In that laughter and in the special treatment people close to her offered over the next few days she also detected their pride in her “sensibleness ” in being afraid. Her fear was funny because it was misplaced—there was no real danger—but it did confirm her hosts’ evaluation of her as an intelligent (and intelligible) moral being. Rather than use the events as a window into the inner world of the Ifaluk, Lutz used them as a source of information on their cultural knowledge about such states. She also reflected on the panic with which she greeted that intruder , reading it as based in American cultural knowledge. This incident and others confirmed her developing understanding of how profoundly the ways Ifaluk people...