Sociology Plus
Culture and Personality School Definition
The Culture and Personality School was a development in the study of socialisation that arose principally in the United States during the 1930s. Combining psychology, anthropology, and sociology — and above all applying psychoanalytic principles to ethnographic material — it held that culture moulds personality, arguing that distinctive personality types are created through socialisation, with particular weight placed on child-rearing practices such as feeding, weaning, and toilet training.
Key Figures and Ideas
Drawing on Freudian theory, notably Civilization and its Discontents (1930), the perspective is best displayed in the work of anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, and Margaret Mead. Mead became especially associated with the School’s central tenet — that different cultures produce different personality types through different socialisation practices — and her controversial finding that sex roles are culturally rather than biologically determined led a generation of American sociologists to re-examine their assumptions about men’s and women’s roles. Abram Kardiner, in The Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945), examined how personality types are embedded in cultural patterns, arguing with his colleagues that religion and politics act as screens onto which a society’s basic personality orientation is projected. Benedict, in “Anthropology and the Abnormal” (1934), showed that a personality type highly valued in one society may be counted deviant in another, and that societies differ — and change over time — in how they deal with behaviour deemed abnormal.
Wartime National Character Studies
The School was central to the wartime National Character Studies, which sought to understand the character, and hence the strategies, of the Axis powers. Benedict’s classic account of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), was one result; Mead’s parallel study of the United States appeared as And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942). After 1950 the emphasis shifted towards statistical demonstration of the links between child-rearing, personality, and culture — as in John Whiting and Irving Child’s Child Training and Personality (1953), which used a large cross-cultural sample to connect early childhood experience with systems of curing illness.
Criticism and Decline
In the post-war period the School was increasingly criticised for exaggerating the uniformity of personality within any given society, for neglecting relationships between cultures, and — most seriously — for reifying culture instead of treating it as a social construction. The claimed connections between early child-rearing and adult personality also proved difficult to demonstrate. Culture-and-personality studies now have little currency in anthropology or sociology, even in the United States, to which their influence was largely confined — though that influence has not entirely disappeared.