Peter G. Stromberg

Language and self-transformation : a study of the Christian conversion narrative

1. Introduction 2. Character and intention 3. Boundaries 4. Dreams 5. Miracles 6. Roles 7. Against a theory of volition Appendix.

Cooperative individualism in Swedish society

The notion that the individual and society articulate only tenuously, if not with tension, may be social scientific folklore. Human aptitudes involving creativity, independent thought, and agency generally, appear to be shaped and sometimes dictated by the socioculture. Social scientists have begun to unpack the issue of agency in order to better understand the relations among and between individuals and society. By exploring an empirical case involving a congregation of Svenska Missionsforbundet, one can establish that while the form of religious practice is individualistic, its content is strikingly communalistic. These practitioners, and other Swedes at large, often perceive a contradiction between the agendas of individual and of community, which conflict bears critical scrutiny.

Narrative and Healing in Dynamic Psychotherapy: Implications for Culture Theory

In dynamic psychotherapies, people work to address troubling thoughts, actions, and feelings by talking about themselves and their experiences. How can such talk ameliorate mental health symptoms? This chapter proposes an answer to this question that circumvents the central barrier to answering it, the assumption that the body and the mind are two separate systems. The chapter author calls upon recent work in cognitive science that emphasizes how human beings use their bodies and their environments in thinking; in such approaches mind and body are not separable. Such work helps us to conceptualize clients in psychotherapy as shaping the environments in which they dwell through the narratives they construct. The transformation that can occur through narrative is, from this perspective, in part a consequence of how persons constitute themselves differently in different environments.

Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself

This Introduction addresses some expectations about the book, leaving to its Conclusion the task of summarizing its claimed advances. It is important to appreciate that this is a mid-stream assessment, not a final synthesis, which would be premature. The achievements to which it points are, first, the kinds of institutional structures and human proclivities psychological anthropologists need to be exploring. These institutional structures are exemplified by D’Andrade’s concept of lifeworlds in Chapter 2, and Paul’s revision of Dual Inheritance Theory in Chapter 3. Lowe’s Chapter 4 offers a bridge between this discussion and the second question, about internalization, addressed in the following five chapters. All chapters reflect how psychological anthropologists have recruited ethnographic methods to these theoretical problems. Reviewed briefly next are the contrasting background literatures on which each chapter begins, reflecting these authors’ widely diverse starting points and prior lack of a common discourse. The book attempts to initiate the kind of sustained conversations with one another, among this group of authors and potential readers, needed to overcome this present shortage of common understandings. The introduction closes by briefly laying the groundwork for the arguments to come, about lifeworlds and about internalization.

Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory

This Conclusion synthesizes the volume’s advances, beginning with Roy D’Andrade’s insight that culture is organized by lifeworlds. The next chapter, by Robert Paul, supports D’Andrade’s approach to culture and the inevitable conflict between self-interest and the group concerns that culture introduces. Paul also offers the notion of the public arena, where culture is learned from its performance. Edward Lowe addresses a different kind of conflict, inner ones arising from allegiance to multiple lifeworlds, eliciting cultural amelioration. Lowe’s chapter also bridges the first two chapters and the remaining ones, indicating where a purely institutional account leaves off and a psychological one must take up. The concept of lifeworlds helps to reframe these remaining chapters as well, gracefully explaining, in addition to cultural variation and contradiction, the tendency toward cultural thematicity. The Conclusion next recounts the book’s argument about internalization: its basis in synaptic plasticity and cultural schemas, and its further cultivation by child socializers with their intent to raise children into culturally valued adults, and by therapists with their goal of healing. The Conclusion goes on to consider the roles of psychodynamic processes, psycho-biology, and, finally, methods. It closes with a summary of the “straight-edged pieces” that have been identified, and that frame the “jigsaw puzzle” of culture theory, and the remaining missing pieces of this theory.

Theories of the transcendent

Guthrie, Stewart. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xi + 290 pp. including end notes, references, figure credits, and index.

Force of Habit: Exploring Everyday Culture

30.00 cloth. Saler, Benson. Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993. x + 292 pp. including bibliography and index.

Taking Play Seriously: Low-Level Smoking Among College Students

80.00 cloth. Torrance, Robert. The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. xvii + 367 pp. including bibliography and index.

Ideological Language in the Transformation of Identity

35.00 cloth.

Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You

Force of Habit: Exploring Everyday Culture. Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren. eds. Lund Studies in European Ethnology, 1. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1996. 172 pp.