Some reflections from my wonderful career in Psychological Anthropology

Abstract

Our Ethos editors have launched an occasional section with contributions by SPA members for a brief commentary; I appreciate the invitation. The editors suggested informal reflections on some of the traditions of Psychological Anthropology that I have experienced and value in my career. There are many traditions worth sustaining, and celebrating them is one of my goals—a blend of my advocacy of and for our field, and some advice for the field in the context of describing some of my own experiences and career. This is not the place for lengthy summaries of research findings or theory debates, but there are some references if readers want to look further (Weisner, 2018a).

Psychological Anthropology benefits from its core bioecocultural theory and conceptual framework. Psychological Anthropology combines culture and mind, and encompasses the whole person, from our biology and evolutionary past to childhood and how we acquire cultural information and social competence, to our shared cultural models and unique experiences, and our health and well-being. Psychological Anthropology is holistic; includes culture, mind, brain, and experience; it includes the local contexts in the communities and lives we study; is comparative and cross-cultural; includes mixed methods; asks about learning and the acquisition and organization of cultural knowledge; continues to contribute to many empirical topics; and more (Weisner, 1997). My reflections about Psychological Anthropology are based on these strengths and definition of our field, firmly based on the social sciences. Although there is great diversity in what we practice as part of Psychological Anthropology, these are core strengths deserving of celebration and continued support.

I learned from and contributed to Psychological Anthropology as a very fortunate faculty member at UCLA for my career, beginning in 1971. Ethos was founded with UCLA faculty Walter Goldschmidt and Douglass Price-Williams, as editors in 1973. Goldschmidt and Price-Williams described the creative “institutionalized instability” of Psychological Anthropology as an interdisciplinary field—and hoped to bring articles to Ethos that explored these tensions. Psychological Anthropology was expanding in numbers and in intellectual projects, and yet our work at times was rejected by some journals with outdated criteria (such as continued confusion with early “culture and personality” studies) and we wanted a home in which to publish. The title “Journal of Psychological Anthropology” was already in use by another journal. I think “Ethos” was a reference to our holism and focus on shared cultural models of cultural communities (this was the argument made by Walter Goldschmidt at the time, as I recall), and also perhaps to the hoped-for unifying intellectual project and vision of studying culture and mind together that Ethos the journal would bring.

To give a sense of the field and Ethos’ range right from the start, the first volume of Ethos included papers by, among others, in order of publication, Tony Wallace, Robert and Ruth Munroe, John Whiting, Walter Goldschmidt, George Foster, Bob LeVine, Ted Schwartz, Sara Harkness, Ed Bruner, Melford Spiro, Steven Piker, Theodore Graves, William Caudill, Judith Brown, Carol Ember, Roy D'Andrade, Kim Romney, Richard Shweder—and me. What an interesting and wide-ranging group of scholars! They did ground-breaking fieldwork in the US and around the world, contributed theory and intellectual projects, participated in founding and growing academic departments, made new methodological contributions, influenced other social sciences, and provided support for students (many of whom may well be reading this commentary).

I benefited from the Psychocultural Studies and the Mind, Medicine and Culture programs at UCLA. I also had my appointment in the Psychiatry Department and Neuropsychiatric Institute, Culture and Health Center, led by Robert Edgerton which provided many opportunities for research programs, teaching, and collaborations (Weisner, 2018b). Everything in my commentary here was only possible with the support of my teachers, colleagues, students, and funders.

Psychological Anthropology continues with remarkable productivity 50 + years after the founding of Ethos. An excellent example is the new Handbook of Psychological Anthropology (Lowe, Ed., 2025), which covers the first one hundred years and looks forward to the next to come. There are 39 authors of the 26 chapters covering theory, methods, lifespan development, “body, emotion, self, and experience,” and postcolonial and political-economic interventions, including mental health and policy. Psychological Anthropology and Anthropology itself has had many “crises” in the past fifty years—crises of competing theories, methods and epistemological issues, moral and ethical debates, coloniality, inequality, relevance, diversity within our field, and more. These issues are discussed by the authors in the Handbook, as well as in Ethos and general Anthropology articles, and deserve to have continued debate and should lead to needed changes. Yet, in my view, the central core of Psychological Anthropology remains strong.

I graduated from Reed College in 1965, then at Harvard Social Relations/Anthropology for graduate school. The Social Relations Department—which no longer exists as an academic department—was a center for interdisciplinary, collaborative, cross-cultural, mixed methods, comparative research studies in Anthropology (e.g., DeVore & Lee, Eds., 1976; Seymour, 2015; Vogt, 1969; Whiting & Whiting, 1975). These research programs provided funding for anthropologists for fieldwork and write up time, offered training in fieldwork methods, sampling, and—perhaps most important—a continuing seminar and collaboration opportunities with other graduate students, faculty and students from other disciplines, while preparing for the field, doing research, and after coming back.

I benefited from the Child Development Research Program in Kenya, and the Children of Different Worlds collaboration (a continuation of the Six Cultures studies) for my fieldwork and training. The methods and theories from these projects often produced very surprising empirical findings, provided funding and support for students and postdocs, often led to University and institutional recognition, and had many interdisciplinary impacts. There continue to be some recent terrific interdisciplinary, collaborative programs like these in Psychological Anthropology: Tanya Luhrmann et al. (2021), Ochs & Sadlik, (2013), Super et al. (2020), Maynard & Greenfield, (2003), Jenkins & Csordas, (2020), Bradd Shore (2008; 2009), Carol Worthman (2020) and no doubt others. I saw part of my task as a teacher and faculty member to support students and postdocs with funding, research collaborations and publication opportunities through my own multiyear research projects. I would encourage Anthropologists to do more such team, collaborative, interdisciplinary research programs wherever we can!

Psychological Anthropology is particularly good at discovering serendipitous, unanticipated, original findings. Psychological Anthropology often goes after supposedly “settled” findings from research in other disciplines and other sub-fields within Anthropology—and changes, revises, contradicts, and adds value to them. Doing this continues to be one of the most valuable research contributions, and pleasurable professional experiences in my academic life! This kind of intellectual project began starting from my early fieldwork in Kenya on the effects on children and parents of rural-urban migration. Ethnographic study of the effects of socially distributed childcare, sibling care, and changes in family organization was my first such experience.

I started fieldwork in Kenya in 1968. John and Beatrice Whiting launched their collaborative field research program for studies of child development in Kenya, and I was fortunate to be part of it (Edwards & Bloch, 2010; LeVine, 1973; Weisner, 2010). I proposed a study of the effects of rural-urban migration on children’ social and cognitive development, health, and family and childcare. Each field team also organized behavior observations among families in their communities (Whiting & Edwards, 1988; Weisner & Edwards, 2001).

I wrote a dissertation proposal and defended it before heading to Kenya. And most of it changed completely in design, methods and findings once I started fieldwork! Modernization theories and the presumed benefits of moving to cities and formal education dominated this field at the time, and to some extent still do. Child care by mothers was largely the presumptive exclusive or primary caregiving relationship. Cross-cultural ethnography of children in context of urban social change—important as this was—had little impact on conventional research and theory. All these standard assumptions were wrong or overgeneralized.

To start with, forty percent of my urban families (I planned on an urban study) were gone three months after starting in Nairobi—because migration of children and families involved commuting back and forth from rural villages to Nairobi: the important social network was the extended lineage family, often with multiple households in several places, sharing child care and exploiting multiple economic resources, and adapting to multiple settings. I had to develop a rural and urban matched comparison sample of families and children and ethnographic methods to understand this (Weisner, 1973; 1976).

Sibling caretaking and other forms of non-parental care were normative; but migration disrupted this practice, with some older children remaining in the Western Kenya villages, some commuting, and some staying in Nairobi. The changes in sibling and nonparental, socially distributed care of children as a result, and changes in children's tasks, influenced parents’ and children's social development. Unmentioned in my early research proposal, understanding sibling caretaking then became a central topic I pursued thereafter, and was of interest to the child development field, sibling researchers, cross-cultural family and caretaking research, and others (Weisner & Gallimore, 1977).

Reconsiderations of conventional attachment theory is another example of a topic challenging conventional theory and measurement in psychology. There are universal features of attachment systems (such as the attachment-sensitive period in children, and the clearly important stress-buffering roles of privileged caretakers, including maternal care) but these exist within highly diverse ecocultural worlds. In attachment networks for example, a sense of social trust is an important component of well-being, which cannot be only an individual assessment, based on one dyadic maternal-child exchange. Multiple, socially distributed networks of care, including sibling care, are widespread (here again, being there in the field in Kenya provided my initial empirical evidence regarding attachment).

Consider the categories used in the classification of children and their parents/caretakers in standard attachment theory coding using the Strange Situation (Weisner, 2017; 2026). There is an inevitable moral valence when using terms such as secure attachment, sensitive parenting, or attuned caregiving and behaviors. These labels (secure, sensitive, attuned), regardless of the reasons they may have been chosen in the past, are not appropriate, because their opposites inevitably end up being assigned to the non-Euro-American world or to those less educated and resource-advantaged within a country (LeVine & Miller 1990). How can it be justified to characterize individuals, families, and entire cultures and ethnic groups or social classes as insecure, insensitive, and unattuned, without careful attention to what it means to be secure, or display social trust? Why are caregivers and children acting in different ways in early social interactions and relationships; what are their opportunities, constraints, beliefs and goals in their local environments and communities? Security, belonging and social trust certainly do matter for children's development, and these clearly vary across individuals in a family or community, across groups, and across cultures. This should be assessed, but with diverse measures, including valid normed assessments, in context.

Once I had results from migration outcomes, sib care, and child and caretaker attachment behaviors (as just three examples) and began publishing these, I intentionally worked to publish in child developmental and family research journals, present with researchers in panels at those meetings from other disciplines, give talks and engage in debates at times in other departments, and teach to students outside Anthropology. In addition to Psychological Anthropology and Anthropology contexts, I enjoyed leaving the safer silos of our own field and speak, publish and teach more widely. Our field has so many findings that matter and we should continue to do this wherever and whenever we can!

In addition to cross-cultural research on child development, and developing qualitative/quantitative methods, I collaborated on several other long term interdisciplinary projects. Psychological Anthropology is a terrific intellectual platform to launch interdisciplinary and mixed methods research on families and children! A series of studies around families of children with developmental disabilities focused on parents’ goals and practices for creating a sustainable, meaningful daily routine for their child and family, including siblings and other caretakers. How did families accommodate and change their routines and goals and resources? The study included child assessments and standardized questionnaires. We also did home visits and observations, and listened to parents describe these everyday accommodations and captured their experiences using the Ecocultural Family Interview. From conversations with over one hundred families, we found ten key domains of accommodations to the child with disabilities and family context. We followed the families and children through adolescence, including asking the teens about their friendships, self-construal regarding their disability, and parents’ struggles and goals. One mother commented on our focus on their cultural goals, daily routines and cultural and familial accommodations:

ʻʻProfessionals kept asking me what my “needs” were. I didn't know what to say, I finally told them, “Look, I'm not sure what you're talking about. So let me just tell you what happens from the time I get up in the morning until I go to sleep at night. Maybe that will help.” Bernheimer & Weisner, 2007:192).

Another project followed children growing up in countercultural, “hippie” families from the 1970s to 1990s (Weisner, Bausano, & Kornfein, 1983; 2008; 2009). How would parents who questioned conventional society, parenting and family norms and values respond when they had children themselves? These were parents living in communes and collectives, single mothers by choice, couples who were not married by choice and raising a child, as well as a comparison sample of two-parent married couples. There were fifty families in each of these four lifestyles. Although parents and children in these nonconventional family lifestyles did clearly struggle more with personal disruptions, along with societal changes, and had financial, interpersonal and other challenges, the health and education of children and youth overall matched or exceeded our comparison sample and other normative national data on educational and other outcomes. Pro-natural, more countercultural parents often compared their children to the parents’ memories of their own youth, saying their children were less progressive and less pro-natural than the parents used to be. However, their children on average were considerably more progressive than our comparison sample youth (Weisner & Bernheimer, 1998).

A third collaborative study evaluated efforts to support working poor families and their children in Wisconsin. This multiyear intervention program, New Hope, did improve incomes and work for some parents facing fewer preexisting difficulties to find and sustain employment (Duncan, Huston, & Weisner, 2007; Weisner, 2011). The New Hope study analyzed a random-assignment experiment, comparing participants who were offered additional income, health benefits for their children, support for childcare and other benefits for working, compared to control families who received only the benefits provided by the State. The ethnographic and qualitative interview data compared a subset of both treatment and control parents and children and so could understand the intervention experience from inside the lives of each household. How and why did the intervention affect parents and children, if it did, and how were children impacted? Parents eligible to take up New Hope benefits did not or could not always do so, due to other difficulties in keeping jobs, juggling other needs, and already having supports for childcare, for example, that worked well for them and fit into their lives. The parents’ goals for work and children were high overall across families, even when their only options sometimes were poorly paid, insecure “basement jobs” as they were called: “Hey, I just want what everyone wants” as one parent said.

Every one of these projects led to unexpected results that often challenged supposed settled, conventional beliefs and findings about countercultural families and kids, families with children with developmental disabilities, and working poor parents and children. They all explored the structural conditions and cultural models, scripts, and everyday ecocultural routines that drove behavior and thought. How could a major research program not have visited the countercultural study families and talked with them and observed their children; how could long-term studies of families adapting to children with disabilities not sat with them in their living rooms and asked about their lives and struggles; how could our work with working poor families—part of an intervention to hopefully support them—not talk with parents about what the intervention looks like and means to them and what is helping and what is not? One way to bring Psychological Anthropology findings to other disciplines is to advocate for the use of qualitative, ethnographic, narrative, and fieldwork methods as an expected part of the evidence needed and funds granted for every research program. Including quantitative and more systematic samples and assessments in primarily ethnographic studies similarly might well add value to what we learn. This is more common than in the past, thanks in part to those of us in Psychological Anthropology who, as I have, served on Foundation Boards and reviews, NGO organizations, or other funding and policy committees. Many colleagues in Psychological Anthropology have accomplished this in their own topic areas. My experience is that other researchers (and, sometimes, funders of such work) are quietly well aware that diverse samples, qualitative methods, cultural context, and ecocultural theory are needed, and Psychological Anthropology is one discipline where they can find this.

Psychological Anthropology continues to use a wide range of methods, diverse cultural and community samples, analysis, and research designs. This also is one of our comparative advantages in the social sciences, and I certainly believe in its value. The title of the SPA-sponsored conference and the book that resulted, Methods That Matter (Hay, Ed., 2016) reflects that (Weisner, 2016). For many years, there were no software tools making this easy. After decades doing these and other studies using mixed methods in collaborative teams without the software we could have benefitted from, I and others developed the qualitative, mixed method software tool Dedoose (Dedoose.com) some twelve years ago. Simply making it easier to safely, securely include narratives, fieldnotes on cases, ethnographic notes, photos and videos, and interview texts in studies that otherwise might not have done so, doing this collaboratively and online, with open export to Word, Excel and other software has helped to increase the use of qualitative cultural data and mixed methods research.

“What is the most important influence on a child's development?” (this was the title of a TEDx talk I gave) was the question heading my culture and childhood classes. The answer is the culture and ecology, the community the child and family grow up in, the cultural models and ethnopsychology shared in their communities. Yet very few people say that this is the most important influence—at least at first. The empirical evidence and conceptual models we have in Psychological Anthropology for culture and childhood around the world is arguably one of our greatest contributions to the social sciences (Korbin et al., 2025; LeVine, 2007), with broad recognition in the general public as well (Lancy, 2014; Weisner, 2015). Keep our focus in Psychological Anthropology on children and parenting and social development and the learning of culture to build on one of our most valuable intellectual and methodological contributions!

Perhaps it is useful for a more personal commentary, to add something about the family experiences and history through which I came to my passion for psychological anthropology and my choices of topics. I am the first-born son, with two younger brothers, of refugee immigrant parents and grandparents, who escaped Hitler and Nazism in 1938. My father (age 19) and his family escaped Germany, my mother (age 15) from Austria via a year as a refugee with a Swedish family, and then fortunately reunited with her family. My Dad was beaten and kicked out of school; my mother was sent away alone to escape. They and their families ended up in Oakland, California as teenagers, and my parents met there. We grew up as part of the progressive Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarians. My Dad launched a successful business after working in a steel mill during WW II; my mother worked as a beautician. But then she went back to get her High School equivalency test, eventually graduating from UC Berkeley with a Masters in English (we got our BA degrees the same year), and taught at Merritt College in Oakland. My interests in migration and immigration, family disruption, family change and adaptation, well-being and culture, support for working poor families and kids, and long-term, cultural and contextual understanding of childhood have a personal resonance. My research and teaching choices of course came from my own mentors and students, and having so many terrific opportunities for research. But here as well are my parents’ and grandparents’ stories and legacies.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.