Title: Culture and Personality – Anthropology
Headings: Culture and Personality
Culture and Personality
Basic Premises
Points of Reaction
Leading Figures
Key Works
Principal Concepts
Methodologies
Accomplishments
Criticisms
Sources and Bibliography
Relevant Web Links

Content: Personality becomes an intervening variable. This view reconciled sociological and cultural approaches with that of psychological reductionism. The two-systems view was developed by Inkeles and Levinson and Melford Spiro. It held that culture and personality interact and balance one another. Spiro specifically was interested “in the ways in which personality affects the operations of the sociocultural system” (LeVine 1981:59). Culture and personality are viewed as aspects of a total field rather than as separate systems or even as legitimate analytical abstractions from data of the same order (Kluckhohn 1954: 685). In other words, culture and personality are interdependent and track along an interconnected curve. Culture influences socialization patterns, which in turn shapes some of the variance of personality (Maccoby 2000). Because of distinctive socialization practices in different societies, each society has a unique culture and history.