Darwinian Psychological Anthropology: A Biosocial Approach [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

Psychological anthropology has contributed more to cross-cultural psychology and psychiatry than to its parent discipline. Needed is a biosocial psychological anthropology stressing the analysis of social relationships and focusing on the individual in his natural social context rather than on isolated personality mechanisms or grand culture-and-personality theoretical schemes. Human social relationships and structures may be viewed as having been organized by natural selection and as being generated ontogenetically by feedback processes based on environmentally stable hominid characteristics. The approach advocated bears some relationship to the techniques of "situational analysis."