Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology

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Summary: A CONFUSIONISTS VIEW OF PSYCHOLOGICAL-ANTHROPOLOGY
Review: This book was not written for you and me; we being non-anthropologists. It is more or less a text for use by graduate students and practitioners in the field of psychological anthropology. Having never taken a course in anthropology (although the subject holds my interest) and the probability being I never will, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and believe anyone eager to undertake a thorough scholarly exercise will enjoy it as well. The book is a wonderfully written exploration of a complicated subject matter from a different -- and often changing -- point of view, and it is the author's approach to his subject that is the lesson most valuable to all who read this book, regardless of the professional, vocational, or educational perspective of the reader.

Richard A. Shweder, is a self-proclaimed confusionist, a term I suspect he invented but nevertheless explained at a recent symposium. A confusionist (not to be confused with Confuscianist), is someone who believes that the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from the famous nowhere in particular. Given the choice between incompleteness, incoherence, and emptiness, Shweder opts for incompleteness while trying to get beyond such limitations by staying on the move between different ways of seeing and valuing things in the world. In addition to being a confusionist, he also admits to being neoantiquarian. A neoantiquarian, according to Shweder, is someone who rejects the idea that the world woke up, emerged from darkness, and became good for the first time yesterday, or three hundred years ago, in the West and Northern Europe. A neoantiquarian does not think that newness is necessarily a measure of progress.

Bonus: Aficionados of fine writing will marvel at how craftily Professor Shweder pens a technical work. A most splendid example of how to approach technical writing assignments like a bard. If Shweder were to exercise poetic license you might suspect you were reading Vonnegut or Bellow.