Thinking through cultures and psychologies: Robert Levine’s life and work,and a discipline’s ongoing project

The world is changing rapidly and so are its cultures and psychologies. Rare is the social science publication that has a shelf life of over 5 years; furthermore, many scholars seemed programmed and rewarded for hopping on to the latest trendy topic, theory, or analytic technique with little awareness or acknowledgment of the historical context from which the latest “thing” emerged and how innovation often builds upon, integrates with, and transforms what has been viewed previously as traditional best practice in social science. Thus, it is with abundant gratitude to take the recent publication of the selected papers of Robert Levine (Sharma, 2020) as an opportunity to both reflect upon the many signification contributions of this distinguished senior scholar, but also to leverage the publication of this volume to revisit classic theory and research relevant to disciplines of psychology and anthropology in terms of present day foci and realities.

While Robert Levine is a name familiar to most readers of this publication, it is worth summarizes some of his biography here. Born March 27, 1932, he was raised in New York, and earned both his Bachelor’s Degree (1951) and Master’s Degree (1953) at the University of Chicago, then as now a hotbed of intellectual cross-pollination especially in the social sciences. Levine continued on at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations earning his PhD there in social anthropology (1958), with a project utilizing his fieldwork among the Gusii of East Africa. Levine’s fieldwork with the Gusii continued in 1964 and 1974–76, and he also conducted fieldwork in Nigeria with the Yoruba (1961–2; 1963) and with the Hausa (1969). After 2 years at Northwestern University (1958–1960), he went on to teach at University of Chicago (1960–1976), and then came the call to Harvard where he has been since 1976 and is now emeritus after retiring in 1998. It is also essential to note Levine’s training at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, where he earned a certificate in 1971, and which was a critical component relating both to his personal development as well as, at the time, his nearly unique position to make the professional contributions he accomplished bridging psychology and anthropology.

Levine is best known for his dedication to multidisciplinary cross-cultural work devoted to the nuanced examination of child development. His many awards, fellowships, and service include: Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1971–2), Research Scientist Award, NIMH (1967–76), Member, National Academy of Education where he was Secretary-Treasurer (in 1988-93), President of AAA’s Society for Psychological Anthropology, Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Science (1989–present), Spencer Senior Scholar Award, Spencer Foundation (1990), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow (2004–2005), Career Contributions Awars, Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA, 1997), and Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education Research, American Educational Research Association (AERA) (2001). Notably he also held visiting positions in Hong Kong, 1994; 2001–2002), at the University of Hong Kong, and was a Fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala (1992–3). In addition to dozens of articles and chapters, Levine has published 15 books and monographs, including Nyansongo: A Gusii Community in Kenya (1963), Dreams and Deeds: Achievement Motivation in Nigeria (1966), Ethnocentrism (1972), Culture, Behavior, and Personality (1973), Culture and Personality (1974), Culture Theory (Shweder & Levine, 1984), Human Conditions (1986), Parental Behavior in Diverse Societies (1988), Child Care and Culture (1994), Japanese Frames of Mind (Simizu & Levine, 2001), Childhood Socialization (2003), Anthropology and Child Development (2008), Psychological Anthropology (2010), Literacy and Mothering (2012), and Do Parents Matter? (2016).

As evident in the titles listed above, Levine’s lifework reflects diverse but abiding interests in building a viable psychosocial science that bridges related disciplines including psychology and anthropology, but also child development, psychoanalysis, poverty studies, and demography. A staunch advocate for interdisciplinarity and hybrid multimethod, multidisciplinary approaches in the best sense of clear thinking and cogent, systematic hybrid investigations, Levine’s approach both resonates with similar calls in modernity and also reflects continued struggles in the social sciences and in the humanities with respect to the issue of what degree disciplines should remain distinct and siloed, and to what extent collaboration is desired or essential. His life project calls to mind issues more salient for the relevant disciplines than the content of the more narrow, specific geographic regions or villages he examined. For example, in seeking investigative methods appropriate for both unpacking local knowledge and thick descriptions and meanings in small scale village communities but also appropriate for providing insight into larger scale societal and even national and international transformations under globalization, Levine’s work recalls work by C. P. Snow on the two cultures of scholarly inquiry, the sciences and the humanities, as well as more recent attempts at unification of psychology and academic disciplines such as those respectively by Sternberg (2004) and by Wilson (1998).

The present volume, skillfully edited by Robert Levine’s former student and scholar in his own right, Dinesh Sharma, in my view, is essential for the library of any faculty member working at the intersection of anthropology and psychology or related disciplines, such as psychological anthropology or cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, culture and personality, or Indigenous psychology. Here, sensibly organized and gathered all in one affordable place, are the key chapters and articles from Levine’s impressive decades-long in-the-making oeuvre. The volume begins with a preface by Byron Good, the eminent medical and psychological anthropologist at Harvard University, whose own career intersected with Levine’s at both Harvard, and at University of Chicago where Good earned his PhD in 1977. Next, the book’s editor Dinesh Sharma offers an insightful orientation to the volume, situating Levine’s thought in the context of larger scholarly trends, and describing his interdisciplinary approach and model, such as noting Levine’s conceptualization that human parental behavior intersects, based on his research and theorizing, with organic hardware (e.g., universal constraints, mammalian heritage, epigenetic change), ecological firmware (e.g., population specific socioeconomic conditions, institutional constraints and opportunities, resources and technology, technological revolutions, poverty reduction, and urbanization), and cultural software (e.g., population specific cultural models, scripts, meanings, goals, members, and mental models and systems). Such a holistic approach resonates with more recent psychological and human development models, such as the influential model of Urie Bronfenbrenner (1981), that insists that to understand human behavior, scholars must look beyond the individual focused classic theories by such persons as Freud, Erikson, Piaget, and Kohlberg, and examine aspects of development that are determined in part by influences more traditionally studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians. The introductory section also includes a delightful and insightful autobiographical essay by Levine that offers his personal point of view and recollections on many of the luminaries in the discipline; given his connection to Harvard and the University of Chicago as well as other institutions, his memories and interactions make a compulsive read, with descriptions of George Stocking, Margaret Mead, Clifford Geertz, John and Beatrice Whiting, Jean Briggs and Robert Levy, Mel Spiro, Ray Fogelson, and Erik Erikson to name but a few.

Next, structurally, the first section of the book focuses on the history of psychological anthropology, offering four classic chapters by Levine. Since Levine’ life, work, and career offered many periods and moments of immersion with luminaries in the discipline, this insider’s account makes for a fascinating and informative read, and affords many moments to reflect on the discipline’s history, present status, and future directions. The first chapter in the section focuses on the classic culture and personality studies from 1918 to 1960, and Levine is careful to provide a thoughtful and moderate account of the movement’s accomplishments, as well as political, generational, and indeed research aspects and events that led to its demise, and eventual relabeling and transformation into related more modern disciplines such as psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, and cross-cultural psychology. The next chapter in this section focus specifically on Margaret Mead and her work and influence especially on the anthropology of childhood, including discussion of gender socialization, research methods, and the political and generational context that impacted both Mead and culture and personality studies. Finally this section concludes with chapters on “Plasticity and Variation: Cultural Influences on Parenting and Early Child Development Within and Across Population,” which offers much attention to Boas and William Caudill (known for cross-cultural examination of Japanese populations) and “Properties of Culture: An Enthographic View,” which is one of many points in this essay collection where Levine advocates for interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

The second section of the book focuses upon “Culture and Psyche” and includes six chapters by Levine that demonstrate his commitment to this line of inquiry and his careful attention to linking method to theory, and his abiding interest in multidisciplinarity. Chapters here also reflect the history of medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology in the 20th Century, as all rely heavily on the influence of psychoanalysis. Chapters in this section include: “Psychoanalysis and Other Cultures: An African Perspective,” “Freud and Anthropology: Why a Freudian Anthropology?” “Themes and Variations of Freudian Anthropology,” “Is the Oedipus Complex Universal: Explorations in Freudian Anthropology,” “Freud and the Social Sciences” and “Asian Explorers of Psyche and Culture: Sudhir Kakar and His Contemporaries.” These chapters reflect Levine’s training in psychoanalysis coupled with his Harvard anthropology PhD, and include discussion not only of Freud, but of other thinkers deemed relevant to the intersection of culture and psyche by Levine, including Erikson, Heinz Hartmann, Durkheim, Frazer, Boas, Malinowski, Roheim, Spiro, Otto Rank, Demos, Kardiner, Kakar, and the sociologist Erving Goffman. A working knowledge of some of Freud’s classic later works on society would be optimal to access and appreciate this section most fully, such as his work in Totem and Taboo (1913), Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and its Discontents (1930), and Moses and monotheism (1939). The issues raised in this section remain relevant today, transformed perhaps from the focus here on the possibly universality of the Oedipal Complex to frequently more general inquiries regarding the existence of cultural universals in modernity (Brown, 1991).

The book’s third section is entitled “Person-Centered Studies of the Gusii in Kenya,” and it offers five significant chapters by Levine. While some of the studies were conducted and reported decades ago, they remain valuable not simply as a snapshot into Gusii culture at that moment in time, but also for the stimulating theory and application that they suggest via Levine’s astute analyses and commentaries; thus, the value of this section has scope far beyond interest of Africanists, to all cultural psychologists and psychological anthropologists with interests in theory and methodological best practices. The first chapter in this section is titled “Outsiders’ Judgments: An Ethnographic Approach to Group Differences in Personality,” and among other issues, describes a method of reputational evaluation whereby geographically and culturally distinct groups may rate other groups on various scales and assessments, adding interesting nuances to ongoing debates over emic versus etic approaches. The next chapter addresses “House Design and the Self in an African Culture,” and offers fascinating and insightful analysis of how architecture and home design reflect and reinforce cultural values, including dimensions of gender, status, lifespan development and aging, and rites of passage. The analysis calls to mind Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958), in its prescient unpacking of domestic space and meaning. Later chapters in the section take a lifespan development approach to the Gusii, with one chapter titled “Adulthood Among the Gusii of Kenya,” another focused on “Gusii Funerals, Old and New,” and the last titled “The Self in Culture.” In this last chapter, Levine acknowledges the analytic power of diverse and eclectic theory, including Bruner, Crapazano, Devereux, Freud, Gertz, Goffman, Hallowell, Hymes, Kohut, Mauss, Obeyesekere, Radcliff-Brown, Turner, Van Gennep, and more. This application of, and tour through, classic and then contemporary theory will inspire many readers to visit a number of these thinkers and perhaps other essays and full books by Levine, as the topics and issues they address remain relevant in 2022.

The book’s fourth section is titled “Comparative Studies of Human Development,” and includes four evidenced based chapters. Here chapters included “A Social Science Perspective on Childhood Experience in India,” a chapter coauthored by Dinesh Sharma entitled “Child Care in India: A Comparative Developmental View of Infant Social Environments,” a chapter entitled “Women’s Schooling in Asia and Africa: New Questions and Answers,” and on called “The Semantics and Semiotics of Attachment.”

The final section of the book, Part V: Conclusion, is enormously valuable in that it offers five chapters by eminent scholars who each offer a commentary chapter and perspective on Levine and his influence and career from their diverse perspectives. Dinesh Sharma, editor of this book, and former Levine student, begins the section with an interview on “Literacy, Mothering and Demographic Change” with Sarah E. Levine and Robert A. Levine. Next, eminent cultural psychologist of the University of Chicago, and Harvard Social Relations PhD, Richard A. Shweder offers an incisive critique as well as tribute to the enduring power of Levine’s life’s work in his chapter “Commentary: The Cultural Psyche.” Then, Thomas S. Weisner weighs in with his “Commentary: The Cultural Psyche, or the Work of Culture in Psychology.” Weisner brings the perspective of an emeritus professor of both psychiatry and anthropology at UCLA, who also earned a 1973 PhD in Social Relations from Harvard. The section next moves to a chapter by Parker Shipton, Boston University Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, titled: East Africa, Ethnology, and the Levine Legacy,” which helps situate Levine’s fieldwork and theorizing in East Africa with contemporary concerns, and brings renewed attention to the value of this work which may be now less familiar to specialists in social theory and to non-Africanists. This final section smartly concludes with an essay by Levine himself, offering his recent self-reflection and point of view on his own career and the current state of the discipline as of 2020, when he provided these “Comments Delivered at the Centennial of Harvard Graduate School of Education.” As added bonuses, the book concludes with set of photographs illustrating various times and places in Levine’s career, and also prints Levine’s bibliography, which alone is wonderful to have as a resource and reading list for years and generations to come.

The call to action regarding mixed methods and multidisciplinarity for optimal study of human development made by Robert Levine beginning 50 years ago, remains true today, and perhaps ever more so. There are one million psychologists around the globe, and psychology is growing more rapidly outside Western Europe and the USA rather than within those regions (Zoma & Gielen, 2015), yet research participants, researchers, and theories still far too often reflect a dire lack of diversity, as recently well-articulated by Joseph Heinrich and his colleagues in their term WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic) used to describe the types of samples and nations typically included in psychology research even today (Heinrich, 2020). Signs of change include the continuing strength of the AAA’s Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) and its journal Ethos, the Society for Cross-Cultural Research (SCCR) and its multidisciplinary journal, Cross-Cultural Research, and in the last 25 years, the founding and growth in APA of its Division of International Psychology, which publishes the journal, International Perspectives. Each of these organizations in recent years has published and accepted work that reflects mixed methods and interdisciplinarity, often in ways that would align with Levine’s thinking. Cross-cultural approaches to human development are finding their way into the textbooks (e.g., Gielen & Rich, 2017; Rich et al., 2017) and psychology curricula as well (e.g., Takooshian et al., 2016). While it may seem as though psychology has been heavily quantitative for much of its history, it is critical to remember that many of its pathfinders, such as Freud, Erikson, Maslow, Piaget, and Kohlberg, utilized qualitative, even idiographic and biographical, methods extensively, and a number of contemporary psychologists are renewing the call for judicious, appropriate use of such methods (e.g., Rich, 2017) without abandoning the careful use and interpretation of quantitative data and methods when warranted. Likewise, many anthropologists now include quantitative methods in part of their training, along with qualitative fieldwork and interviewing, as reflected in leading textbooks (e.g., Bernard, 2017), facts that should please Levine and reflect his vigorous and well-placed advocacy, as well as his leading by example.

In sum, it is difficult to put the book down in any way. It focuses on an undeniably eminent leading senior scholar in the discipline whose influence has been felt for decades, and it includes a carefully curated collection of key chapters and articles from the various aspects of Levine’s work central to his towering reputation. Finally, unlike many academic books these days, this nearly 400 page volume is attractively priced at under 50 US Dollars, making its adoption as a primary or supplemental proseminar text within reach of many. It goes without saying it should be within easy reach on every scholar’s bookshelf. Find this book, think, be inspired, and savor!