
Richard A. ShwederUniversity of Chicago | UC · Department of Comparative Human Development
Richard A. Shweder
PhD
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Publications (172)
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), customary female genital modification practices common in parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are inherently patriarchal: They reflect deep-rooted inequality between the sexes characterized by male dominance and constitute an extreme form of discrimination against women. H...
To the extent that the Dawoodi Bohra custom of circumcising girls as well as boys (1) has broad support among Dawoodi Bohra women, (2) is motivated by a gender-equal interpretation of the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 17 of the Hebrew Bible) traceable to the views and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, (3) is less physically invasive than a legal male...
Muslim women of the Dawoodi Bohra community have recently been prosecuted because they customarily adhere to a religiously based gender-inclusive version of the Jewish Abrahamic circumcision tradition. In Dawoodi Bohra families it is not only boys but also girls who are circumcised. And it is mothers who typically control and arrange for the circum...
This essay honors the life and work of Professor Kuo-shu Yang by addressing three questions: (1) What are the differences, if any, between cultural psychology and indigenous psychology?; (2) What is the role of reason in cultural interpretation?; and (3) Do the indigenous psychologies of different peoples have psychological relevance and applicatio...
Developmental theorists have struggled with defining the relations among biology, psychology, and sociocultural context, often reducing psychological functions of a person to either biological functioning or the role of sociocultural context - nature or nurture - and considering each area of human development separately. New Perspectives on Human D...
Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we...
To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need a diverse set of questions and methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods That Matter offers compelling and successful exam...
Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we...
In 1952 A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn formulated a definition of ‘culture’ that became a mantra for a generation of cultural anthropologists who came of scholarly age in the middle of the twentieth century. Little did Kroeber and Kluckhohn know that for the next 50 years the idea of ‘culture,’ in its anthropological sense, would be frequently de...
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of normal psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a sing...
Freely staying on the move between alternative points of view is the best antidote to dogmatism. Robert Merton's ideals for an epistemic community are sufficient to correct pseudo-empirical studies designed to confirm beliefs that liberals (or conservatives) think deserve to be true. Institutionalizing the self-proclaimed political identities of so...
Doctoring the genitals is compatible with a recognizable conception of social medicine. This commentary critically examines the distinction between medical and nonmedical procedures; presents an alternative account of Sohaila Bastami's personal reaction to the anonymous caller's request for referral information concerning hymen reconstruction surge...
This chapter examines academic freedom at the University of Chicago, which proudly thinks of itself as a Socratic, free-thinking, and contentious institution. More specifically, it considers the antiquarian view of academic freedom associated with two constitutional conservatives, both of them famous for their advocacy of judicial restraint: Suprem...
This book discusses the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinizes a variety of obstacles to such inquiry encountered in personal and professional experiences. This discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to...
This commentary on four theoretical articles published in this issue of Emotion Review discusses the one big thing that links them all and raises some questions about the ontological status of the appraisal part of appraisal theories of emotion.
The return of anthropological interest to the descriptive study of the moral foundations of social life is a very welcome development. Nevertheless, if there is going to be a new anthropology of morality, it must have something new to say about some very old questions. The first is the analytic question: what counts as a morality? The second and th...
In this wide ranging interview, Professor Richard A. Shweder from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, discusses whether it is or is not possible to be a robust cultural pluralist and a dedicated political liberal at the same time. In this discussion, Professor Shweder offers his insights - based on over 40...
Should there be gender equity in genital cutting? In Germany (and much of Europe), the native inhabitants tend to argue there is moral equivalence between customary male circumcision and customary female circumcision and both should be proscribed. In Sierra Leone (and several other countries in Africa), the native inhabitants tend to argue there is...
Stimulated by these three brilliant target essays this commentary raises a few questions about the universality of the emotions, the cultural psychology of natural kinds, and the analytic deconstruction of the idea of an emotion.
As the moral philosopher David Wong has noted (2006: xi): "The standard characterizations of [moral] relativism make it an easy target and seldom reveal what really motivates people who are attracted to it. Introductory textbooks in ethics frequently portray the view as an extreme variety of subjectivism (or conventionalism) in which anything goes...
Beller, Bender, and Medin should be congratulated for their generous attempt at expressive academic therapy for troubled interdisciplinary relationships. In this essay, I suggest that a negative answer to the central question ("Should anthropology be part of cognitive science?") is not necessarily distressing, that in retrospect the breakup seems f...
Reality testing is unavoidably grounded on metaphysical assumptions. Among reflective reality testers, a rather unconciliatory clash of metaphysical traditions has been going on for a very long time; perhaps for 2,500 years. So it is not at all surprising that the contemporary state of the art in the human sciences is in fact not all that different...
This chapter explores the consequences of globalization on the nation-state and demonstrates the insufficiencies of the zero-sum model. It uses history as a tool for hazarding “three auguries of globalization.” The first contemplates a future characterized by the rise of “universal civilization”. The second possibility pushes in the opposite direct...
The possibility of law in the absence of a nation would seem to strip law from its source of meaning and value. At the same time, law divorced from nations would clear the ground for a cosmopolitan vision in which the prejudices or idiosyncrasies of distinctive national traditions would give way to more universalist groundings for law. These altern...
In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, Stanley Katz (who now chairs the editorial board of this journal) invited the intellectual community to reflect on its own history of involvement in public affairs and to make good on its mistakes. This essay examines a single case of intellectuals involving themselves in public affairs and some...
This commentary aims to convince on two points. First, that this collection of chapters which has aimed at synthesizing developmental and cultural psychology, would be entirely unconvincing to Jean Piaget, if he were alive today. Secondly, that Jean Piaget is arguably right that it is not possible to be a developmental psychologist and a cultural p...
The objection, rightfully noted but then dismissed by Henrich et al., that the observed variation across populations "may be due to various methodological artifacts that arise from translating experiments across contexts" is a theoretically profound and potentially constructive criticism. It parallels Donald Campbell's concern that many cultural di...
The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion offers both parents and professionals access to the best scholarship from all areas of child studies in a remarkable one-volume reference. Bringing together contemporary research on children and childhood from pediatrics, child psychology, childhood studies, education, sociology, history, law, anthropology, and...
Fuambai S. Ahmadu is both a professional anthropologist and an initiated member of the Bondo society of Sierra Leone. This interview with Ahmadu by Richard A. Shweder on the subject of female genital cutting serves to contextualize a submission by Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin, who describes the changes of perception he and other members of the audience...
The aim of this essay is to distinguish between two types of liberals: imperial liberals versus liberal pluralists. The two types I have in mind are those who assume that liberal ways of life are objectively more valuable than illiberal ways of life and should replace them (for the sake of making the world a better place), and those (such as myself...
Abstract In this article, I honor Jerome Bruner's meaning-centered and person-centered approach to the study of cultural psychology by describing aspects of the cultural psychology of suffering in and around a Hindu temple town in Orissa, India. I also outline the “big three” explanations of illness (biomedical, interpersonal, and moral) on a world...
This tribute was delivered by Richard A. Shweder at the meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology in San Diego, California,on October 9, 1997.
This collection of essays — each of which was prepared originally for the “Friday Morning Seminar” of the pioneering Harvard program in medical anthropology — begins by describing itself as “an extended conversation about contemporary forms of human experience and subjectivity,” an examination of “what we consider to be the modern subject,” and an...
Schooling is always an act of hope. An older generation hopes to pass on its learning to those who follow, a free society hopes to engage a new generation in the project of self-governance, and an unequal society hopes to offer genuine opportunities for individual economic mobility and success. Adults hope schools will help students become economic...
Educators and policymakers who share the goal of equal opportunity in schools often hold differing notions of what entails a just school in multicultural America. Some emphasize the importance of integration and uniform treatment for all, while others point to the benefits of honoring cultural diversity in ways that make minority students feel at h...
The discipline called “cultural psychology” has been experiencing a major revival since the early 1980s. The aim of cultural psychology is to document historical and cross-cultural diversity in the processes and products of the human mind, based on the premise that “to be a member of a group is to think and act in a certain way, in the light of par...
Clifford Geertz, arguably the best-known and most influential American anthropologist of the past several decades, died of a broken heart on October 30, 2006, at the age of eighty—the result of "complications" following heart surgery. All this, according to initial death notices.
Two days later, on November 1, the New York Times published an obitua...
Clifford Geertz is the most influential American anthropologist of the past four decades. His writings have defined and given character to the intellectual agenda of a meaning-centered, nonreductive interpretive social science and have provoked much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding. As part of the American Anthropologic...
Within the terms of the federal regulatory scheme requiring institutional review board (IRB) oversight of federally funded research with human subjects, projects that are not federally funded are not mandated for IRB review. Eighty percent of social-science projects at the University of Chicago are not federally funded. This article is a critique o...
The paper will basically be an attempt to state what the author take to be: a) the main message of Walter Mischel's 1968 and 1973 critique of personality trait psychology; b) the connection between Walter Mischel's work and the work of Roy D'Andrade and Richard Shweder on the "systematic distortion hypothesis; and c) the good reasons for moving fro...
The systematic distortion hypothesis states that under difficult memory conditions judges infer what “must” have happened from their general model of what the world is like and/or find it easier to retrieve conceptually affiliated memory items. The hypothesis further states that lay conceptual schemes “tend to be innacurate with respect to how beha...
In this commentary I respond to John Searle's conceptual framework for the interpretation of ‘social facts’ as a provocation to spell out some of the philosophical foundations of the romantic pluralist tradition in cultural anthropology. Romantic pluralists in anthropology seek to affirm (to the extent such affirmation is reasonably possible) what...
The practice of determining who sleeps by whom in a family household is a symbolic action that simultaneously expresses and realizes some of the deepest moral ideals of a cultural community.
What are the universal ideals of morality? Is it possible to enforce them without imposing ones own parochial conception of things on others? And precisely how is that to be done?
Liberal democracies are based on principles of inclusion and tolerance. But how does the principle of tolerance work in practice in countries such as Germany, France, India, South Africa, and the United States, where an increasingly wide range of cultural groups holds often contradictory beliefs about appropriate social and family life practices? A...
We all know what a voluntary action is we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfil that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g. the juridical) and guide...
bymoving from the abstract to the concrete, by suggesting that the aims of “identity politics” are in tension with the Socratic educational ideals of the academy, and by contesting two particular, popular, and politically charged claims about how moral progress can be, or has already been, achieved in two areas of life. I will begin, however, with...
For decades now culture has been a topic anthropologists argue about: WHAT it does or does not mean, IF it should or should not constitute a central concept of the discipline. This essay steps outside these arguments to rephrase the issue and our approach to it. It explores WHEN it makes sense to use the cultural concept: Should we proceed inductiv...
The keynote speakers at the 2nd Asian Association for Social Psychology Meetings were asked to clarify the relationship among the three scholarly fields known as cultural psychology, indigenous psychology and cross-cultural psychology. Are they three names for the same thing? If not are they complementary or antagonistic enterprises? Does one appro...
Available Light Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Clifford Geertz. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000. 287
pp. $24.95, £15.95. ISBN 0-691-04974-2.
These 11 essays by the influential and controversial cultural anthropologist Geertz are bound together by the underlying belief
in the restricted scope of social science...
Many of us believe we recognize the symptoms of middle age: lower back pain, mortgages, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This particular construction of midlife, most often rendered in chronological, biological, and medical terms, has become an accepted reality to European-Americans and has recently spread to such non-Western capitals...
This essay is an edited and elaborated transcript of a tape recording of remarks made at the presidents' panel at the Bi-Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, San Diego, California, October 12, 1997.