3 28 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [73, 1971

psychology, imitating nineteenth century physics, should have nothing to do. Con- spicuous as these sets of taboos are, they are equaled by the avoidance of the body. Sex, puberty, menstruation are all treated as if they were sociological and not biological phenomena.

The other peculiarity of the remarks about psychology interspersed in the chap- ters is the desire to insist upon some kind of lack of continuity from childhood to adult- hood. Why it should be an ultimate sin against scientific and Commonwealth-based anthropology to postulate some kind of continuity within an experiencing organism, is not clear. But it is there, and the attempt to treat later stages in development is some- how relied upon to negate the importance of earlier stages, an approach with which we are not totally unfamiliar, for example in the work of Alex Inkeles.

Now for the meat of the matter, which is as sound and good as the treatment of psychology is tentative and groping. The contributions fall into three categories. A miscellaneous group on various aspects of psychology and their relationship to an- thropology includes Mayers introduction, Richards retrospective survey, Jahodas A Psychologists Perspective, and Barbara Lloyds Yoruba Mothers Reports of Child- rearing, which makes some sagacious comments upon the difficulties of handling such doubtfully valid questionnaire material. The conclusion reached from this set of ar- ticles is that not until anthropologists know so me d eve1 o p mental-not laboratory- psychology and psychologists have some experience of behavior of individuals in dif- ferent societies, will we get very far.

The second set of papers is based on African data and forms a valuable and com- plementary series: Goody on Kinship Fos- tering in Gonja; Spencer on The Function of Ritual in the Socialization of the Sam- buru Moran; Philip and Iona Mayer on Socialization by Peers: the Youth Organi- zation of the Red Xhosa; J. S. La Fon- taines TWO Types of Youth Group in Kinshasas (Leopoldville), a valuable urban study.

A third group of papers is disparate: Wilder on Socialization and Social Struc- ture in a Malay Village, which is interesting but would have been improved by more

comparative data on other Malay groups, the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia, etc.; An- thony Forges quite different paper on Learning to See in New Guinea, a state- ment of his very special and unique material on the function of art as a separate and untranslatable set of symbols among the Abelem; and Loudons study of Teasing and Socialization on Tristan de Cunha, which is a valuable addition to studies of social control in small isolated groups and should throw special light on Caribbean studies.

It should be recognized, however, that it is not only in British social anthropology that we find today this compound of sci- entism and the belief that any quantification is the sign of scientific work, and a fear of dealing with childhood and the unconscious elements in human psychology which mirror mans long past. But it seems odd to apolo- gize for giving any attention to a subject to which three English anthropologists have made the most significant contributions, Bateson, Gorer, and Turner. The rejection of Leakeys findings may not be unrelated. The principal claim of anthropology has been as a science which includes mans body and his evolutionary past, as well as his present, particularly as exemplified by primitive peoples in relatively intact societies. It may be remarked in passing that these essays often introduce such institutions as schools without any comment on the extent to which they are Western institutions, going to the other extreme from Malinowskis sco- tomazation of contemporary culture contact conditions.

The substantive contributions in this volume make it one which no serious stu- dent of socialization and enculturation pro- cesses can do without.

Personality and Politics: Problems of Evi- dence, Inference, and Conceptualization. FRED I. GREENSTEIN. Bibliographical note by Michael Lerner. Markham Poli- tical Science Series. Chicago: Markham, 1969. xiii + 200 pp., figures, indexes. $5.95 (cloth).

Reviewed b y FRANCES HENRY McGill University

GENERAL A N D THEORETICAL 329

Greenstein has long been interested in the study of personality and politics and the present volume is his attempt to pull to- gether his thoughts over the years on prob- lems of evidence, inference and conceptual- ization. He argues strongly that while poli- bical behavior can and is being analyzed by political scientists in terms of impersonal categories such as role playing, social char- acteristics such as class, sex and age, and the impact of situation and culture, the crucial input of personality is frequently over- looked. His thesis is that political actors are full blown individuals who are influenced in politically relevant ways by the various strengths and weaknesses to which the human species is subject. This being so, the study of personality and politics ought to be a developed subdivision of the field of poli- tical science but, in fact, it has attracted little attention primarily because scholars are not equipped to deal with the elusive con- cept of personality. Greenstein rather naively appears to assume that all that is necessary for the development of this sub- division is the ability to sift through the existing literature in personality and politics and be able to think clearly about the issues that arise in it. He admits however, that the existing literature is in a remarkable state of empirical, methodological, and conceptual confusion. The major aim of the book then is to sift through the literature in an attempt to diffuse controversies and channel schol- arly activity into constructive inquiry.

Greenstein presents a threefold classifi- cation of the literature: (1) studies using single case psychological analysis of indi- vidual political actors including both in depth biographical studies of individuals and in depth studies of the general population; (2) typological analysis of the psychology of political actors of which the best known are the studies of authoritarianism; and (3) aggregative analysis, including national character and other global studies as well as microscopic studies of behavior in groups. While some good work can be cited in each of these categories, Greenstein favors a more comprehensive and multivariate system of explanation such as that of M. Brewster Smiths A Map for the Analysis of Per- sonality and Politics which emphasizes the interrelatedness and interdependency of the

psychological, social, and cultural deter- minants of political behavior.

Chapter 2 deals with objections to the study of personality and politics and at- tempts to deal with such criticisms as the notion that personality cancels out, that social characteristics are more important than personal traits, that political and situ- ational restraints serve to limit the impact of individual action (action dispensability) and the like. Chapters 3-5 revert back to the threefold classification of the literature in which Greenstein draws upon the single case study of Woodrow Wilson by the Georges and the typological studies of authori- tarianism. Chapter 5 is potentially the most interesting for political anthropologists and culture and personologists because it deals with the problems of linkage between per- sonality structure and political structure and the ways in which psychological data can be used to explain system regularities. The conclusions reached here, however, may be of great importance to political scientists, e.g., the need to be sensitive to the many links in the inferential chain, but are not particularly eye-opening for our discipline. Similarly, the strategies for studying aggre- gation such as building up from small scale analysis of personality in social situations, relating psychological frequencies in a popu- lation to system regularities, taking account of the location of actors in the social and political structure, and working back from role requirements to personality types that fit them, are not new thoughts for psycho- logical anthropologists.

The main contribution of this book is that the major theoretical and methodo- logical problems arising in personality and politics (or, for that matter, personality and any other variable) are thoroughly discussed and analyzed by means of a very extensive explication of the existing literature. It is also written in a straightforward but en- gaging style that consistently holds the readers interest. I suspect, however, that it will not particularly enlighten those anthro- pologists who are already acquainted with the literature of culture and personality and political anthropology. An excellent anno- tated bibliography, although somewhat slim on anthropological contributions, adds to the usefulness of the volume as a reference work.