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ABSTRACT
Robert I. Levy's 1973 book Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands was a landmark study in the ethnopsychology of a non-Western culture, explicating not only the terms in which Tahitians experience mental phenomena but also the historical and contemporaneous contexts of social action and interaction that give those terms their cultural meanings and psychological salience. This article briefly reviews the features that distinguished the study at the time and in terms of which it remains an unsurpassed model for future research. Placing Tahitians in the history of ethnopsychology, the article suggests that ethnopsychological studies carried out by insiders trained in anthropology and/or clinical psychiatry provide a needed complement to the daunting achievement represented by Levy's masterwork.
[ethnopsychology, Tahiti, cultural meanings, ethnographic methods]
Ethnopsychology is a descriptive approach to human experience that raises difficult theoretical questions for psychology and anthropology alike. By describing the psychological categories indigenous to a particular culture, an ethnopsychological account raises the questions of whether Western psychological concepts are appropriate or necessary for understanding persons in non-Western contexts, and whether psychology as we know it is only of many culture-specific conceptualizations rather than a scientific theory of universal validity. At the same time an ethnopsychological account raises the question of whether experience, individual and collective, can be adequately understood in terms of indigenous cultural categories alone or requires the assumption of universal mental processes for a satisfactory explanation. These are issues of fundamental import in psychological anthropology and the human sciences more generally.
Levy's Tahitians played an important role in bringing these issues to the fore and stimulating ethnopsychological research during the 1970s and afterward. It elevated the standards for understanding psychological experience in a culture other than our own, and stands as a model for such investigations 32 years after its publication. In this brief article I shall focus on its contribution to ethnopsychology. This is less straightforward than it might seem because Levy did not use the word "ethnopsychology" in the book and did not place his own work in the history of previous studies in that field.
First of all, ethnopsychology has been independently invented many times by field workers who encountered people in another culture using vernacular terms to describe and explain what we...