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The dictates of postmodernism require that I specify my own perspective. Obviously, there are an infinite number of statuses that influence anyone's personal perspective on anything. This is part of the postmodern dilemma. However, there is a restricted set of historical conditions that are relevant to a particular task. What is relevant about my history to the task that I have set myself in this essay is my relation to the disciplines of psychology and anthropology. Therefore, in talking about what psychology has to offer anthropology, I want to make it clear that I am not a psychologist talking about anthropology as someone else's discipline. Although I am in a department of psychology, I received both my degrees from the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, an interdisciplinary mix of social psychology, social anthropology, and sociology. For me, both psychology and anthropology have always been part of my tool kit. In fact, I am revising this essay from the School of American Research in Santa Fe, an institute for advanced study in anthropology. In discussing what psychology has to offer anthropology, I am therefore talking to myself as well as to my colleagues in anthropology.
Until quite recently, I, like Fish (2000), had given considerable thought to what anthropology had to offer psychology (Greenfield 1996). Like many cultural and crosscultural psychologists (Jessor, Colby and Shweder 1996; Triandis and Berry 1980), I was particularly impressed with the ethnographic method. How to reconcile this admiration from the field of psychology with the breast-beating and self-flagellation going on in cultural anthropology? In thinking about this problem, it suddenly occurred to me that the methodology of psychology had successfully addressed some of the principal problems identified by the postmodern critique of anthropology. I now believe that this may be why psychology has weathered postmodernism better than anthropology. By "weathering postmodernism better" I refer to an optimistic sense that the tradition of empirical research will continue to yield rich rewards in our knowledge of human nature.
Of course, my premise may be instantly rejected by cultural anthropologists, for empiricism itself is of course under attack in the postmodern critique (Geertz 1973). Along with empiricism, scientific generalization is also an object of derision. In the course of this essay, I hope...