Psychological & Psychiatric Anthropology

Psychological and psychiatric anthropology are two fields concerned with a number of issues around the interaction of social structure, cultural processes, and human psyches. Related fields include cultural and social psychology, cross-cultural or transcultural psychiatry, psychiatric epidemiology, the old “Culture and Personality” studies in
anthropology and the related literature on “national character” in sociology and political science, as well as aspects of medical anthropology and sociology. This page draws together various resources for researchers in these areas.

1. Professional organizations
2. Departments with historical strengths in psychological anthropology and related fields
3. Funding sources for research and graduate study.
4. Language Resources for Cross-Cultural Research
5. Evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and other evolutionary perspectives

Also see my site on Culture-Bound Syndromes and the syllabus for my 2007 course in psychological anthropology.

Professional organizations

• American Anthropological Association
• Society for Psychological Anthropology and its journal Ethos
• Society for Medical Anthropology
• Society for Linguistic Anthropology
• Society for Anthropological Sciences - promoting scientific and empirically based research in anthropology. Great website with resources for teaching.
• American Psychiatric Association
• American Psychological Association
• International Association for Sex Research
• The Across-Species Comparisons and Psychopathology Society - For evolutionary psychiatrists, psychologists, and others interested in sociophysiological integration
• Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture
• WEDA -- Worldwide Email Directory of Anthropologists

Academic Departments, Centers, and Institutes

These programs and institutions have historical strengths in psychological and psychiatric anthropology and related fields, including human development, social and cultural psychiatry, etc.

Social Science Departments and Institutes

• Duke University: Department of Cultural Anthropology
• Emory University:Department of Anthropology
• Groningen University: Department of Social Psychiatry
• Harvard Medical School: Department of Social Medicine
• McGill University: Department of Psychiatry, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry and their Annual Summer Program in Social & Cultural Psychiatry
• University of Chicago: Committee on Human Development
• UCLA: Department of Anthropology, Center for Culture, Brain, & Development,
  and Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR)
• UCSD: Department of Anthropology and Department of Cognitive Science
• University of Kent: Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing

Funding Sources

Research Support
• Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR at NIH)
• NIMH - National Institute of Mental Health
• National Science Foundation - Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
• Foundation for Psychocultural Research - supporting and advancing interdisciplinary
  research projects and scholarship at the intersection of psychology, culture, neuroscience & psychiatry.
• The Spencer Foundation funding for education-related research.
• The Wenner-Gren Foundation - offers funding for anthropological research at every level.
• William T. Grant Foundation - focuses on improving the lives of youth ages 8 to 25 in the United States, mainly by providing grants primarily for high-quality empirical studies.

Postdoctoral Programs
• Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
  Each year the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey, invites fifteen to twenty scholars to spend an academic year in residence as Visiting Members, pursuing their own research. It welcomes applications in economics, political science, law, psychology,sociology, and anthropology. It encourages social scientific work with an historical and humanistic bent and also entertains applications in history, philosophy, literary criticism, literature, and linguistics.

Also, check out my list of general funding sites for the social sciences

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Language and Ethnographic Resources

• http://www.yourdictionary.com/ is a portal for online dictionaries, providing links to more than 1800 dictionaries representing more than 230 languages.
• Ethnologue: database on languages of the world
• Docuseek: the combined collections of four leading distributors of independent documentary film & video, representing over 3,200 titles, are now searchable.
• Indigenous Peoples: a library of over 500 documents relating to indigenous peoples throughout the world, including Native American tribes, the Maori, Australian Aborigines, the Sami, and others. Hosted by the New Zealand Digital Library project.

Evolutionary Psychology and Sociobiology

• Evolutionary Psychology: "The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it. In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones."
• Human Behavior and Evolution Society
• The site for Memes & memetics
• The Rutgers research group on evolution and higher cognition has set up a web archive of their recent papers on mindreading, pretense, rationality, and mental disorders.
• Darwin and Darwinism
• Tree of Life - a web-based attempt to represent current understandings of the evolutionary relationships among current life forms on earth
• Selected papers and commentary on various aspects of evolution, both current and historical, managed by Donald Forsdyke. The site will in due course also contain the entire Darwin correspondence which is being published by Cambridge University Press.
• The Stephen Jay Gould Archive: Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was among the best known and widely read scientists of the late 20th century. A paleontologist and educator at Harvard University, Gould made his largest contributions to science as the leading spokesperson for evolutionary theory. His monthly columns in Natural History
  magazine and his popular works on evolution have earned him numerous awards and one of the largest readerships in the popular-science genre, penning over twenty successful books throughout his career.