Overview

Was Edward Sapir’s perspective on culture and personality groundbreaking, or should we regard it as just one more theory that reached a scientific dead-end? Exploring the Interplay of Edward Sapir's Anthropology and Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Culture and Subjectivity introduces a fresh perspective to traditional anthropological discourse by exploring Edward Sapir’s insights into culture and personality relationship alongside Jacques Lacan’s theories on the individual and collective. This book reassesses the dynamics between subjective and social realms, paving the way for potentially a new anthropological model of subjectivity and the definition of culture. Exploring the historical context of anthropology-psychoanalysis relationships, this book synthesizes diverse conceptions of culture and personality through an interdisciplinary lens. By leveraging Lacan’s theoretical framework to interpret Sapir’s bold ideas on the culture-personality dyad, it assesses integrating Lacanian subjectivity into the culture-individual relationship, bridging commonalities between the two fields and introducing insights into their interdisciplinary interplay. This book summarizes key findings from Lacanian subjectivity theory and examines a new perspective on the process of cultural transmission and socialization by highlighting Sapir`s pioneering view on the relationship between the individual and society. It also addresses ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions in anthropology through Lacanian dynamics of desire.

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9781666967227

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Reviews

""Not much attention has been paid to the possible connection between the linguistically based anthropology proposed by Edward Sapir, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, and the work of the revolutionary psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The thorough research accomplished by Lenart Kodre is breaking new ground. His investigations circumscribe the numerous points of intersection between the two thinkers, exploring the ways in which Sapir's conception of relations between the individual and culture can be envisaged in a new light through Lacan's concepts of the subject, the knot of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, the logic of desire and fantasy etc. Reflections on these encounters provide an expansive prospect of psychoanalytic contribution to anthropology, initiated by Freud's Totem and Taboo. Kodre's project is neither that of collapsing the distance between the two nor to keep the detachment of two separate domains, but to find the unexpected moments of truth in their intersections. This is a courageous and very necessary work."" --Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana

Author Information

Lenart Kodre is an anthropologist and earned his Ph.D. in 2016.

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