Making Culture and Making People—Comparative Constructivism1

IN THIS PAPER I WILL FIRST review what I mean by its title, then establish a framework for comparing and contrasting our two traditions of anthropology and psychoanalysis, and then use that framework to describe three "contemporary cultures" as they have been "made" by anthropologists. In doing so, I hope to lay out what I believe to be the mutual methodological and theoretical revelance of psychoanalysis and anthropology each for the other, and where I would like to see more collaborative work. In what follows I will be almost exclusively relying upon anthropological materials, rather than presuming to tell you what your own literature says.

Before that frame, I must pause and explain how a paper putatively about "contemporary culture" could include as its three cases a description of, respectively, a canoe building hunting and gathering society on an isolated and small Pacific Island, a hunting/gathering small scale agricultural society of the highlands of New Guinea, and a life history of a delusional odd jobber from Morocco. I follow this definition of contemporary man: all humans alive today. As a psychological anthropologist concerned with the comparative study of human development, these, and all of these, are my contemporaries. Any theory I build or modify must be broad enough to encompass them all.

I must also define what I mean by constructivism. Within anthropology (and here the word seems interchangeable with constructionism) it is that whatever "reality" is, it is in our context the product of an interaction between the people being studied and