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This excellent anthropological monograph clearly shows in its omissions that the orthodox anthropologist and the psychoanalytic anthropologist are simply arguing at cross-purposes. The author's point of view can be summarized in the following quotation:
'For Bert Crow Lance and Homer Buffalo, we maintain, judged
from the vantage point of any other culture than their own, would remain enigmas or examples of inexplicably bizarre behavior if we did not fall back on history—on the decadent pattern of the vision quest, on patterns now almost vanished of prestige and power-seeking, etc. But the problem of the ethnologist as we can see it, is not the reporting of the outlandish and the picturesque; it is the discovery of plausible motivations in terms of native meanings, the discovery of the essentially humane in its to us often disguised manifestations. In practice then, we can never know enough history either biographical or cultural, in explaining a present culture as it functions in individual acting in such and such a (historically conditioned) way' (p. 104).
The culture gives the individual a certain frame for his action or attitudes. Certainly nobody can choose the vocation of a university professor if he happens to be born an Andaman Islander. But within this frame the character and life of the individual is determined by the unconscious, by his own ontogenetic past; moreover, a historical sequence of culture patterns and forms is one thing and the psychological explanation of these culture patterns is another. Bert Crow Lance, mentioned above, goes out to fast for a vision which would make him rich. But before he has completed the four days his deceased mother appears to him in a vision and tells him that there are snakes around which endanger him (p. 102). It is evident that a psychoanalytic explanation of the vision is called for. If the author intends to give the reader a sense of the 'emotional immediacy' of peyotism (p. 103) we must repeat that the s