In Memory of Harvard Anthropologist Robert A. LeVine

Professor Robert A. LeVine (1932–2023) was my teacher and mentor. He was a like-minded person who quickly became my intellectual ally and, ultimately, a dear friend. Bob was one of the very last scholars who witnessed and operated within the framework of the Culture and Personality school and who, at the same time, contributed the most to radically redress its fallacies. In so doing, he set the foundations for the kind of psychological anthropology we practice today.

Professor LeVine was one of the six pairs of graduate students John and Beatrice Whiting sent in the 1950s to the world’s four corners for their well-known ethnographic study on comparative childhood development. His longstanding interest in the Gusii of Kenya, Africa in general, and developmental anthropology started then. Yet Bob was also the person who, profoundly fascinated by the deep reaches of psychoanalysis, received full training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1960s and became a staunch Kohutian, despite the Freudianism in which he had been enculturated by the Whitings (indeed, he was a direct student of Heinz Kohut at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute). While he always remained appreciative of many of Sigmund Freud’s intuitions, he felt that the concept of the self that Kohut proposed (albeit only after the death of Anna Freud, as Bob always liked to point out) was better positioned to reflect the inextricable and profound interdependence he had discovered between socio-cultural environment and individual psychic processes.

Professor LeVine published extensively on a wide range of topics—childhood development, ethnocentrism, the critique of attachment theory, the history of psychological anthropology, maternal literacy and its ramifications, etc.—but psychoanalysis was always at the center of his personal attention. Bob expressed his regret many times with me for not having been able to actually “do psychoanalysis in the field” the way he had wished to do it, which he had theorized about in his most valuable conceptual contribution to the field: Culture, Behavior and Personality: An Introduction to

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the Comparative Study of Psychosocial Adaptation (1973; 2^nd ed. 1982). He did not fetishize the clinician’s consulting room and believed true, legitimate psychoanalysis could be performed in a naturalistic environment.

Beyond setting the theoretical foundations for a type of ethnographic work—person-centered interviewing—that has become today a sine qua non for any meaningful psychodynamic ethnographic work, Culture, Behavior and Personality contains the one principle that I have come to consider the most important for an ethnographer who engages their interlocutors psychoanalytically and psychodynamically. Bob LeVine (1982) writes: “Individuals, and only individuals, can be psychoanalyzed. Customs, institutions and organizations cannot be, and any attempt to do so involves dispensing with those elements in the clinical method that give psychoanalytic assessments their validity” (p. 209). In its courage, intellectual honesty, and academic rigor, this principle has been the one that has most crucially informed my work in the field as a psychodynamic anthropologist and the one yardstick against which I have always evaluated my and others’ work. The wisdom and knowledge that Professor LeVine has conveyed to us over the years were only matched by his friendliness, down-to-earthness, and the profound respect he granted to everyone, no matter what, for the very fact of being human beings. He is sorely missed.

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