8 - Cupid and Psyche: investigative syncretism in biological and psychosocial anthropology

Summary

Tension between body and mind has been integral to Western views of human existence. This ancient theme finds expression in a pair of adversarial lovers, the god Cupid and the mortal Psyche, whose remarkable durability in Western imagination attests to the persistence of the tension they represent. Cupid's arrows incite passions in their victims, implying a humoral causality in experience similar to the attribution: “hormones made him do it.” Psyche, on the other hand, embodies the human capacity to create a self-determined, evolved persona. Representing the divide between views of human behavior as determined or emergent, Cupid and Psyche have long been consigned to alienation in Western conceptions (Popper and Eccles 1983: 148–210).

Several conceptual trends in this and the previous century have, however, recognized synergy between biology and culture in human experience. Although Cartesian views had reinforced the distinction of mind from body (LeDoux 1986), the nineteenth century brought renewed efforts to unite these elements because the mind was considered the fulcrum of biosocial coevolution. Thinkers from Darwin to Freud (1895) subscribed to this notion, which, along with linear cultural evolution and “primitive mind,” was subsequently rejected by social anthropologists in favor of superorganismic views of self and culture (reviewed in Hallowell 1960; Kroeber 1917). Again, research directions diverged to social and biological paradigms for explaining human diversity. These paths collided spectacularly when sociobiological theory precipitated awareness that both paradigms claim overlapping explanatory domains: motivation, social behavior, and the constitution of self.