Exploring the Interplay of Edward Sapir’s Anthropology and Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Culture and Subjectivity

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.

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