Ethnography, Comparison, and Changing Times

This article, based on Levy's Distinguished Lecture at the 2001 meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, summarizes his views on how the psychologies of actors and the community forms and structures in which they are embedded, dancers and their dances, are mutually constituted. In particular, he contrasts two distinct communities where he did field research: Piri, a small village in French Polynesia; and Bhaktapur, a religious city in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, suggesting that the particular cultures of these two places give rise to different forms of public life and childrearing, resulting in differing kinds of learning during childhood and ultimately in distinctive experiences of the self.