Richard Shweder, The Communitarian Impulse

Text of Professor Shweder's Address

RICHARD A. SHWEDER is a cultural anthropologist and professor of Human Development in the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree in social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, taught at the University of Nairobi and has been at the University of Chicago ever since. He is author of Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology and the editor or co-editor of many volumes including Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion; Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities; Ethnography and Human Development: Meaning and Context in Social Inquiry; Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development; and Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions). He also has a book under preparation, a collection of his essays entitled, Why Do Men Barbecue? And Other Recipes for Cultural Psychology.

During the 1995-96 academic year he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences where he returned for a second time to co-chair a Special Project on "Culture, Mind and Biology" and work on various topics in cultural psychology, including the development of self, emotion and morality and to prepare a handbook chapter on "The Cultural Psychology of Development: One Mind, Many Mentalities" for the recently published Handbook of Child Psychology. Professor Shweder has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio-Psychological Prize for his co-authored essay, "Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?" He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. He is currently co-chair of the Social Science Research Council’s Planning Committee on Culture, Health and Human Development; Co-Chair of the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation/Social Science Research Council Workshop on Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law; and a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Successful Midlife Development. During the 1999-2000 academic year he will be a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin.

• Sponsored by The Harold D. and Rhonda N. Roberts Memorial Lecture in the Natural Sciences. This lecture fund was established by the Roberts family in memory of Harold Roberts '08, a Denver attorney and water law expert and his wife, Rhoda Norton Haymes Harris '08, a former president of the YMCA and the first woman president of the Denver Council of Social Agencies.