Mentalisation among Gusii people of western Kenya (MRes/PhD Anthropology)

据报道，肯尼亚西部的古西族人很少谈论精神状态，他们的当地语言ekegusii只有很少的词汇来描述独特的精神现象(R.A.Levine，1984)。在她的对话者中--7名带着年幼子女的古西族妇女--S·莱文指出，她们“惯常的表达方式是描述行为和事件……省略了他们个人的反应、意见和判断”(1979，第358页)。同样，R.A.Levine报告说，“正常的Gusii对话很少提到说话者或其他人的个人意图”(1984，第82页)，他对人们行为方式的调查往往会得出关于身体健康、经济状况或人们习惯行为的答案。我建议研究关注和理解内心体验的文化模式可能是这些观察的基础；精神化--即根据潜在的精神状态对公开行为的解释--是否会因背景而异，是什么导致了这种差异；以及意图在古西族道德判断中扮演的角色(如果有的话)。在回答这些问题时，我希望对正在兴起的心理人类学研究(例如，鲁尔曼，2011,2020)、认知中的文化差异以及关于道德和人格的人类学辩论做出贡献。

Gusii people of western Kenya have been reported to rarely talk about mental states, and their local language, ekegusii, has a thin vocabulary for describing distinctively mental phenomena (R. A. LeVine, 1984). Of her interlocutors - seven Gusii women with young children - S. LeVine noted that their "habitual mode of expression was to describe actions and events ... leaving out their personal reactions, opinions and judgements" (1979, p. 358). Likewise, R. A. LeVine reported that "normal Gusii conversation contains very little reference to personal intentions on the part of the speaker or others" (1984, p. 82), and that his enquiries into why people behaved the way they did tended to elicit answers about physical health, economic situation, or habitual behaviour of persons. I propose to study what cultural model of attending to and making sense of inner experiences might underlie such observations; whether mentalisation - i.e., the interpretation of overt behaviour in terms of underlying mental states - may vary depending on context, and what might drive such variation; and what role, if any, intentions play in Gusii moral judgement. In answering such questions, I hope to contribute to the burgeoning research on anthropology of mind (e.g., Luhrmann, 2011, 2020), cultural variation in cognition, as well as anthropological debates on morality and personhood.