The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are prominent figures in psychological anthropology, and they write about recent developments in this field. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, the early practitioners in the forties and fifties concentrated on studying cross-cultural variation in child rearing practices. While tensions between individual experience and collective meanings are still central to psychological anthropology, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approaches, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, and ethnopsychology have been introduced. Psychological anthropology's present scope includes the psychology of cognition and affect, to which it has made substantial contributions.