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

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.