One of Debbie Custance’s formative memories was a talk by ecologist John Crook about Ladakh, a region on the borders of Tibet.  This culture practises polyandry: typically, a woman will marry two brothers.  Women can also become shamans.  Crook suggested that women, who find themselves having to look after two men under the supervision of a powerful mother-in-law, suffer hysterical attacks, and seek the shaman role as a way out of intolerable psychological pressures.  As the audience emerged, Custance heard Crook being dismissed as a “functionalist”: his view that hysteria was a function of circumstances showed that he was approaching the question from a narrowly Western point of view.  And wasn’t insanity a Western cultural construct anyway?  Having labelled him, the anthropologists in the audience dismissed his ideas without further discussion.
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But closed minds make for bad science.  Custance believes that it is high time that those who work in psychology, sociology and anthropology began a serious dialogue about what they are doing.  Each discipline should have much to learn from the others: it should be possible to work out a common underlying paradigm for all three.  But work and time pressures on academics typically mean that there are no points of contact where these interchanges can occur. 
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As a comparative psychologist, she is no enthusiast for the extreme reductionism of evolutionary psychologists like Tooby and Cosmides, but she believes it is right to question the standard “tabula rasa” paradigm of sociology and anthropology, where genes count for nothing and culture for everything.  And the traffic in ideas need not be all one way: she admires anthropologists like Steven Mithen, who wrote “The prehistory of the mind”. 
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Moreover, all the social sciences need to learn from genetics.  Psychologists like Robert Plomin, author of the classic “Behavioural Genetics”, have shown that it is possible to analyse the contributions of both nature and nurture.  It may be that where individuals are concerned, cultural influences are dominant: in one phrase: “biology whispers, culture yells”; but the interaction between the two can still be highly significant. 
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Geneticists no longer argue that genes determine behaviour; but it is foolish as well as ignorant to deny that they have some effect.  Custance believes that there is there is the potential for good and bad programmed into each of us: it is up to us to choose which path we follow.  Only if we understand our limitations, though, can we make a sensible choice about what is possible for each of us. 
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“What is to be done?” as Lenin said.  Custance has one practical suggestion: why not organise a half day of informal talks at Goldsmiths, where interested people from the Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology Departments could get together.  Interested participants would speak for just ten minutes on their own research interests and general approach.  Afterwards, everyone would meet over a drink to discuss their ideas further.  Now there’s an idea we can all subscribe to ….
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(Interview with Rory Allen)