About

Douglas W. Hollan is a distinguished professor and a cultural and psychological anthropologist whose primary focus is on how social experience affects health, including mental and emotional health, emotions, empathy, embodiment, and different states of consciousness and non-consciousness such as sleeping and dreaming. He employs person-centered interviews and observation to explore how emotional health and well-being are conceptualized across different times and places, and how these conceptualizations influence the experience of health and well-being. Hollan is currently co-director of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research-UCLA Culture, Brain, Development, and Mental Health Program, which integrates ethnography and neuroscience in the study of global mental health issues.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience

  2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Development of Culture Theory

  2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Emotional Entrainment in Crowds and Other Social Formations

  2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• From Ghosts to Ancestors (and Back Again)

  2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Selfscapes of Well-Being in a Rural Indonesian Village

  2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Selfscapes, Selfhoods, and Subjectivities

  2025-10-21

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This book explores cross-cultural similarities and differences of human subjectivity and selfhood through the concept of selfscapes. Utilizing an ethnographic and person-centered approach to the study of human subjectivity, Selfscapes, Selfhoods, and Subjectivities demonstrates that autopoietic processes are informed by the constraints of a social and material ecology acting on a particular person and by how that person is remembering and habitually responding to that history of engagement with the world. While the co-constitution of social and historical circumstance and individual reactivity and memory is universal, the way an autopoietic process unfolds within any given social ecology will vary, sometimes greatly, from person to person.   Drawing on a broad theoretical base, this book is essential reading for anthropologists, psychoanalysts, social psychologists, and anyone seeking to understand the varieties and particularities of human subjectivity and selfhood.

  PublisherDOI

• Affecting with and being affected by person‐centered interviewing and observation

  Ethos · 2025-07-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Person‐centered interviewing and observation—an ethnographic approach that attempts to describe and represent human behavior and subjectivity from the point of view of the acting, desiring, intending, sensing, reflecting, and attentive subject—inevitably engages the emotions and memories of ethnographers and subjects alike as they interact and affect one another in both intended and unintended ways. In this article, I provide two brief examples of such mutual influence from my early Indonesian fieldwork, and I discuss how such dynamics are implicated in anthropological theory and ethics. I argue that person‐centered interviewing and observation is a humbling practice that underscores experiential diversity and the limits of what we can know about others and ourselves.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hands in memory and in imagination

  Anthropology of Consciousness · 2024-06-19 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We use our hands for many tasks and sensory orientations, including eating, communicating, and bathing. We hold, and manipulate a variety of objects, artifacts, and people, feeling for warmth, coldness, texture, hardness, and softness. We approach people or objects with greetings, embraces, and caresses, and to shove, hit, or defend ourselves against other people and potentially dangerous things. Yet just because our hands play such a central role in so many aspects our lives, they may also play an inordinate role in our memories and imagination. This paper highlights the place of hands in memory and imagination and how these memories and imaginings, in turn, affect not only how we use our hands and for what purposes, but with whom we use them and under what circumstances.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Relational, but also Singular

  2023-06-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The chapter by Doug Hollan is concerned with what is seen to be a dialectic between an individual, insular, gratuitous inner life on the one hand and on the other common sets of received social, cultural, and material circumstances. Hollan's informants, Nene'na Tandi and George, are entangled in the world, but their being entangled is characterized by angles of observation and by associations of thought, memory, and image unique to them. Existence entails the developing and maintaining of a boundary and separation—what William James described as “absolute insulation”—between the self, its experiences and consciousness, and everything else in my world that does not possess the imprint of personal consciousness. This boundary is a porous, permeable, dynamic, and evolving one. An individual's “selfscape” is the emerging, implicit, systemic, moment by moment mapping of their embodied experiences onto the space and time of the contemporary socially, culturally, and politically constituted world. The concept of selfscape thus attempts to capture a spiraling, nonlinear, recursive, autopoietic process: the dialectic between received circumstances and the individual's experience of those circumstances. The concept suggests the limits of thinking in terms of social types or categories alone, including relationality; for an individual's “selfscape” is both singular and socially and relationally constituted, the autopoieticism both consciously managed and an unconscious and unintended flow (as manifested in dreams). Entangled in sociocultural ecologies, the individual's very presence alters those ecologies and the lives of others in both known and unknown ways; an interior scape of emotion and memory leads the individual to construct a particular kind of lifeworld for themselves and their consociates.

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamics and vicissitudes of empathy

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  Empathy is a notoriously difficult experience and concept to pin down exactly, being defined in different ways by different disciplines and in different historical periods. Empathic processes are also always in motion as people’s emotional states and perspectives change over time, and even from moment to moment, sometimes as a result of having been empathized with. Laurence Kirmayer has noted the special obstacles to empathy that obtain in a psychiatric clinic serving a diverse population in which the opacities of more severe forms of mental and emotional distress, and language and cultural differences, may challenge or impede successful communications between mental health workers and patients. Psychotherapeutic situations also expose how difficult it can be for a potential empathizer to track such dynamic flows of emotion and perception, and how often such efforts miss the mark, even when the potential empathizer is professionally trained and motivated.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jane C. Wellenkamp

  17 shared

• Daniela Heil

  16 shared

• Naomi Adelson

  York University

  16 shared

• Scott Clark

  University of Newcastle Australia

  16 shared

• Benjamin N. Colby

  York University

  16 shared

• C. Jason Throop

  University of California, Los Angeles

  3 shared

• Jeannette Marie Mageo

  2 shared

• Anton Ploeg

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• UCLA Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award (1995)
• Boyer Prize, Society for Psychological Anthropology (2013)