S. Worthen | Weblog

Anthropology is only moderately interested in cross-cultural symbolism (even though it is a subject I wrote on in grad school) for two reasons. First, anthropology is strangely opposed to cross-cultural studies at this point in its history, primarily because of the attitude that each culture is unique and that there is no basis for cross-cultural universals or regularities. Second, efforts in this regard (e.g. Jung's original work, Joseph Campbell's pop-Jungian analysis, and Levi-Strauss's structuralism) have all been thoroughly discredited. Many archetypes that were thought to have some cross-cultural basis can now be shown to have been absent in areas that weren't in contact with the West.
However, in cognitive anthropology, a small but well-respected sub-field, there is still some interest in identifying the basis of some regularities seen in symbols and the meanings attached to them. However, the concept of archetype is no longer accepted, and it is also admitted that it is very unlikely that specific pairings of symbols and referents are not going to be panhuman - at best, they'll be found more often than would be expected by chance. I wrote a 50-page paper on this subject about five years ago, so I have a substantial bibliography if you'd like to see it.