Search

The concept of 'culture', as used in anthropology and related fields, has been under continual and mounting criticism for several decades. This paper argues that while this concept needs indeed to be scrutinized and problematized, we are nonetheless much better off with it than without it. By rejecting it, we would jeopardize, in particular, the vital interests of immigrants, refugees and other crossers of cultural boundaries, who need to learn about cultural differences to be able to flourish, or even survive (socially), in a new environment. Drawing on autobiographical cross-cultural literature, the paper shows how the experience of transcultural lives and transcultural 'selves' vindicates the 'culture' concept, despite its limitations, and how this experience points to a need for cross-cultural education, rather than for the abandonment of the concept of 'culture(s)'. At the same time, the paper shows how the results of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and especially those of the so-called 'natural semantic-metalanguage' (NSM) theory developed by the author and colleagues, allow us to better identify different cultural assumptions, values and understandings associated with different languages and to articulate different 'cultural scripts' in a way which would reflect the perspective of cultural insiders while being intelligible to outsiders. It also shows how the theory of 'cultural scripts', which is an offshoot of the NSM theory of language and thought, helps to refine the 'culture' concept and to make it more theoretically viable and more workable in practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strongly constitutive sociocultural perspectives in psychology have become more developed and influential in recent decades, particularly during the past 15 years. These approaches include constructionist, discursive, relational, dialogical, and neo-Vygotskian theories. They diverge from one another in some respects, but are alike in that they all consider psychological processes, such as mind and self, to emerge out of social, cultural, and historical contexts. This paper explores some central themes and commitments that inhere in these approaches, particularly with regard to how subjectivity is historically and relationally constituted. It emphasizes the importance of further legitimizing them within psychology and adjacent disciplines. It also points out some current limitations, suggesting that they risk what social theorist Dennis Wrong called an “oversocialized” conception of human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traditional theories of culture and socialization in the social and behavioral sciences have concentrated on how attitudes and values come to be "internalized" and thus shared by members of a collectivity. The emergence of practice theory challenges the classical theory of socialization and acculturation by shifting the focus of analysis away from explicit symbolic representations and towards tacit,motor-schematic procedures. In this paper I argue that even as they reject the traditional object of older socialization-based accounts, most practice theorists continue to operate with the same outmoded theory of socialization and acculturation inherited from classical sociology. I useWacquant's (2004) "carnal ethnography" of becoming a boxer to outline an alternative approach--grounded in recent research in cognitive neuroscience--which provides a more adequate explanation of how practices come to be acquired and transmitted from person to person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper explores whether a combination of intersectionality and hybridity perspectives will be sufficient to develop a feminist gender psychology of immigrant women that escapes the pitfalls of gender essentialism. Analyses of interviews with Indian immigrant women and self-descriptions of Filipina mail-order brides (MOBs) suggest that intersections of identity can ironically contribute to the essentialization of ‘self’ as well the ‘other’. We argue that essentialist representations among these women mask the role of power between various social intersections of gender. The various modes and contingencies of essentialist idealized representations may be interpreted as psychological strategies employed by Asian immigrant women to locate displaced identity within a transnational and postcolonical history. Further, we argue that the cultural psychological study of gender should examine the costs and benefits of such idealized representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the politics of gender circulating within the discourse of culture in psychology. Two complementary conceptualizations of culture are considered in relation to the politics of gender representation they either afford or disallow. Notions of dominant or mainstream culture typically portray gender as marginal or else as indicative of other markers of difference (whereby the over-visibility of gender reflects its tokenized, reified and homogenized status). Either way, both the centrality and intersectionality of gender and culture are overlooked in ways that bolster the liberal pluralism of multiculturalist discourse. Alternatively, discourses around culture that presume minority status currently function to indicate racialized difference. These not only reify cultural practices in ways that abstract and separate them from the contexts of their emergence and function and so feed into discourses of cultural pathologization, but they also privilege 'race' over gender and so, paradoxically, marginalize and even exclude some minority women's positions, interests and experiences. Within both discourses of culture, the contemporary romanticization and abstraction surrounding notions of 'community' is shown to marginalize gender-specific issues posed by the position of minoritization. Drawing on conceptual-political problems posed by prevailing discourses of culture and gender in relation to domestic violence, some examples are offered to indicate how re-conceptualizing the relations between culture, 'race' and gender can challenge and change theory, policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests a framework in which the importance of the individual dimension and agency can be reclaimed within a profoundly social and relational view of the self. Juxtaposed with recent research on the self, cultural-historical activity theory is discussed, including its foundational premises formulated by Vygotsky and its conception of the self articulated by Leontiev. Expanded in a number of ways proposed in this paper, this theory helps to theorize the self (a) in its practical relevance, as a lawful and necessary moment in human collective practices, (b) as endowed with the capacity to generate new cycles of practice, and (c) as immanent in activities that position individuals to contribute to meaningfully changing the world. The concept of ‘self as a leading activity’ is discussed as a way to capture what the self is, where it is located, and what its purpose and relation to society are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of basic internalization/ externalization processes as the vehicle by which socio-cultural meanings are turned into personal sense systems. Such systems guide persons' actions in respect to their environments. Social and personal worlds constantly mutually constrain each other in ways that lead to transformations in both. Internalization and reciprocal externalization occur as the person takes in and transforms social messages and other signs in self-talk (dialogues with oneself and imagined others). The theoretical account is accompanied by the specifications of empirical criteria for observing personal dialogues, and an empirical example is provided and analyzed in terms of the unfolding of the personal sense system in a task environment. The data of dialogues between police officers and a computer program about adolescent shoplifting reveal how these respondents transformed the computer input through their internalizing/externalizing operations, by interpolating specialized knowledge and personal beliefs, taking up prior expressions, and going beyond the social material that was given in the task. This account of internalization/externalization extends sociogenetic approaches to explain how the human mind functions as both a social and a personal organized system. KEY WORDS: externalization; internalization; microgenesis; ontogenesis; personal and collective culture; personal sense; social meaning [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We elaborate on the relationships between the notions of border, discourse, and culture. Vološinov and Bakhtin offer a theory of discursive practices that entails a conception of culture as dialogic transformation of both objective and subjective life through the folding and crossing of borders. Based on the theoretical elaborations of Vološinov and Bakhtin, we begin discussing classical and contemporary theories of culture, and end by discussing theoretical issues in applied research fields to show some implications of our reconstruction of these authors' dialogical theory of discourse. We propose that this theory gives to borders and borderworks a crucial role in the process of becoming of discourse and gives a special relevance to discursive processes in the more general social processes involving the establishment and trespassing of power-related boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I want to suggest a framework for the study of action that does not turn 'culture' and 'psychological phenomena' into two sides of a dichotomy, but which is sensitive to the context of action. This is called for in view of what seem to be genuinely interesting developments in our thinking about ourselves: for example, theoretical and empirical attempts to re-unite brain, body, words and world in such a way that it is no longer interesting to speculate merely about what is 'in', and opposed to what is 'outside', the individual. Briefly, I propose a definition of culture that seems to offer productive empirical possibilities. After this I suggest an empirical focus on task, participant(s) and situation, by way of explicating the resources and constraints operating during action-in-context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary welcomes Held's (2020) article on epistemic violence in psychological science. When psychologists employ social categories, such as "Black people" or "the Japanese" as "fixed factors" in their experiments, they may ignore the social construction of these categories within a cultural context. This can lead to cultural conceptions being enshrined in a methodology that has a tendency to essentialize social categories, with their inferred psychological attributes simply becoming a question of their "accuracy" or "inaccuracy" and not about the history and ideologies within which they are formed. Cultural psychology and Indigenous psychologies challenge this ideological neutrality of social categories, which is illustrated by Hinton's cultural model of stereotypes. Ignoring the evidence that traditional academic psychology is a cultural psychology (rather than an objective science) simply maintains the dominant ideological structures of epistemic violence within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two conceptualizations of time— kairic and prophetic —to illustrate the semiotic multistability of time: the Gestalt-like switch between conceptualizations. We will use two well-known novellas about time and salvation (by Charles Dickens and C. S. Lewis) to explore how the features of these two schemata cluster together thereby creating these two different understandings of time, while simultaneously blocking the view to each other. Finally, we will explore how the tensions between these two schemata are of interest for the logic of psychological science. It will be argued that many of the classic tensions within psychology speak to the multistability of our conceptual schemata regarding time and causation, something that is particularly exemplified by the challenges posed by Peirce's notion of abduction. As we opt for one vision of time, we occlude others, even as we remain aware of their presence just beyond our conceptual reach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular conception of the “intelligence,” or g, thought to be measured by IQ tests, is that of a cognitive “strength” variable that facilitates complex cognition such as reasoning and problem solving. Yet test items seem remarkably un-complex when compared with everyday cognition. Here, typical verbal and non-verbal test items are examined and arguments asserting their complexity are challenged. In contrast, several lines of research indicate how “real life” cognition is much more complex than that required by such items. The claim that an IQ-job performance correlation is stronger for more complex jobs is also challenged. This leads to the suggestion that other sources of variance, including cultural, affective, and other non-cognitive factors, may explain differences in test performance. An alternative explanation for the still-puzzling “Flynn effect” is proposed, with the idea that IQ differences reflect cultural “distance” (from possibly equal, but different, complexities) rather than a universal cognitive “strength.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article aims to distinguish between a sociocognitive and a sociocultural approach to forms of “collective” creativity. While the first is well-illustrated by studies of group or team creativity, the second has generally supported investigations of collaborative creativity, most of them performed in the last few decades. The comparison between these two fields takes different levels into account, from the epistemological position adopted to issues concerning the theories and methods used. Special attention is given to reviewing models of creativity. However, although the literature on group creativity contains several cognitive models, there is a scarcity of such constructions for collaborative creativity. This is why a secondary aim of this material is to introduce a sociocultural theoretical framework and discuss its implications for developing situated models of creativity. In the end, the similarities and differences between the two paradigms are examined with reference to both theory and research and arguments are given for why it would be beneficial for sociocognitivists and socioculturalists to engage in a more consistent dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay discusses the troubled history of the self in the social sciences in the light of two new books that examine the topic from different disciplinary perspectives—psychology and cultural sociology. The psychology text (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka) presents an impressive and wide-ranging elaboration of Dialogical Self Theory—an approach which conceptualizes the self as extended in both space and time. The sociology text (Illouz) examines the modern self through the lens of psychology's construction of it as flawed and deficient. Both texts converge on a dialogical analysis of the self's relation to culture (through the medium of psychology). Each is strongly recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue addresses a series of critical theoretical questions concerning the emergence and history of psychoanalysis in different cultural settings. Contributors from different parts of the world bring their particular local vantage points to bear on traditions of psychoanalysis, treated here as forms of clinical practice and as an array of cultural representations of internal mental states and social relations. The theoretical focus is in the status of psychoanalysis as a form of knowledge (positioned alongside and in contradistinction to psychology), on the nature of knowledge in psychology (of others by practitioners and researchers), and on forms of popularized self-knowledge (including the relationship between that self-knowledge and professional claims). The inclusion of such material in a psychology journal begs a series of questions about the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychology and the historical conjuncture at which it would seem appropriate to re-examine this relationship. This opens the way to a critical engagement with psychoanalysis in different parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a brief introduction to Silvan Tomkins, the man and his work, the interdisciplinary reach of Tomkins' theory of affect is demonstrated here in a collection of articles illustrating how affective engagement intertwines inner and outer reality. Susan Best rescues the ‘pleasure in looking’ from renunciation, consolation or a voyeuristic, suspect visual pleasure, and revitalizes aesthetics using Tomkins' conceptualization of affects, interest and joy. These affects suspend the viewer between objectification and identification, as interest leaves the art as object, while joy renders it a source of communion. Adam Frank demonstrates how lingering unspoken affective memory—bodily memory—uncannily shapes our negotiations with the environment, via skills or taboos: skills which remain as phantom ‘nervy guesses’ as to where a lost limb might have been; or taboos on looking limiting our visual pleasure. Doris McIlwain rezones pleasure, renews the promise of drive theory and maps how even transient affective states (or gaps in affective experience) become enduring personality dispositions promoting cascading developmental constraints regarding what we can feel about, and do to, ourselves and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In psychotherapy practice, a complex relationship exists between clients, culture and values. By drawing on psychology, philosophy and anthropology, we developed an interdisciplinary ethical framework for cultural psychotherapy. The framework, which reflects a hermeneutic approach, avoids the excesses of both an 'objective' view of ethics (and its relation to selfhood) and the social constructionist view, which tends towards relativism. To take this middle path, therapists need to do more than familiarize themselves with the professional codes of ethics set out for this practice. These ethical codes and the rules that constitute them are important, but they should not replace the difficult work of ethical thinking and judgment. These processes require psychotherapists to engage in the (often) difficult task of gaining a better understanding of a client's culture or context, including their conceptions of good, and critiquing or correcting instances where the therapists' own moral or cultural prejudices distort or compromise the therapist-client relationship. We also present a case example in which we illustrate the strength and relevance of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a dialogue between Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept of Bildung, Ernst Boesch's concept of culture as action field and Jaan Valsiner's concept of culture as semiotic mediation for psychological processes, comparing their respective implications for the understanding of self-other relations. The focus on self-other relations touches on the issue of 'self-culture engagement', since the other is understood as an active interactor who at every moment transforms the possibilities and limits of a given sociocultural constellation into concrete reality. This debate is felt to be justified by the connecting thread of hermeneutics, methodologically viewed as essential by the three authors being studied (Gadamer, Boesch and Valsiner) for understanding culture-self relations. On the one hand, in each of these theoretical propositions both culture and individual are similarly conceived as constructors of meaning and constructed by one another. On the other hand, some aspects of this process of meaning construction and interpretation of constructed meaning are conceived differently by each of them, leading to some differentiation in the 'hermeneutic task' as a route for deepening the understanding of the 'self-culture engagement'. From this perspective, a discussion on the propositions we can derive from their hermeneutic views with respect to the self-culture-other relations can be interesting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central concern for a psychology of culture is the question of how people come to commit themselves to 'shared' forms of understanding. Although the 'shared' or social nature of human understanding has received ample attention in different forms of cultural psychology, what is lacking is an account of the normative 'force' or compellingness of cultural forms. We argue that both phenomenology and social constructionism have failed to acknowledge the inherently normative dimension of social and cultural life. For an alternative grounding of cultural psychology we turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty. We show that at the end of his life Merleau-Ponty was working on a theory of meaning that acknowledges the normative dimension of our affective engagements in the world as well as the affective dimension of our normative engagements. We argue that this theory may be a powerful alternative for a social constructionist approach to culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue takes the binary of 'culture' and 'self' to be a problem of theorizing an entrenched dualism by simultaneously breaking down the dichotomy and re-theorizing its inherently contested members. In this introduction we describe briefly the problems confronting this theoretical project, the manner in which alternative frames of analysis can be brought to bear on the question, and the ways in which the authors of this issue have addressed their task. While eschewing the dichotomies of culture and self through an analysis of the experiences of body, emotions, colonization, immigration, gender, representation and language itself, these articles bring out considerations of culture and self that provide new opportunities for investigation, theory and understanding. We view this special issue as one that provides a range of tools within which to theorize the problematic of 'self and culture'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We try to show that the fundamental grounds of psychological thinking about the domains of 'culture' and 'the self (and their possible connections) are necessarily representationalist in the Cartesian sense. Rehearsing Heidegger's critique of representationalism as the basic wrong turning taken by modem thinking generally (and by psychology in particular) with respect to what human being is, we move on to the possibility of a counter-representationalist re-specification of the concept of culture. Here we mobilize ideas from Husserl and Heidegger (again), and also from the basic ethnomethodological theory of Sacks and Garfinkel, to argue for the primacy of culture as an order of practical-actional affairs that makes conceptualizations of a putative 'self' always an effect of, and subsequent to, that very (cultural) order. Accordingly, we end by briefly analysing an actual case of an explicitly cultural use of a supposedly intensional term, 'agree'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lack of integration is often identified as a fundamental problem in psychology and the social sciences. It is thought that only through increased cooperation among the various disciplines and sub-disciplines, and integration of their different theoretical approaches, can psychology and the social sciences make real progress. An increasing number of psychologists have recently been proposing that the theory of evolution must be accepted as the foundation of all the sciences that deal with human beings, including their behaviour and culture. I argue, however, that the ideal of integration is based on a mistaken idea of natural science as a seamless whole. Moreover, the close connection between language and mind entails the need for a different approach to behaviour and culture than the one offered by evolutionary psychology. Rather than to seek integration, psychology and the social sciences need to make the existing pluralism more productive. I argue that the concept of boundaries offers a good starting-point for reflecting on disciplinary diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The standard research programs in moral development have been criticized for adopting a narrow and restrictive view of the moral domain. There has been a dearth of alternative theories that account for the diversity of mature moral viewpoints both within and outside Western culture. We present an interactivist framework that takes into account the plurality of moral perspectives. It does so by addressing fundamental issues of psychological ontology and providing an account of values and the self based on the interactivist conception of knowledge and the knowing-levels treatment of consciousness and developmental stages. We discuss foundational questions such as the nature of the self, how it develops and the relationship between the self and values or morals, with special attention to the nature and source of value conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern writing has forced psychology to confront a series of problems pertaining to the nature of human consciousness, personal integrity and language. It invites us to rethink notions of undivided and unitary self-hood that have underpinned much orthodox empirical research and theory in the discipline, and it does so in the story-worlds of Progress, Reflection and Opportunity. At the same time as it performs a dispersion of psychological concepts, postmodernism has encouraged a spirit of deconstructive critique and challenge to the modern academic and professional apparatus of the `psy-complex'. However, `the postmodern', as a movement of sustained playful theoretical reflection linked to an account of a new cultural context for theoretical research, has now outlived its usefulness. Even the story of `the modern' that postmodernists pitch themselves against misleads psychologists, traditional and critical. The progressive potential of postmodernism has been exhausted, and those who engage in critical theoretical work in psychology need to attend to the ideological assumptions it carries about social relations and structures of power that threaten a radical political agenda in the discipline. The dangers that flow either from an optimistic naïve adoption of postmodern nostrums (relativism, amoralism, collectivism or autonomy) or from a pessimistic disappointed embrace of the alternative visions it incites (scientism, fundamentalism, individualism or organicism) need to be urgently addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]