Just How Many Different Forms of Culture Are There?

Responds to comments by H. Takooshian and J. K. Tebes on the current author's original article, "Many forms of culture". The current author argued that psychologists tend to focus on too narrow a set of cultures (ethnic and national cultures) and some dimensions of those cultures (individualism-collectivism, independence-interdependence). He then argued that there are a number of ways in which it would be important for psychologists to expand how we theorize about culture, do research on culture, and integrate culture into clinical practice and applied settings. He discussed religion, social class, and within-country region as three examples of under-explored types of culture (Cohen, 2009). Takooshian (2010) and Tebes (2010) pointed to a potentially expanded set of cultures beyond the three examples the current author focused most on (religion, socioeconomic status/social class, region) to include age, sex, sexual orientation, physical and mental challenges, and others. The current author agrees that these are good candidates to be considered cultures as well. Even within the same household (with people sharing ethnicity, nationality, religion, social class, and region of origin), adolescent teenagers hold certain cultural outlooks different from those of their middle-aged parents. This raises the questions of just how limitless the set of cultures is and whether every group is a culture.