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Cultural Psychology : A Once and Future Discipline
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Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 08:07:13 -0800 (PST)
From: Mike Cole
Cultural Psychology : A Once and Future Discipline
by Michael Cole
Hardcover $29.95 Harvard University Press 1996 ISBN 067417951X
Introduction
In the spirit of its title, this book explores the origins and possible future of the field of cultural psychology, the study of the culture's role in the mental life of human beings. I begin with a seeming contradiction. On the one hand, it is generally agreed that is the need and ability to live in the human medium of culture is one the central characteristics of human beings. On the other hand, it is difficult for many academic psychologists to assign culture more than a secondary, often superficial role in the constitution of our mental life. Moreover, when academic psychologists set out to convince the field that culture plays a central role in mind, they are marginalized within the field.
This situation brings me to my first question: Why do psychologists find it so difficult to keep culture in mind?
My efforts to answer this initial question take me into the history of psychology to discover how culture came to be so marginal to the discipline. I then review earlier efforts that relied primarily on cross-cultural methods to include culture within psychology's overall scientific program. My focus is on both the difficulties that these efforts encountered and the successes that they achieved.
Once I have explained why it has been so difficult for psychologists to keep culture in mind, despite many decades of effort by many talented researchers, I address a second question: if you are a psychologist and you believe that culture is a fundamental constituent of human thought and action, what can you do that is scientifically acceptable? My goal is to describe one principled way to create and use a culture-inclusive psychology.
Of course, this goal is by no means original. In recent decades many of scholars whose work will be discussed in the pages to follow have sought to make the case for a "culture inclusive" psychology on the grounds that so long as one does not evaluate the possible cultural variability of the psychological processes one studies, it is impossible to know whether they are universal or specific to particular cultural circumstances.
For example, John and Beatrice Whiting, anthropologists with a long term interest in human development wrote that :
If children are studied within the confines of a single culture, many events are taken as natural, or a part of human nature and are therefore not considered as variables. It is only when it is discovered that other peoples do not follow these practices that have been attributed to human nature that they are adopted as legitimate variables (1960, p. 933).
More recently the same argument has been made by Marshall Segall, John Berry, Pierre Dasen, and Ypes Poortinga, four psychologists who have spent decades engaging in such work:
...given the complexities of human life and the importance of culture as a behavioral determinant, it obviously behooves psychologists to test the cross-cultural generality of their principles before considering them established. It is obvious, then, that the scientific study of human behavior requires that employ a cross-cultural perspective. (1990. p. 37)
This line of argument seems so commensensical that it may be difficult at first to understand why such a patently correct point of view does not have the corresponding effect on the discipline. Why isn't cross-cultural research fully integrated into psychology's project of establishing basic principles of human behavior? A simple answer, the complexities of which I will spend a good deal of time deconstructing in later chapters, is that general psychology does not know what to make of a good deal of the data that cross-cultural psychologists produce because the research does not live up to the methodological requirements of the discipline.
Among those interested in exploring the role of culture in mind a rather sharp and well articulated division of opinion has developed to respond to the dual facts that cross-cultural research is widely ignored and that its findings are difficult to interpret. Many cross-cultural psychologists believe that increased attention to problems of methodology will eventually lead to cross-cultural psychology's integration into the mainstream of psychological research (e.g. Segall et. al, 1990). From this perspective, the problem can be solved by rigorously applying known methods. In place of the all-too-prevalent one shot experiments, it is agreed, what is needed are multi-cultural comparisons that allow "unpackaging" culture as a variable so that firmer causal conclusions can be reached. The effort to "unpackage" culture leads the psychologist naturally into interdisciplinary work with anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists both as a source of methods for making the appropriate observations and as a source of theoretical ideas about how to handle the resulting complexities.
A second group believes that not only cross-cultural psychology, but the entire enterprise of scientific psychology from which it derives, is so deeply flawed at its foundation, that an entirely new discipline for the study of culture in mind must be formulated. This latter opinion is expressed forcefully by Richard Shweder , who writes that for the general psychologist
there is no theoretical benefit in learning more and more about the quagmire of appearances--the retarding effects of environment on the development of the central processing mechanism, the noise introduced by translation of differences in the understanding of the test situation or by cultural variations in the norms regulating the asking and the answering of questions (Shweder, 1990, p. 12).
Rather, if you are a general psychologist, you will want to transcend those appearances and reach for the imagined abstract forms and processes operating behind intrinsic crutches and restraints and distortions of this or that performance environment (Shweder, 1990, p. 11-12).
In effect, Shweder is asserting that the cross-cultural strategy for introducing culture into psychology is simply misguided. No amount of increased methodological sophistication can rescue the enterprise. In its place he proposes not a re-furbished new sub-discipline of psychology, but a new discipline, which he calls cultural psychology. Rather than seeking to understand the mind as a general processing device, Shweder argues, cultural psychology sees the mind as "content-driven, domain-specific, and constructively stimulus-bound; and it cannot be extricated from the historically variable and culturally diverse intentional worlds in which it plays a coconstitutive part." Shweder looks to interpretive branches of the social sciences and to the humanities for the methodological foundation of this new discipline.
As will become clear in the chapters to follow, I have a great deal of sympathy for Shweder's critique of general psychology and his attempt to formulate an alternative which places culture at its core, instead of its periphery. I am also convinced that in formulating an alternative way to think about culture in mind, it is important to integrate knowledge from all of the humane sciences, which, as I will show, are a part of Psychology's birthright.
However, I am not entirely clear on the shape that an alternative discipline would take. The reasons for my ambivalence will be made clearer as the presentation proceeds.
I begin in Chapter 1 by looking at the pre-history of psychology as a discipline, adhering to the principle that in order to understand something, it is important to know its history. Chapter 1 inquires into the ways in which culture's relation to thinking was dealt with before Psychology came into being. In an important sense, Cultural Psychology was there "in the beginning." Of special interest is the link between the advent of Psychology-as-Science and the way in which cross-cultural research was conceived and conducted. In Chapter 2 I trace major attempts to apply the strategy of standardized cross-cultural research emphasizing both the problems of interpretation that it calls down on itself and its accomplishments. Chapter 3 describes attempts to improve standard methodologies by conducting multidisciplinary research on cognitive development that takes people's everyday experiences as a starting point. This approach can either be viewed as a "reform" of the standard experimental method, or an alternative methodology. It leads necessarily to coalitions with anthropologists, sociologists, and field linguists, not only to find "native versions" of existing tasks, but "native tasks" that are then modeled in experiments. At the time I was carrying out work in that tradition I referred to my work as "experimental anthropology and ethnography psychology."
Such an approach must own up to undoubted shortcomings. There are often unbridgeable gaps between an anthropologist or native's description of "native tasks" and what psychologists know how to experiment on. In addition, theoretically, such work is forced to assume the existence of a common, universal core of human nature, which, after all, is one of the questions that cross-cultural research is supposed to resolve! Despite its difficulties, this strategy has proven extremely fruitful as a means of decoupling various kinds of culturally organized experience and as way to provide an experimental critique of overgeneralizations based on work restricted to modern, industrialized, societies.
Beginning with Chapter 4 I turn to the search for an alternative formulation of the issues and the paths to their resolution. I take as my starting point the ideas of the Russian cultural-historical approach to psychology and sketch out the challenges such an approach must meet if it is to serve as a useful perspective for guiding psychological research. Chapter 5 begins the job of elaborating the Russian approach by proposing a conception of culture that, while consistent with their views, brings them into line with contemporary ideas in anthropology and the cognitive science. Chapter 6, using the notion of culture developed in Chapter 5, reexamines the question of culture's role in human origins and historical change. Chapter 7 applies the elaborated notion of culture to current evidence on child development.
In Chapters 8, 9, and 10 I focus on work conducted by myself and my colleagues over the past decade and half. Chapter 8 addresses a key methodological problem confronting cultural-historical approaches to cognition: how to ground one's analysis in the culturally organized activities of everyday life. Chapter 9 builds on the ideas presented in chapters 4-8 and seeks to demonstrate their utility by using them to create a specially designed forms of reading instruction that treat reading acquisition. Chapter 10 introduces a new methodology in which small cultural systems are created and studied in their institutional context over a period of years. It provides one way of analyzing culture and thought as a aspects of a collective process occurring over time.
In Chapter 11 I return to the two questions with which I began. I summarize my current understandings about what makes the study of culture in mind difficult and discuss various lines of theory and research that can serve as tools of psychologists who seek a deeper understanding of culture in mind.
I have no particular hopes that my ideas will lead to a coup in psychology, even if they were to convince many people. Psychology is a very deeply entrenched social institution that will not humbly assent to being usurped by a view that holds ALL psychology to be parts of cultural psychology! Perhaps those who argue for a new, post-modern, discipline of cultural psychology are correct; cultural Psychology will emerge along with other "mixed genre disciplines" such as cognitive science, history of consciousness, and communication are correct. If so, then I am offering one methodology and set of theoretical precepts for such a science. If not, I am offering a program of positive critical research for psychologists who choose to use it.
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