TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Universalism without Uniformity - Usha Menon, Julia L. Cassaniti
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0001
[culture;psyche;cultural context;symbolic and behavioral traditions;psychological pluralism]
This chapter elaborates on the distinctive qualities of cultural psychology, an interdisciplinary field that has emerged over the last few decades at the intersection of anthropology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. One of the major issues addressed within cultural psychology is how to take cultural diversity in attitudes and practices seriously while also acknowledging our shared humanity. And, as this chapter explains, cultural psychologists attempt to do so by assuming that culture and psyche make each other, neither one being thought of as prior to nor independent of the other. Emphasizing the significance of context, these scholars regard the abstract potentialities of the human mind—the ability to feel, act, and think, to have norms and work toward goals—as being universal yet emergent, realizing their full potential only within the context of the symbolic and behavioral traditions of a community. The chapter also points out that the fundamental distinction that separates cultural psychology from the fields of cross-cultural psychology and psychological anthropology is its explicit disavowal of psychological universalism. Thus, cultural psychologists, no matter what their original disciplinary backgrounds, tend to assert that ethnic divergences in self-organization, in mental processes and in moral and emotional functioning run deep. (pages 1 - 20)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part I: Breaking Down Barriers Through the Study of Culture in the Study of Mind
One / Challenging Developmental Doctrines through Cross-Cultural Research - Robert A. Levine
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0002
[Child Development;Hausa;Nigeria;developmental psychology;Whiting;Piaget;Kohlberg;Mead;cultural context]
In writings aimed at the general public, claims that a behavior found in US residents is rooted in evolution and the brain are regularly used to set aside the need to replicate a study in diverse cultural settings. As animal experiments once represented the gold standard, enabling researchers to ignore cross-cultural evidence on child development, so advances in evolutionary biology and neuroscience have now taken that transcendent place. If development is largely a matter of human evolution and the brain, why should we worry about childhood environments in the non-Western world? “Challenging Developmental Doctrines” answers this question by examining the long history of the anthropology of child development and the emergence of cultural psychological investigations of the study of the child as emerging within, rather than apart from, cultural context. Critically engaging with the work of Stanley Hall, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Margaret Mead, among others, LeVine shows how John and Beatrice Whitings’ research group at Harvard and a subsequent long-term study of child development among the Hausa of Northwest Nigeria helped to show how and why culture is important in the study of developmental psychology. (pages 23 - 31)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Two / How Cultural Psychology Can Help Us See “Divinity” in a Secular World - Jonathan Haidt, Paul Rozin
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0003
[divinity;secularism;Three Ethics;moral discourse;Flatland;cultural psychology;cross-cultural psychology;Sexual morality;bioethics]
This essay describes the ways that our thinking about morality changed in response to Richard Shweder’s writings about morality, and in particular his description of the “ethics of divinity.” It first describes Shweder’s theory of the “three ethics” of moral discourse and explain why the theory was so important for moral psychology. It then shows how useful the ethics of divinity has been for understanding some puzzles about sexual morality, bioethical controversies, and the American culture war more generally, and closes with an endorsement of moral pluralism. It uses the story of Flatland, a short novel by the English mathematician Edwin Abbot, published in 1884, as an analogy to describe the move from psychology to cultural psychology that such a perspective enables. (pages 32 - 44)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Three / Beyond Universal Taxonomic Frameworks in Cultural Social Psychology - Joan G. Miller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0004
[cultural psychology;cross-cultural psychology;morality;motivation;social support;communal norms;India;Japan;context]
This chapter provides a critical evaluation of work in the social psychological tradition of cultural psychology. An overview is first presented of the general theoretical assumptions and goals of cultural psychology, a methodologically heterogeneous and interdisciplinary research tradition that is distinguished by its assumptions that culture and self are mutually constitutive. To illustrate the goals of cultural social psychology, an overview is then provided of cross-cultural work that we have conducted that embodies sensitivity to context while challenging the universality of psychological theories of interpersonal morality and social support. Appraisal next centers on contemporary research in cultural social psychology that seeks to culturally broaden social psychological theory through its programs of quantitative and comparative cross-cultural research. It is argued that such work has achieved only mixed success in achieving its goals due to its limited attention to context and embrace of individual difference models of culture. The argument is made that to fully achieve the agenda of cultural social psychology future research in this tradition needs to go beyond essentializing taxonomic frameworks and work to gain more indepth understandings of the cultural meanings and practices of the cultural communities under consideration. (pages 45 - 59)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Four / From Value to Lifeworld - Roy D’ Andrade
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0005
[Cultural Relativism;East versus West;Human Values;Moral Anthropology;Quantitative Analysis;Value Relativism;Value Surveys]
The essay presents a synopsis of quantitative studies of human values across cultural groups and poses a puzzle to be solved. A quantitative study of values reveals very few “East versus West” differences in value judgments and great deal of similarity not only in value dimensions (for example, individualism versus collectivism) but also in the rating of particular value items. The results of the study are challenging on a number of levels. On the empirical level, the quantitative results contradict decades of ethnographic research on cultural differences. On a methodological level, these results from survey questionnaires are different than the results from participant observation, leaving uncertainty in the choice of methods. On the theoretical level, if every group’s values are almost identical to every other group, what causes or sustains cultural differences? The finding of value similarity across cultures may seem implausible. But that is what these data show. The essay then considers ways that cultural differences in moral evaluations of behavior and estimations of what is right and wrong in everyday life are compatible with the existence of universal human values. (pages 60 - 74)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part II: Psychological Processes Across Culture: One Mind, Many Mentalities
Section 1: Emotion: A Multiplicity of Feeling
Five / “Kama Muta” or “Being Moved by Love”: A Bootstrapping Approach to the Ontology and Epistemology of an Emotion - Alan P. Fiske, Thomas Schubert, Beate Seibt
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0006
[emotion;moved;touched;Kaluli;touched by the spirit;heart-warming;social relationship regulation;tears;goosebumps;tears]
The emotion that people may label being moved, touched, having a heart-warming experience, rapture, or tender feelings evoked by cuteness has rarely been studied and is incompletely conceptualized. Yet it is pervasive across history, cultures, and contexts, shaping the most fundamental relationships that make up society. It is positive and can be a peak or ecstatic experience. Because no vernacular words consistently or accurately delineate this emotion, we call it kama muta. We posit that it is evoked when communal sharing relationships suddenly intensify. Using ethnological, historical, linguistic, interview, participant observation, survey, diary, and experimental methods, we have confirmed that when people report feeling this emotion they perceive that a relationship has become closer, and they tend to have a warm feeling in the chest, shed tears, and/or get goosebumps. We posit that the disposition to kama muta is an evolved universal, but that it is always culturally shaped and oriented; it must be culturally informed in order to adaptively motivate people to devote and commit themselves to new opportunities for locally propitious communal sharing relationships. Moreover, a great many cultural practices, institutions, roles, narratives, arts and artifacts are specifically adapted to evoke kama muta: that is their function. (pages 79 - 100)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Six / Unsettling Basic States: New Directions in the Cross-Cultural Study of Emotion - Julia L. Cassaniti
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0007
[affect;emotion;Thailand;Southeast Asia;Buddhism;cultural psychology;psychological anthropology;cross-cultural psychology;ekman]
There may not be basic emotional states uniformly experienced across time and space. Nevertheless, we can systematically make sense of a universal human capacity for feelings, and a potential to recognize them in each other, through an interdisciplinary perspective on componential qualities of emotional experience. In this essay Julia Cassaniti draws out such a cultural psychology approach to the study of emotional universality, highlighting a Thai Buddhist theory of emotionality based on an interpretive scheme of cultural meanings tied to a local moral causal ontology, and showing how this scheme makes sense of emotionality not at the level of discrete emotions but through locally elaborated dimensions, or components. Using a case example of the affective response to a flooded house in Northern Thailand, she argues that such a perspective allows for the study of similarity without claiming cross-cultural uniformity of emotions as natural kinds. (pages 101 - 114)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Seven / Rasa and the Cultural Shaping of Human Consciousness - Usha Menon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0008
[rasa;emotion;Hindu gastronomy;Hindu aesthetics;Hindu soteriology;cultural mentality]
This essay explores two particular areas of interest in cultural psychology with respect to the Hindu concept of rasa: first, the idea that rasa qualifies as a “mentality” in the Shwederian sense because it leaves its characteristic impression on several domains of Hindu life; and, second, the degree to which there is convergence between the Hindu theory of the emotions as presented in the ancient Hindu dramaturgical text, the Natya Sastra, and current cultural psychological research into emotional functioning. While rasa has a range of meanings associated with it, many Hindus would agree that its conventional meanings are “juice, flavor, taste”. The essay demonstrates that rasa does qualify as the cultural mentality of Hindu India because it shapes many varied fields ranging from gastronomy and aesthetics to soteriology. Rasa also has implications for the ways in which Hindus conceptualize the manifest world and beyond. With respect to the Hindu theory of the emotions, there is little correspondence between this theory and contemporary research in cultural psychology because the Natya Sastra is unarguably a cultural artifact that reflects the premises, values and concerns of a particular cultural world, not a research enterprise that seeks to understand emotional functioning across cultures. (pages 115 - 132)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Section 2: Intersubjectivity: Social Trust, Interpersonal Attachment, and Agency
Eight / The Socialization of Social Trust: Cultural Pluralism in Understanding Attachment and Trust in Children - Thomas S. Weisner
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0009
[attachment systems;stress-buffering;cultural learning environment;multiple caretaking;attunement;sensitivity;socialization for personhood]
Attachment systems have universal features (the attachment-sensitive period in children and the stress-buffering roles of privileged caretakers), but with enormous diversity, not uniformity, in their contexts, practices, cultural meanings, and outcomes. First, many learning mechanisms have evolved for children to use to learn about safety and security in their environment and who can reduce distress, not only the attachment sensitive period. Second, exclusive attachment and care by a single maternal caregiver is unlikely to have been selected for in past environments. The likely alternative then and still today would be multiple, socially distributed care, including sibling caretaking. Third, the methods used to describe, measure, and assess attachment are very narrowly defined and bracket out context, meaning and diversity out where these should be foregrounded. Finally, there is an inevitable moral valence when using terms such as secure attachment, sensitive parenting, or attuned caregiving and behaviors. Parents are attuned to their cultural learning environment, their family system, and the kind of person they hope to shape, not only to that individual child at hand at a given moment. Children learn how to appropriately feel, show and receive security, trust and social competence in diverse ways around the world. (pages 135 - 151)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Nine / An Attachment-Theoretical Approach to Religious Cognition - Charles W. Nuckolls
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0010
[attachment;Boyer;cognition;agency;supernatural;psychological pluralism;naturalism;spirits;Bowlby;human evolution]
A variation on the theme of universalism is the question of where religious concepts come from. The “naturalness of religion” hypothesis, developed by Pascal Boyer and his colleagues, asserts that agency is part of a “security motivation system.” It is a fundamental human adaptation to the detection of prey and predators. “Agents,” in this view, become significant first and foremost as sources of opportunity or danger, and from this Boyer constructs a theory of religious presentations that depends on the natural human tendency to detect agency. The superhuman entities universally posited by religion emerge from a psychologically inherent agency detection system that all humans share, and that, for reasons not entirely understood, detects agency even where there is none. This chapter will examine the nature of attachment, not as a supplement to, but as a core component of the cognitive theory of agency detection and religious representations. It will be shown that the agency/attachment system is a developmental process, shaped by the circumstances of human evolution, but also and importantly subject to cultural variation. (pages 152 - 168)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part III: Implications of Psychological Pluralism for a Multicultural World: "Why Can't We All Just Get Along?"
Section 1: Challenges to the Modern Nation- State: Globalization’s Impact on Morality, Identity, and the Person
Ten / Acculturation, Assimilation, and the “View from Manywheres” in the Hmong Diaspora
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0011
[Hmong;Thailand;diaspora;migration;morality;acculturation;assimilation;life course;Three Ethics;refugees]
This chapter elucidates trends in moral thinking from a transnational comparison of Hmong refugee families in both Thailand and the United States. An intergenerational comparative analysis of moral reasoning in these two locations challenges some core assumptions within “acculturation” and “assimilation” scholarship that dominates social science understandings of how migrants’ lives change in the course of migration and resettlement. Hmong of both older and younger generations in this sample of transnational families are adapting their moral thinking to new social contexts, but that these patterns of intergenerational difference cannot be productively understood through linear thinking inherent in current acculturation and assimilation models. Alternatively, “the view from manywheres” leads to the production of thick descriptions of those moral worlds in order to understand these worlds in their own terms. The analysis in this chapter provides insight into the nature of these worlds and how these worlds might themselves be changing. This chapter argues that a life course perspective can provide a more adequate explanation of these intergenerational differences within these transnational families. Doing so requires an ethnographic understanding of dominant modes of life course development as they intersect with new social contexts of development over the course of migration and resettlement. (pages 173 - 196)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Eleven / Vexed Tolerance: Cultural Psychology on Multiculturalism - Pinky Hota
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0012
[Multiculturalism;recognition;morality;FGM;liberal feminism;tolerance]
This essay sets up a dialogue between political anthropology and cultural psychology to examine how they expose the slippages between public reason and embodied morality within multiculturalism. By examining the work of Richard Shweder and Elizabeth Povinelli on radical alterity, morality and bodily practices, the essay details how cultural psychology and anthropology identify similar impulses and impasses within multiculturalism. Moreover, it advances a critical reading of cultural psychology's larger framing of debates about multiculturalism around the question of tolerance. (pages 197 - 213)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Twelve / Equality, Not Special Protection: Multiculturalism, Feminism, and Female Circumcision in Western Liberal Democracies - Fuambai Ahmadu
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0013
[circumcision;genital surgeries;multiculturalism;feminism;liberalism;Okin;Kono;West Africa]
This essay challenges the idea, first put forward by the feminist political philosopher Susan Okin, that multiculturalism is bad for women. Okin makes her case by arguing that multiculturalism involves privileging group rights over individual rights, and among non-Western groups, women are given short shrift because, almost always, group rights turn out to be patriarchal rights. Using the dense cultural meanings surrounding the Kono practice of female circumcision the essay argues powerfully against Okin’s thesis. It demonstrates that, among the Kono, as is the case with other groups in West Africa, initiation practices like male and female circumcision transform a child, who is thought to have both male and female elements, and therefore ‘complete, into a single-sex, ‘incomplete’ person, capable of procreation. Far from female circumcision being gender-based violence, as many Western feminists tend to think, the essay elaborates on the various ways in which the rite celebrates women’s sexual and reproductive power and female sexual autonomy. It ends with the plea that for Western liberal democracies to live up to their promise they have to afford freedom, autonomy and sexual rights to all citizens, including those women who choose to affirm their culture heritage through undergoing female circumcision. (pages 214 - 236)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Section 2: Mental Health: Variations in Healthy Minds across Cultures
Thirteen / Cultural Psychology and the Globalization of Western Psychiatric Practices - Randall Horton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0014
[Psychiatry;Cultural psychology;Culture and mental health;DSM-V;ICD-10;Cultural Formulation Interview;Cultural bias;Multiculturalism and psychiatry;Medical anthropology]
This paper examines key institutional and economic forces driving the rapid extension of the use of Western models of diagnosing and treating mental illness into all corners of the developing world. It examines the ways that problems in the American psychiatric research system, notably, ethnocentric biases and untoward economic influences, appear to be mirrored in the emerging international system, and how these may undercut the promised benefits of expanded mental health care to communities across the globe. It approaches these issues by examining the changing treatment of socio-cultural issues in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] and the International Classification of Diseases [ICD]. While identifying persisting problems in the main body of the DSM-V, the paper notes the significant progress in thinking about the socio-cultural dimensions of mental health represented in the Cultural Formulation Interview included in the appendix of the work. Drawing on research from cultural and multi-cultural psychology, cultural psychiatry, and medical anthropology, the paper maps several out possible steps for establishing more responsive and well-grounded mental health practices to serve diverse communities within the United States and across the world. (pages 239 - 259)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Fourteen / Toward a Cultural Psychology of Trauma and Trauma-Related Disorders - Byron Good, Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0015
[trauma;PTSD;violence;post-conflict;humanitarianism;cultural psychology;Aceh;Indonesia]
The goal of this paper is to reflect on what Shweder calls a “cultural psychology” of trauma-related disorders, based on the author’s work in post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia, beginning 2008. Psychiatric categories, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, have long been ‘good to think with’ for those interested in the interface of anthropology, psychology, and medicine. Too often, however, such discussions devolve into debates about whether psychiatric disorders are ‘real’ and universal, though with cultural modification, or whether mental disorders are culturally constituted, distinctive to particular societies. The paper examines the entry of the term ‘trauma’ into Indonesia, arguing that a cultural psychology needs to examine not only the interdependence of cultural and psychological processes, but the embedding of these in local political and historical processes. The paper then outlines recent critiques of the category PTSD, then uses data from a mental health intervention in Aceh to examine the phenomenology of trauma-related disorders, respond to questions of medicalization of normal responses to violence, and ask whether treatment led to recovery, before returning to the question of embedding of trauma and trauma treatment in local cultural, psychological and political processes. (pages 260 - 279)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Fifteen / The Risky Cartography of Drawing Moral Maps: With Special Reference to Economic Inequality and Sex-Selective Abortion
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226501710.003.0016
[Economic Inequality;Sex Selective;Abortion;Morality;Cultural Comparison;Equality-Difference Paradox;India;Gender;Kiryas Joel]
During much of the 20th century the ranking of cultures, civilizations, and religions from better to worse was out of fashion in American cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, in recent decades global moral mapping has become popular again, even in cultural anthropology. In light of this pendulum swing this essay presents two examples of ways to do normative analysis while avoiding ethnocentrism and the associated hazards of invidious global comparisons. The first example concerns economic inequality in the United States. It raises some doubts about recent liberal egalitarian portraits of the US, especially those which convey a sense of national crisis and social decline based on evidence that economic inequalities have been growing for the past fifty years and are greater today than in the decades prior to 1965. The second example concerns sex selective abortion in India. Critically examined is the depiction of the Indian sub-continent as a patriarchal society where violence against women runs so deep that even the womb of Indian mothers is a dangerous place for a female fetus. The essay illustrates the value of a cultural psychology of morality approach to comparison by complicating our picture of income inequality and by reframing that portrait of sex discrimination. (pages 280 - 306)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Index
