Emotions and sentiments in a multicultural society: the case of honor
Paper to be presented at the 9th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), June 3-8 2001, Calgary
Paul Voestermans & Cor Baerveldt

Nowadays, psychologists are gradually becoming aware of the importance of 'culture' in accounting for patterned human conduct. However, as modern industrialized societies become more and more heterogeneous and culturally pluriform, it also becomes increasingly difficult to use the rather generic concept of 'culture' in an explanation of actual human behavior. Yet, many problems that arise as a consequence of contact between people with different histories and traditions are rooted in deep-seated, culturally constituted emotions or sentiments. The question is whether modern psychology is equipped for the task of understanding the largely unreflected emotions that often seem to make 'culture' so tremendously persistent, and inaccessible for change. Instead of borrowing their concept of culture from the 'real' social sciences, psychology is faced with the challenge to offer a psychological account of culturally patterned actions and emotions. In this paper we will use the sentiments of 'honor' and 'shame' as a case to criticize some prevailing theories of culture and to develop a psychological perspective on culturally orchestrated sentiments in a multicultural society. To this, we will build on the enactive view on emotions we discussed in our other paper.

In the recent past, Dutch society has been faced with several, sometimes dramatic incidents that seem to derive from deep-seated sentiments of honor and shame among Mediterranean (mainly Turkish and Moroccan) immigrants, e.g. cases of blood feud, forced marriages, cases of sexual harassment. Those incidents have raised the question what kind of psychology could contribute to a better understanding of the emotions and sentiments which exist within a multicultural society. In this paper we will argue, that most psychological research with respect to multicultural society still suffers from two fundamental misunderstandings concerning culture.

First, psychology still tends to derive its concept of culture from nineteenth century theories of culture as civilization. Christopher Herbert (1991) has convincingly argued that the culture theories that came into vogue in the nineteenth century are in fact a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of original sin and redemption. As such they served a moral or normative purpose rather than a scientific one. Nowadays, psychology still runs the risk of getting tied up in a sheer moralistic discourse about cultural norms and values, instead of uncovering the production principles of culturally patterned behavior.

A second mistake is to treat culture in terms of psychological properties that are supposed to be 'shared' among the members of a certain group. Culturally constituted sentiments are then considered as 'collective' feelings and emotions. Elsewhere (Verheggen & Baerveldt, 1999) we have extensively criticized the social scientific use of this notion of 'sharedness'. This notion merely belongs to the descriptive domain of an outside observer, and does not refer to any actual mechanism. Moreover, it leads to a monolithic conception of culture: cultural systems as a whole are marked as "collectivistic" or "individualistic", as characterized by "interdependent" or "independent" concepts of self, or as "honor culture" or "guilt culture". Such generalizing characterizations offer hardly any psychological insight into the way the behavior of actual persons in bicultural situations is regulated. On the contrary, the acting persons get lost between two supposedly homogeneous cultures.

An enactive approach to culturally constituted sentiments tries to avoid the pitfalls of superfluous moralization and useless generalization. After all, the claim that a man committed murder because he participates in an honor culture is in fact highly tautological. Moreover, what may incite a Moroccan or a Turkish man to murder is neither more, nor less cultural than what may bring him any other behavioral strategy in case his honor is at stake. In both cases his behavior, and the particular emotions involved, acquire their form by the constant mutual coordination of actions with other people. Therefore, instead of using culture as an explanation, or even as an excuse for certain behaviors, we suggest that cultural patterns of behavior can be understood more fruitfully as the dynamic product of an ongoing consensual coordination of actions which takes place within a community of experiencers. As we will argue in our other paper, those dynamical processes can better be understood as a mutual coordination of differences than as shared or collective experience. So, instead of studying either cultural norms and values, or supposedly 'collective' feelings and emotions, psychology is faced with the task to uncover the ritual and conversational practices by which certain experiences are validated. On the basis of some actual cases we will discuss how psychological research could proceed in that respect.

References
Baerveldt, C., & Voestermans, P. (2000). Het misverstand cultuur: naar een psychologie van biculturaliteit [The misconception of culture: Towards a psychology of biculturality]. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psychologie, 55, 109-120.

Herbert, C. (1991). Culture and anomie: Ethnographic imagination in the nineteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago press.

Verheggen, Th., & Baerveldt, C. (1999). From social representations to consensually coordinated action: Towards an intrinsically social psychology. Paper presented at the 8th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), April 25-28, 2000, Sydney.

Last updated: April 2001
Maintained by Cor Baerveldt