Advancing Cultural Psychology
Symposium organized at the 7th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), 27 April - 2 May 1997, Berlin

The aim of the symposium
In a recent chapter in a social psychological handbook (Higgins & Kruglanski, 1996) it is argued that culture "should not be understood as context, because context refers to 'that which surrounds' and seems to imply that culture is outside and can be separated from psychology or from people" (Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996, p. 863). Culture is an activity, it is practice, it is history turned into nature. As such culture is diversity, which is the consequence of an ongoing process of meaning making. The cultural perspective assumes that psychological processes are not just 'influenced' but are thoroughly culturally constituted. This sounds promising. Yet, the review of the literature on culture and biology, culture and the cognitive system, the motivational and personality system, the interpersonal system and finally the group does show that what the authors claim that culture is, has produced the type of research, that is not in accordance with this claim. Quite on the contrary, culture remains a variable and remains just 'context'. This symposium, organized by the Nijmegen Cultural Psychology Group (NCPG) aims at bringing colleagues together and discuss with them how culture can be conceptualized in such a way that research will be stimulated that focuses on the meaning-making, active, practical and diversity producing components of culture. The NCPG symposium is, of course, open to other papers that address comparable concerns.

For now, the NCPG presents four papers with a common theme: Advancing a theoretically sound and psychologically relevant conceptualization of culture. At the same time, we hope to discuss with the participants a viable route to theoretically based research. The emphasis, however, is on conceptual issues. The first paper is directed towards what can be called a new epistemology for cultural psychology. One which present a view of 'the social' that opens psychology up to intrinsic social processes. The tendency to just aggregate individuals into e.g. artificial groups is criticized and taken to be the main source of misdirected cultural psychological research. The second presents a dialogical perspective on culture and self. It clears the ground for such an approach by showing that previous and received models of the nexus between culture and self run into serious trouble, once the issue of 'multiculturality' is addressed. The third paper points out that some recent theoretical advances in psychology meet the traditional anthropological objections against 'idealism' and 'mentalism' in culture theory. The paper aims at an elaboration of Bourdieu's habitus theory and the notion of embodiment and bodily practice this theory includes. The fourth paper explains the importance of activity for cultural psychology. It argues that cultural psychological phenomena are rooted in practical, socially organized activities. It will explain how hermeneutics and phenomenology can be developed into a viable methodology.

Abstracts of the separate papers

Towards a psychological study of culture: epistemological considerations
Cor Baerveldt & Theo Verheggen (Click here for the complete text of the paper)

In the last decade psychology has been characterized by a remarkable tendency to "socialize" or "culturalize" its subject matter. However, for want of a solid epistemological foundation, much of contemporary cultural psychology continues to be entrapped in the old pitfall of conceptualizing culture as "context", as individuals aggregated into artificial groups, or as a social order that imposes itself upon individual behavior. We claim that the fundamental "paradox" that comprises the key problem of cultural psychology, is that precisely when people are being "themselves", when they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, there behavior can be observed to be socially patterned. Therefore, those observed patterns must not subsequently be put on the scene as an explanation for the culturally "orchestrated" nature of individual behavior. A profound reflection upon the epistemological foundations of social science is necessary to reframe the relation between psychology and culture.

The above-mentioned paradox gave rise to the question that has been bothering the social sciences from the outset: what is the reality of the social? We demonstrate, that one of the main objectives of some of the founding fathers of the social sciences was the contesting of naive knowledge claims with regard to a reality "out there", while at the same time establishing the reality of the social. Even Durkheim, the alleged advocate of a science that studies social facts, asserted that those social facts only exist in and through the experiential world of individuals. At the beginning of this century the outlines for a "socio-cultural psychology" or a "Völkerpsychologie" where already articulated. Therefore, it is even more striking that the social sciences took a course that can be characterized both as a de-socializing of psychology and a de-psychologizing of the "true" social sciences: sociology and anthropology. While, for example, sociology proclaimed the reality of social facts by stressing their independence from individual experience and acting, psychology, even social psychology, established a science of the individual by methodologically setting this "individual" apart from his/her life-world.

In order to offer a way out of this problem, we explore the epistemological consequences of some recent developments in "enactive" and "constructivist" social science (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991, Maturana, 1991, von Glasersfeld, 1991). We demonstrate that in continuously maintaining their own identity, people constitute co-operative domains of interaction or "consensual domains", which are "real", because they are rooted within their own bodily constitution. When we agree with von Glasersfeld (1991, p. 19) that "(…)the self we come to know and the world we come to know are both assembled out of the elements of our very own experience", we are obliged to place this experience in the center of our scientific inquiries. However, because the distinction between "self" and "environment" can itself only be made within the descriptive domain of an observer, it is epistemologically inadmissible to explain the patterning of this experience in terms of an interaction between a "prefixed" self and a "prefixed" social reality. Social patterns do not exist as an independent reality, which is imposed upon us, but are themselves grounded in the structure of our experience. So, instead of pointing out the cultural nature of all that is psychological, we want to focus our attention on the psychological or experiential nature of all that is cultural. A paradox only arises, if we fail to distinguish between the descriptive domain of the observer, who finds the behavior of individuals to be socially patterned, and the phenomenal domain of the acting individual, which is rooted in his own constitution.

Advancing cultural psychology: the psychology of culture
Paul Voestermans (Click here for the complete text of the final paper)

Since the early nineteenth century attempts were made to make psychology more culture minded. Herbart was the first to emphasize that the mind's content originates from the fact that people belong to a group. Wundt's Völkerpsychologie contains the same message. It is fair to say that a lot is accomplished since then, if one takes the Markus, Kitayama & Heiman 1996 review of culture as context and variable in psychological research as a measure. Yet, apart from being a ready-made product, culture also has a process-side. In Bourdieu's terminology, a scientific approach to culture has to deal not only with culture as opus operatum, as product, but also with the modus operandi, the way culture operates. At this juncture, I would like to propose in my paper a psychologically informed approach to culture. I would like to highlight three distinct developments in psychology which make such an approach possible.

1. Interdisciplinary psychological and anthropological theory and research into the affective system show the importance of the affect system in the production and monitoring of behavior. It is quite important for a cultural psychology to investigate the nexus of culture and the affective system in order to understand the way culture operates in constituting emotions and feelings and vice versa. Affective structures are also important for the understanding of the way culture involves the body.
2. There is a growing concern in psychology with embodiment. Culture is embodied as well, which means that in understanding behavior, acquired and refined bodily skills and practices become as important in the monitoring of behavior as reflexive, that is to say, propositionally and argumentatively organized, cognitive processes.
3. In social psychology there is an increasing emphasis on everyday automaticity in behavior. Priming experiments show the importance of the automatic activation of behavioral patterns. This makes it possible to approach culture social psychologically as a 'priming system'.

These three theoretical developments in psychology taken together tie in with important new developments in culture theory. The paper will focus on Bourdieu's habitus theory and on those developments in the conceptualization of 'culture learning' in which bodily organized co-regulative practices play a central role (Baerveldt & Voestermans, 1996). Finally, I would like to discuss the research consequences of the above attempt to bring psychology and culture together in one theoretical frame.

In search of a model for the relation between culture and behavior
Harry J.G. Kempen (Because off illness Harry Kempen was not able to finish his paper)

This paper intends to contribute to the development of a model for the relation between behavior and culture. Some "dual models" attributing different percentages to the influence of nature versus culture will be criticized. Also Hofstede's model, a triangle with a broad baseline for the nature component and thereupon a smaller area for collective mental programs, with at its top a tiny peak for individual mental programming. Furthermore the model used in Markus a.o.(1996) will be reviewed. Here culture is regarded as a factor constituting a necessary aspect of five basic psychological levels: the biological, the cognitive, the personal motivational, the intergroup and the group/cultural. For my model I return to the "dialectical cycle" of Berger and Luckmann (1966): a) Society is a human product, b) Society is an objective realty, c) Humans are social products. However, in this cycle - and in many other social constructionist models - the production of culture seems to start from a bodyless mental species. I think it necessary to add to their cycle as a starting point the human body. Inherent to this body is a self, not in the way of a Cartesian "cogito", but in the sense of Vico's "wholly corporeal imagination". In this "as-if"-area humans can weigh in a risk-free way what to do.

Elsewhere (Kempen, 1996) I have sketched some five universal task-areas for humans:

1. The self/nonself-boundary, which can be vague or sharp.
2. The evaluation of the situation: good, bad, good and bad, or neutral.
3. Which kind of activity: doing nothing, becoming active, or participating.
4. What is the appropriate time orientation: the past, the now, the future.
5. How large/small is the space I must attend to.

These universal options lead to a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. And here culture enters by way of norm formation: silently consensual, in the form of collective narratives, or imposed by powerful groups, by way of a permanent dialogue, or otherwise. An advantage of this approach is in my opinion: a return to the universal human body, without loosing the possibility of explaining cultural variability. A second advantage may be that this form of body-oriented social constructionism could counter cultural relativism: when the body is not only the starting-place of cultures, but also its landing place, cultures might be evaluated from what they do to the body. Not only directly, by violence for example, but also indirectly by extorting some of the possible options at the expense of other bodily possibilities.

An activity approach to cultural psychology: conceptual and empirical considerations
Carl Ratner (Humboldt State University, Arcata, California)

This paper explains the importance of activity for cultural psychology. It argues that cultural psychological phenomena are rooted in practical, socially organized activities such as work, politics, education, religion, leisure. These activities organize psychological phenomena in a variety of ways, one of which is by generating concepts about the nature/meaning of things. These concepts, in turn, organize psychological phenomena. I will present examples of this conception of cultural psychology. The paper will also explain some methodological principles for investigating cultural psychological phenomena. It will explain how to describe the cultural features of psychology. I will show how qualitative methods, particularly hermeneutics and phenomenology, are particularly useful for such description

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