Towards
a psychological study of culture: epistemological considerations
Paper presented at the 7th conference of the International
Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), 27 April - 2 May 1997,
Berlin.
Cor Baerveldt &
Theo Verheggen
Introduction
This paper is about a paradox
that in our view comprises the key problem of cultural psychology.
It is about the question how it is possible that especially when
people believe they are being "themselves", or to act
on the basis of their own authentic experience, we can observe
their behavior to be socially or culturally patterned. Take for
example a social practice like mothering. On the one hand, in
our society we all seem to agree that motherly love and care and
the motherly practice of fostering her own children, is not the
result of explicitly acting on the basis of cultural standards
or prescripts regarding motherhood, but something which seems
to emanate from a mother's experience in a natural way. On the
other hand however, countless anthropological and sociological
studies demonstrate that mothering is hardly natural at all, because
it adopts a cultural form that differs substantially across cultures
and through history. On closer inspection, it appears that seemingly
natural experience is thoroughly intertwined with socio-cultural
realities like gender relations, family systems and local moral
universes. Moreover, the belief that one acts on the basis of
ones own experience actually contributes to the reproduction of
social practices like mothering. Does this mean that a mother
is wrong when she beliefs to act in accordance with her own experience?
Is it our task as social scientists to refute such claims of authenticity,
by revealing human conduct to be in fact culturally ordained?
Or should we somehow account for this experiential reality in
order to explain the social patterning of human conduct? In our
view, cultural psychology should do the latter. We claim that
the paradox only emerges if we fail to distinguish between the
phenomenal domain of the acting individual, rooted within her
or his own bodily constitution, and the descriptive domain of
an observer who recognizes the behavior of individuals to be socially
patterned. In such an indiscriminative context, observed social
structures too often come to be identified as autonomous forces
or entities, existing outside of, and independent from human actors.
As such, those reified structures are in turn easily confused
with the dynamics, processes and mechanisms that actually fashion
human action. In our view however, the latter find their ground
in the embodiment of the actor, not in the actuality of a world
that precedes human experience. While acknowledging and underlining
the dedication of contemporary cultural psychology to study the
cultural forms of feeling, thinking and acting, we search for
the experiential basis of those cultural forms. What can psychology
say about the nature of human experience, so that it becomes intelligible
how this experience can become socially patterned in the first
place? We claim that cultural psychology should not search for
such patterns outside the realm of experience itself. Neither
a pregiven, or "out there" reality, nor culturally constructed
scripts or models suffice as a psychological explanation for the
social patterning of human conduct. Therefore, we focus on the
psychological nature of all that is cultural, instead of pointing
out the cultural nature of all that is psychological. Our aim
is to provide an epistemological basis for a psychological study
of culture, that is thoroughly rooted within our experiential
reality.
Cultural
psychology and the constructionist thesis
Since its founding years,
psychology has been paying attention to cross-cultural differences
of human psychological functions. It is only recently that the
working of culture itself has become an issue for an increasing
number of psychologists (Markus, Kitayama & Heiman, 1996). This
tendency is accompanied by a growing awareness among psychologists,
that a conceptualization of culture merely in terms of "cultural
variables" or as "context" for human behavior falls
short, because the human psyche is itself inherently social. Instead
of restricting themselves to the study of cross-cultural variation
in human conduct, these psychologists claim that we should investigate
the cultural forms of feeling, thinking and acting in the first
place. Although there is undoubtedly a vast range of cross-cultural
variation in human psychological functioning, the question what
should be compared cannot be answered in terms of a psychological
science that fails to account for the social or cultural origin
of the self and of our higher mental functions. In this regard,
the relatively new approach called cultural psychology, aims at
reclaiming the social as a central dimension in the study of the
self, countering the tendency within contemporary social psychology
to consider the social bond as something "(…) which can be
built only after the fully self-contained individual has been
established" (Sampson, 1987, p. 47). Once the self is no
longer viewed as "self contained individual", but as
a process that is inherently social, our social world can no longer
be depicted as a neutral background or context for human behavior.
The world we inhabit is an experiential affair, manufactured of
"meaning" rather than "matter". Therefore,
according to Shweder (1991), cultural psychology should be the
study of "intentional worlds". Because intentional worlds
and human selves are "inextricably bound up", cultural
psychology should not be looking for some kind of "central
processing device", or for universal structures of the mind,
but should instead be interested in personal functioning within
particular intentional worlds, and in the interpersonal maintenance
of intentional worlds (p. 76). By distancing himself from the
idea of a central processing device, Shweder wants to escape from
what he calls the "prevailing Platonism" that has been
implicit in psychological science since the cognitive revolution.
Thus, cultural psychology is in his opinion "the study of
the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express,
and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity
for human kind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self and emotion"
(p. 73). Nowadays, the anti-cognitivist argument contained in
Shweder's line of reasoning is particularly articulated by constructionist
and discursive thinkers (Shotter 1993; Gergen 1985; Harré
1983, 1986; Harré and Gillet 1994). Maybe somewhat premature,
some authors even make mention of a "second cognitive revolution"
within psychological and cognitive science (Harré, 1992;
Harré and Gillet, 1994). The label "discursive turn"
is used synonymously here, to point out the growing awareness
that cognitive mechanisms should not to be searched for "within
the head" of a person, but rather within the discursive or
conversational interactions between persons. As Gergen (1989)
puts it: "the locus of knowledge is no longer taken to be
the individual mind but rather to inhere in patterns of social
relatedness" (p. 471). It is in the everyday practice of
speaking that people create both their life world and their own
identities. So although the constructionist or discursive approach
may itself be very differentiated, a common ground can be found
in the idea that the reality we have in common, and in which we
find ourselves, is neither a world that exists independently from
us, nor a socially shared way of representing such a pregiven
world, but a world itself brought forth by our ways of communicating
and joint action. Social constructionism was quite successful
in defeating the notion of a pregiven world, that can be known
insofar as its features can be mapped or mirrored within the human
mind. However, we claim that constructionism's strength is also
its weakness. This weakness becomes apparent, when it has to account
for the fact that our experience is obviously socially patterned,
but nevertheless remains to be our own, authentic experience.
When it comes to the social patterning of experience, social constructionism
runs the risk of distorting or violating the preconditions of
experience itself. Within social constructionism, the structure
of human conduct is not considered to be rooted within the nature
of experience, but is presupposed in some kind of linguistic or
discursive social order, which seems to be well-known already.
We claim that that while social constructionism intends to reject
essentialism, it often ends up turning down experiential reality
as well. Three examples can clarify this claim.
Social
constructionism as aboutism
Although the insight that
knowledge inheres in patterns of interpersonal communication does
not necessarily imply that psychological phenomena are linguistic
in nature, language has in fact acquired a paradigmatic status
within constructionist thought. Partly this overestimation of
language may be due to the fact that constructionist scholars
are often more concerned with psychological science than with
psychological phenomena. However, even when it comes to those
phenomena, social constructionism and discursive psychology tend
to limit themselves to what is said about human feeling, thinking
and acting. This apparent "aboutism" does not automatically
follow from a discursive paradigm. In defense of this paradigm
Harré and Gillet (1994) claim that "it is a main thesis
of discursive psychology that episodes in which psychological
phenomena are brought into being by the use of nonlinguistic signs
should be analyzed as if they were through and through linguistic"
(p. 99). As Harré (1991, p. 223) notices, this position
implicates, that psychological phenomena brought into being by
the nonverbal use of the body, can be considered as meaningful
when they are interpreted by means of a linguistic system, but
also when the body itself serves as a language like sign system.
Apparently the body is also considered as a producer of meaning
or a means of expression in its own right, even though it remains
unexplained why it should therefore adopt a linguistic form. In
practice however, almost all constructionist research confines
itself to the question how human conduct becomes meaningful by
reference to a socially shared discursive order. Research of human
emotions for example, is almost exclusively restricted to the
study of emotion talk, emotion scripts and scenarios, indigenous
theories of emotions, emotion words, narratives etc. (Averill,
1980; Fischer, 1991; Heelas, 1981; Hochchild, 1983; Harré,
1986; Lutz, 1988; Shotter & Gergen, 1989). A main assumption of
constructionist research seems to be, not so much that people
are capable of articulating what they feel, but especially that
what they feel is structured, or even constituted in language.
In this process, cultural scripts are supposed to function as
a kind of mold for individual action. However, by assigning a
central role to cultural scripts in explaining the social form
of feeling, one is in fact begging the question. Even if we suppose
that there are socially shared "cultural models" that
are capable of structuring individual conduct, the question remains
how those cultural models can evoke our emotions and even become
a motivating force. Or as Strauss (1992) puts it: "Knowing
the dominant ideologies, discourses, and symbols of a society
is only the beginning -there remains the hard work of understanding
why some of those ideologies, discourses and symbols become more
compelling to social actors, while others are only the hollow
shell of a morality that may be repeated in official pronouncements
but is ignored in private lives" (p. 1). Moreover, it seems
that the whole question of how cultural models are capable of
structuring our emotions is misleading, because like Voestermans
(1991) states, norms are norms and values are values, because
of the emotions involved. This means that these factors (highly
important though they are) cannot be invoked as antecedents for
an explanation of the cultural construction of feeling and emotion.
As Voestermans observes, emotion talk testifies to the fact that
feelings and emotions are already somehow orchestrated within
certain cultural frames. So an adequate psychological understanding
of those cultural orchestrated emotions requires an understanding
of exactly those features of human experience, that enable it
to be socially patterned in the first place.
The social constitution of meaning: product and process
Another empirical consequence
of social constructionism's preoccupation with language is directly
connected with the first one. Social constructionism seems to
be more occupied with studying meaning as a product of social
interactions than with the way a "consensual world"
is actually produced. Although in recent years a shift of attention
has taken place towards the study of the discursive production
en maintenance of meaning in everyday social interaction (Billig,
1987, 1988; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), the greater part of social
constructionist research is mainly engaged in the analysis and
interpretation of "text" instead of asking questions
about the socio-cultural configurations that enable people to
speak. Even the more dynamic versions of constructionist and discursive
psychological thought tend to restrict their analysis to the study
of meaning insofar as it is discursively articulated and argumentatively
structured. This restriction to the study of culture as "opus
operatum", or finished product, instead of "modus operandi",
or production principle, was especially criticized by Bourdieu
(1984, 1990). According to Bourdieu the analysis of speech requires
the investigation of processes that constitute both the authority
or legitimacy of the speaker and his or her competence to put
something into words. When we consider the implications of this
position for psychological research, we are obliged to pay much
more attention to the acquisition of various social skills. Elsewhere
(Baerveldt & Voestermans, 1996) we demonstrated that the acquisition
of multiple stylized "co-regulative skills" is vital
for the "selfing process". By the neologism 'selfing
process' we refer to the ceaseless flow of mutually induced bodily
conduct, in which both our selves and our lifeworlds are continuously
being enacted. This process involves embodied skills, sensibilities
and an expressive register that is geared to the social practices
we consensually constitute.
Socialization
as the internalization of pre-existing cultural models Although
the constructionist legacy can be traced back to important precursors
like Giambattisto Vico, Jeremy Bentham and Hans Vaihinger, the
belief that the reality of everyday life is ultimately a social
product was especially made prevalent in social science by the
publication of Berger and Luckmann's "the social construction
of reality" (1966). Berger and Luckmann took up the aforementioned
issue of social reality being both a man-made product and at the
same time something which seems to permeate our very own experience.
According to Berger and Luckmann, society can be seen as a dialectical
process in which three moments should be distinguished: society
is product of human interaction, society is an objective reality
and society is a subjective reality. Because the second moment
of this dialectical cycle is in their view the objectivation of
man made reality, a process of internalization is required for
this reality to become an experiential affair. This means, that
although our shared reality is ultimately considered to be a human
product, there remains a gap between experience and a presumed
"out there" reality. The view of socialization as a
process of internalization is still prominent in contemporary
cultural psychology and similar approaches to the social or cultural
forms of feeling, thinking and acting. Although several authors
have stressed that socialization is not a straightforward process,
like "copying" an official model (Strauss, 1992), most
of them persist in conceptualizing socialization as an internalization
of "pre-given" -be it socially produced- structures.
The acquisition of culture is essentially seen as an "in-struction"
process, that is, the human mind becomes structured by virtue
of cultural formations that have their existence outside the realm
of our own experience, but nevertheless become part of our interior
world. Although the instruction metaphor appears to be very appealing,
for example for those interested in child raising and education,
it stumbles upon some serious epistemological problems. To a large
extent those problems are due to the fact that the constructionist
position taken is not radical enough. In defense of what he calls
the "radical constructivist" position, Von Glasersfeld
(1991) demonstrates that the distinction between a self and its
environment can itself only be made within an observer's field
of experience: "(…) 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" (p. 19). Therefore terms like "internalization"
and "instruction" only exist within the descriptive
domain of an observer, which comprises both the actor and his
behavioral environment. When we mix up the descriptive domain
of an observer who finds the behavior of individuals to be socially
patterned and the phenomenal domain of an acting individual, we
conceal the actual behavioral dynamics which should be our object
of study in the first place. The implications of this claim can
be easily overlooked, because it is common practice within social
science, to confuse what Bourdieu (1990) calls "our models
of reality" with "the reality of our models". Like
the observation that the train is regularly three minutes late,
should not seduce us to conclude that there is some kind of rule
that actually dictates the train to be late, our observation that
human conduct is socially patterned should not lead us to the
conclusion that our behavior is actually ordained by cultural
rules or models. Bourdieu especially criticizes structuralism
for eliminating the meaning producing individual in its analysis,
thereby reducing human actors to merely bearers of impersonal
or supra-individual structures. Instead of looking for structure
outside the realm of human experience, Bourdieu wants to draw
attention to the embodied structures of the "habitus".
According to Bourdieu, the habitus is a 'sense pratique' which
reflects the logic of the social order in which it originates.
Therefore it enables people to act in accordance with this social
order in a spontaneous and largely automatic way. It is a principle
of "conditioned" and "conditional" freedom,
which means that it enables a free production of thoughts, perceptions,
expressions and actions within the limits that are specified by
its genesis. Although Bourdieu's main purpose was to found a theory
of social reproduction, he opens up the possibility for a more
psychological study of cultural practices. Because psychologically
speaking, we have to account for the fact that our experience
is obviously socially patterned, but nevertheless remains our
own authentic experience. After all, exactly when people feel
that they are most authentically themselves, when they maintain
their own identities, they most conspicuously contribute to the
production and reproduction of a social order.
Human
experience and human autonomy
We claim that if cultural
psychology wants to account for the social structure of human
conduct, it should not search for this structure outside the realm
of experience. We belief, that by taking language as a paradigm
for human conduct in general, social constructionism takes for
granted a lot about language, without examining in detail its
validity as a model for human experience and human expression.
After all, the structural features of language or linguistic behavior
already determine its suitability and limitedness as a means for
expression. For example, language only enables the articulation
of one word at a time. Linguistic expression therefore necessarily
has a serial or sequential structure. However, we all know that
much of our expression is presentational rather than discursive,
which means that it coordinates the body as a whole, rather than
using it as a discrete sign system (Langer, 1951; Baerveldt and
Voestermans, 1996). Likewise, when we consider language or discourse
to be the structure of all mental or cognitive operations, we
pass by in silence a vast range of preconceptual, mostly syncretic
experience that can hardly be called epiphenomenal, but on the
contrary, is part and parcel of our social lifeworld. In our view,
psychologists are only just beginning to understand how training,
exercise, stylization and ritualization shape our expressive register
and our modes of embodied understanding. Where then, can we find
the epistemological ground for a cultural psychology that does
justice to our experiential reality, without a drawback into essentialism?
Or stated differently: how can we account for the social or cultural
patterning of experience, while at the same time avoiding the
paradox we mentioned at the beginning of this paper? One promising
attempt to reformulate the epistemological foundations of our
scientific enterprise can be found in the work of two controversial
theoretical biologists: Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela.
Their work is often referred to as "autopoietic theory",
but we prefer the word "enactivism", recently proposed
by Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991), in order to situate their
position within contemporary cognitive science. Although an extensive
discussion of their ideas would far exceed the purpose of this
paper, we would like to focus our attention on an idea that is
central in their work: the notion of autonomy. The word autonomy
is not used to mean independent or self-contained. Within the
enactive paradigm, an autonomous system is a system which is capable
of maintaining its own organization or its own identity. It is
this feature of a living system that determines its cognitive
domain, that is, the domain of interactions in which it can enter
without losing its identity. Varela (1979) distinguishes autonomous
systems from heteronomous systems or control systems. According
to Varela the proper paradigm for our interaction with a heteronomous
system is instruction and unsatisfactory results are errors. The
appropriate paradigm for our interaction with an autonomous system
on the other hand, is conversation and unsatisfactory results
are "breaches of understanding"(fig. 1). Conversation,
by the way, refers to the quality of the relationship, not necessarily
to linguistic communication. A clear example of a control system
is a computer, because its operations can be totally predicted
once we know its input. Conversely, the operations of an autonomous
system are not determined by its input, but by its own structure.
It is the structure of the system which determines how it can
be modulated. The "environment" only triggers or selects
certain patterns of change, but does not bring about the range
of possible changes (Winograd and Flores, 1986, p. 43). The most
radical consequence of the enactive position is, that once we
consider the cognitive domain of an autonomous agent to be rooted
within its own constitution, we can no longer explain its actions
in terms that rest on a pregiven reality. An observer can describe
the actions of a cognitive agent in functional or semantic terms,
because she or he can establish a connection between a description
of its internal dynamics and a description of its interactions
with an environment. Nevertheless, such a description is always
a description in terms of the meaning the observer assigns to
this behavior, and does not pertain to the behavioral dynamics
itself. Thus, within the enactive paradigm, cognition is not viewed
as the representation of a pregiven world, but as embodied action.
Cognitive structures are therefore not determined by an independent,
"out there" reality, but by the way in which the actor
is embodied. It now becomes obvious that the enactive paradigm
also throws a different light on the reality of the social. It
can no longer be assumed that human conduct becomes socially patterned
by "swallowing" ready-made cultural models so to speak.
Instead, through our embodied action we continuously orient ourselves
towards each other, thereby constituting co-operative domains
of interaction or "consensual domains" (Maturana, 1978,
1980; Maturana & Varela, 1980). Learning culture is indeed a process
of con-struction rather than in-struction. Those consensually
validated forms of life represent the only kind of "objectivity"
there is. Like Shweder (1991) observes, we live in "multiple
objective worlds". This point of view characterizes enactivism
as a position between constructionism and realism. On the one
hand, it could be considered a constructionist position, because
it rejects the idea of knowledge as the representation of a pre-given
reality. On the other hand however, it is also a realistic position,
because it considers cognition and experience, and ultimately
our social or consensual reality, to be rooted within our own
bodily constitution. Maybe it is best taken to be a kind of 'experiential
realism', which is quite compatible with Lakoff and Johnson's
approach of the same name (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Johnson, 1987).
They consider meaning to be rooted within preconceptual bodily
experience that is metaphorically extended to other cognitive
domains. However, we should bear in mind that this preconceptual
experience is a social experience from the outset, because through
embodied action and embodied understanding we inevitably contribute
to the constitution of consensual worlds. If cultural psychology
intends to account for socially patterned human conduct, it should
take serious experiential reality. Our lifeworld is real, because
it is constructed out of real or authentic experience, that can
be accounted for in psychological terms. This does not put aside
that this experience is socially structured as well. However,
if we choose to look for the origin of this structure in a pregiven
reality or in pre-existing cultural models, we pass over in silence
the preconditions of experience itself. Our enterprise requires
a better understanding of the features of experience that enable
it to be socially structured. Therefore, cultural psychology should
not only be a culturally informed psychology, but also a psychological
study of culture.
fig. 1:
Human beings considered as heteronomous or autonomous systems
| |
Human
beings considered as heteronomous systems |
Human
beings considered as autonomous systems |
| Paradigm
of interaction |
Instruction |
Conversation
/ Dialogue |
| What
is cognition? |
Processing
of information / Representation |
Enactment
of meaning / Embodied action |
| Unsatisfactory
results |
"Errors"
|
"Breaches of understanding" |
| Psychological
reality of culture |
Internalized
cultural models |
Consensually
validated forms of life |
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