Cultural
psychology looks at culture
Paper presented at the 7th conference of the
International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), 27 April
- 2 May 1997, Berlin. Symposium: Advancing Cultural Psychology
Paul Voestermans
Introduction
What aspect of culture
fascinates me the most? Let me give two examples. In the Dutch
newspaper we had two reports about certain habits among the ethnic
groups in the Netherlands. One was called 'plowing girls', the
other was about the wish of a woman of a minority group to have
her baby-girl aborted, because she was the fourth girl in a row.
These examples will highlight aspects of culture which remain
untouched by a culture theory which is not sufficiently informed
by psychology.
'Plowing'
girls
A group of five African
boys form Liberia, Morocco and Somalia in the age of fourteen
through sixteen got arrested for having raped two Dutch girls
of thirteen and fourteen. It was the habit of these boys to arrange
a meeting with a Dutch girl in the room of one of the boys and
get her laid; 'plowing girls', they called it. The helping profession
noticed that these boys justified their outrageous sexual behavior
by taking recourse to their cultural heritage. In the boys' eyes,
Dutch girls were an easy lay. The girls of their own ethnic group
were difficult to get. They saw no harm in forcing Dutch girls
to be at their service. The Dutch girls are generally quite open
about sex. They discuss frankly what clothes to wear in order
to look seductive, they make jokes about being sexy and so on.
All this stands quite in contrast with the way sex is treated
in the boys' milieu. The boys' parents seem to tolerate the deviant
behavior of the youngsters. They use a double standard: a restrictive
attitude toward sex with girls from their own ethnic group and
a more lenient one in case the girls are Dutch. These girls were
allowed to be used for sexual experimentation, so it seemed. This
means that the boys live in two worlds. They kind of feel that
the culture of their parents demands a proof of masculinity. Yet,
it is forbidden to touch the maidens of their own group. Loose
and bad girls are less of a problem, however. Dutch girls fall
in the latter category, simply because their behavior is a bit
more sexually provocative. Since sex is hardly a matter of public
concern and discussion among the ethnic youngsters and their parents,
no attempt is made to correct the standards which these boys derive
rather amateurishly form their bi-cultural experience. Culture
is used as an excuse by boys and parents alike. The boys explain
that they feel themselves driven almost automatically towards
this awkward sexual conduct. Correction by the parents is difficult,
because they in turn feel less compelled by cultural habituation
to intervene for the sake of the Dutch girls , who do not meet
the standards of respectability. In correctional institutions,
one runs into serious difficulty if one tries to get the boys
off the wrong track of cultural justification. They give quite
a lucid account of which moral standards they respect and why
they feel free to use the morally inferior out-group girls. They
can tell why they feel no remorse. They can tell why they proceeded
as they did on the basis of a derogatory attitude towards the
bad Dutch girls. They felt the right to use them for the purpose
of attaining the equally culturally required status of a sexually
experienced man. This type of practice, by the way, is documented
in novels (Condé, 1984) and non-fiction (Falola, 1996, Derrick,
1974) throughout the world, also in the western world , of course.
In all these places a particular type women were considered not
respectable and could therefore be used for the practice of attaining
masculinity.
Abortion
The second example
comes from a debate about justifiable reasons for abortion. The
Secretary of health in the present Dutch administration deemed
it admissible if a woman as member of a certain ethnic group requested
abortion in case she was pregnant of another daughter in a family
of four girls already. She was very cautious , of course, in formulating
her tolerance and cultural sensitivity. Good parenthood is at
odds with the preference of one sex above the other, she argued.
But against this, she emphasized the cultural practice of giving
more value to a boy. Such practice could in some cases create
an emergency situation for the woman, which is a legal ground
for abortion. The desire for a boy is thus made into a justifiable
reason for abortion. A columnist, member of an ethnic minority
group himself, opposed this type of reasoning by pointing out
that it wasn't a justifiable woman's wish but a culturally ingrained
male sentiment which was at stake here. The Secretary reinforced
unwittingly a culturally induced masculine bias, which to his
view needed to be corrected in stead of being prolonged in the
disguise of a woman's preference. Here again culture is used for
the justification of traditional masculine behaviors with respect
to gender. In the Dutch situation, it is rather strange to put
a woman's choice for abortion in one bag with a man's culturally
induced preference for boys. That is counter-emancipatory behavior
on the part of the Dutch Secretary, so the columnists contended.
In a bi-cultural situation, other standards count as well.
Cultural
practice
Culture shows some
interesting features in these examples. I sketch these against
the background of the general recognition that:
"ethnographers' uses of the word culture have established one
essential point of consensus: Culture is not a real thing, but
an abstract and purely analytical notion (Barth, 1994; Keesing,
1994, Sahlins, 1994, Vayda, 1994). In itself 'it' does not 'cause'
behavior, but denotes an abstraction from it, and is thus neither
normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining
how people understand and act upon the world. As a deliberate
abstraction its use is in conceptualizing that ever-changing 'complex
whole' (as Tylor already in 1871 labeled what he thought was culture's
most engaging feature) through which people engage in the continual
process of accounting, in a mutually meaningful manner, for what
they do, say, and might think" (Baumann, 1996, p. 211).
What
we gather from these examples is that we should not investigate
a concept or a word but instead phenomena, phenomena of culture,
that somehow are puzzling and require a thorough investigation.
The examples show that culture is practice. It refers to the patterned
way people "go around and about things", to use Wittgenstein's
favorite expression. It refers to life forms. We want to understand
this life form's modus operandi, to borrow a notion from Bourdieu.
We are used to talk about culture in terms of beliefs against
the background of which behavior takes shape. Culture is generally
thought of as a system of meaning, an ideational system. It truly
is, and I am not saying such a position is wrong, but as practice
culture involves the organization of feeling and sentiment into
strong motives which in turn engender behavior. What both examples
have in common is that they show how behavior is patterned in
such a way that sexual practices and gender preferences are automatically
produced and enacted without too much mindful attention. The clash
of beliefs is in fact not the most puzzling feature. Puzzling
is that in a bi-cultural situation, in which at first sight mixed
rules and regulations apply, on closer inspection the ingrained
practices of one group are at cross with the equally ingrained
practice of the other. Two styles are in conflict. At the level
of explicit norms and values, both practices involve accepted
standards to which one can refer for justification and for the
defense of what one is doing. One group refers to standards of
masculine behavior, decency, and the importance of males, the
other group refers to bodily integrity and sexual equality. But
apparently, culture can make anything right or wrong, not because
of the application of explicit norms and values, but because of
the patterning of behavior, including feelings and sentiments
with respect to girls. Particularly this latter facet of culture
I would like to talk about today: the implicit process by which
cultural practices become resistant to change, to such an extend
that they produce among other things strongly enacted judgments
about others. I am, therefore, curious about how individual members
of a community get equipped with emotions and feelings, bodily
styles and practices, and automatic behavioral patterns. If one
looks at culture in this way, it becomes a system for chronic
priming, which triggers fully automated responses, to put it in
social psychological terms. Somehow, preconscious behavioral patterns
seem to be obtained, once a person enters into the local practice
of his or her peers. The reason why I am interested in this facet
of culture is that strong beliefs are precisely strong beliefs,
norms are norms and values are values, because of the bodily techniques
and emotions and feelings involved. In such a way, that one is
really puzzled by the mobilized and mobilizing forces behind it,
which are not controlled by content, negotiable meaning or philosophical
and ideological skirmishes. What is at stake here is the 'modus
operandi' of people's life forms. What backs up my enterprise
in terms of an epistemology which does away with stagnant views
regarding the nature of the social, and with the mystifying practice
of using concepts like the 'collective mind', or 'collective representations',
'social construction' and the like, is clearly stated by Baerveldt
and Verheggen (this symposium). They call for a psychological
approach to culture, in order to restore the crucial role of human
experience. Social patterns do not exist as an independent reality
of a collective nature, which is imposed upon us. These patterns
are themselves grounded in the structure of our experience. So,
instead of pointing out the cultural nature of all that is psychological,
the focus should be on the psychological or experiential nature
of all that is cultural. 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,
doubtful and illusory problems are created.
Question
and preview
What then is the
structure of our experience, so that it can adopt a cultural form?
That is the central question for cultural psychology. Answers
to this question are highly relevant to our dealings with such
problems as stated in the beginning of this paper. The experience
of masculinity of some ethnic youngsters to the point of raping
Dutch girls and the spoiling of the parental feelings of worth
by the birth of again another girl instead of a boy, need to be
questioned with regard to the organization of emotions and feelings,
the orchestration of bodily practices, and the cultural form or
frame underneath this structure to such an extent that the concomitant
behaviors are turned into something obvious and natural. I turn
to certain developments within psychology for an answer to these
central issues. I claim that there are crucial developments in
the field, that can be of use. What I mean by crucial is that
they can no longer be played down. I am well aware of the contention
which says that psychology itself is too much of a local, 'cultural'
enterprise, to be of general use in the understanding of culture
as a process. But I think that psychology in that regard has come
of age. That is one of the things I like to discuss in this symposium.
Am I mistaken, or are there indeed developments in psychology
which can be integrated in a body of knowledge regarding the way
cultural structures of various sorts become structuring for the
behavior of individuals? How can we get a hold on the process
by which culture and self make each other up, as Shweder (1990,
p. 25-26) has aptly formulated the key question of cultural psychology.
What has psychology to say about it? I want to focus on three
things. First, there is an interesting cultural psychology of
feeling and emotion in the making. Second, the body has become
a new, or may-be one should say, reinvented focus of psychological
research. Third, social psychological research into the "automaticities
of everyday life" (Bargh, 1997) holds some promise with respect
to the study of the cultural underpinnings of habitual behaviors.
One can look at culture as a system for chronic priming through
which certain sensibilities become established from which the
actor draws his or her behavioral motives without explicit recognition.
Culture
and emotion
Source
of meaning and order
In
psychological research, there is increasing interest in emotions
and feelings as an integral part of the meaning giving process.
One is not only interested in 'cold cognition', but in 'hot cognition'
as well. The latter does not belong solely to the domain of disturbing
forces and threats to rationality. Feelings and emotions have
a positive function in establishing the fabric of social life.
An interesting point is the growing awareness that not just emotion
words, linguistic labels, modes of (facial) expression, and visceral
reactions are of prime importance in psychology. There is a growing
concern with how to bring the conceptualization of emotions and
feelings in accordance with a series of features of the affective
response of real people in real life. Zajonc (1980) but also Frijda
(1988) listed a few essential aspects of emotions and feelings,
which need to be accounted for in whatever attempt to come to
grips with how the affective system operates. The following facets
need to be dealt with. Emotions are primary, basic, inescapable,
and irrevocable. They implicate the self, but it is hard to verbalize
in what way or degree the self is involved. As "preferenda", as
Zajonc calls them, they need to be distinguished sharply from
"discriminanda", things that have to do with propositionally and
argumentatively organized distinctive characteristics of what
is perceived or otherwise taken into account. Zajonc claims that
research into the mere exposure effect proofs that preferenda
are somehow disconnected from discriminanda. There exists a separate
system, which generates affective responses without interference
or preparation from the cognitive system (Klinger & Greenwald,
1994). Emotions and feelings are also quite often disconnected
from content, which explains why human beings still recall the
affective load without being able to say what it was that made
such a strong negative or positive impression. A woman once told
me she remembers how, when she was a child of four, her mother
was desperately seeking support from her. She did not remember
the actual circumstances that lead to this kind of demand. All
that was left was a feeling of being asked to be a stronghold
to her mother. The fact that as a young child she tried to live
up to that unrealistic demand was an experience which permeated
her entire life, up to the day she told me her story. But she
wasn't able to fill in the cognitive details. Emotions have lasting
meaning-giving effects without proper insight in, or access to,
the circumstances that actually generated them. Frijda (1988)
points to some additional law-like regularities in the eliciting
conditions, persistence, resistance, and regulation of emotions
and feelings.
Modular
detection system sensitive to culture
Both authors claim
that the affective responses are generated by some sort of detection
system. It is conceived of as a separate module, which somehow
gears in with other modules in the brain, but is open in its own
way to features of the environment. As such the modular detection
system is part of the meaning giving or meaning generating processes
and structures that are continuously active when human beings
interact with their surroundings. The notion of culture refers
psychologically to the patterning of behavior in such a way that
each individual behaves in a comparable form, depending on how
cultural practices have been regulating and transforming the participating
human psyches. The cultural framing or embeddedness of emotions
and feelings is an important part of the formative process behind
this patterning. The classic concept that comes very close to
comprising the cultural framing or embeddedness is the concept
of ritual. What therefore is required for a further analysis of
the cultural form of feeling is the establishment of a conceptual
link between the affective module and the ritual in such a way
that the above mentioned features of the affective system all
get their proper place. We are talking about a new area of cultural
psychological research. Why new? Hasn't there always been an emphasis
on affect, particularly in the field of psychological anthropology?
Cognitively
encapsulated
The traditional focus
of cultural psychological research into emotion and feeling has
been on the ideological tenets of emotions (Lutz, 1988), on their
social construction (Harré, 1986), their scripting (Fisher, 1991),
their linguistic labeling (Russell, 1991), on the relationship
with the moral order (Lutz, 1988) and on the way cultural meanings
enter into the emotion process at distinct junctures. For example,
at those moments the initial appraisal of an event and the cognitive
elaboration take place (Levy, 1984). This type of research is
badly needed. Yet, the most intriguing phenomenon regarding the
nexus of culture and emotion is the way emotions turn cultural
forms of behavior or practices into persistent and cognitively
rather encapsulated structures. Examples of such forms I already
gave at the beginning. The refusal to accept a household which
consists of girls only, or taking the liberty to use Dutch, western
girls for the attainment of a broadly endorsed masculine image,
are practices which are surrounded by emotions and feelings which
turn the practices into almost immutable cultural forms. Of course,
not all practices are of the same kind. It is a separate problem
to set off practices that are degrading from the ones that can
be accepted without objection. My point is that certain practices
can easily be qualified as undesirable, but in order to change
them (again, there is agreement about a change, as for example
in the case of sexual harassment as a culturally ingrained form
of masculine behavior), one has to be quite specific about what
makes such forms persist. It is quite customary to talk about
other cultural forms as products of deep-seated beliefs, which
turn a world view into one of the "multiple objective worlds"
(Shweder, 1991) people inhabit. 'Thinking through cultures' is
one of the ways to avoid the degrading attitude that the Western
world generally has adopted (Shweder, 1991). But the question
is whether cultural practices are in general - psychologically
speaking - the product of beliefs. The beliefs can be qualified
of course in terms of "embodied thoughts" as Rosaldo (1984) has
done. But that is playing with words a bit. I think it is better
to tie in with the new look on emotion and feeling as a modular
detection system through which behavioral patterns are automatically
activated. How this system is related to beliefs and in what way
beliefs make it possible to modulate the nexus between culture
and sentiment is an important, but separate matter.
The
cases revisited
Let me try to illustrate
the implications of this view on emotion and feeling by elaborating
the case I presented at the beginning of this paper. The African
boys living in two cultures try to attain a masculine identity
as an asset in their dealings with peers. It is quite possible
that their attempts get amplified by features of Dutch youth culture.
For their peers are Dutch friends as well. Dutch research into
adolescent sex in the Netherlands reveals how important it is
for boys to have sex or to have a girlfriend you are sexually
involved with. On the other hand, these boys want to display this
masculinity without violating the honor of their families. It
is quite obvious that there are strong feelings involved here.
Of course, one can try to analyze the affair in terms of conflicting
beliefs and deal with the situation in terms of different cultural
demands. But still, what is prominent is e.g. honor as a strongly
felt motivating force. A set of behaviors gets activated because
of a detection in the situation of what honor implies. It implies,
for example, that the Moroccan girls are kept at a distance, that
the fatherly rule is accepted, and that situations need to be
avoided that endanger the reputation of the group to which one
belongs. This is not so much a matter of belief or reflexively
attainable goals. Often, one is not aware of the compliance involved.
At the same, time the boys experience pressure from the peer group.
Such pressure manifest itself also as something dimly felt or
detected rather than something one is fully aware of. The feelings
involved do indeed produce a certain practice, something that
is enacted rather than something that is reflected upon and by
consequence striven for. One may still prefer the term 'belief'
for the things I mention here, but emphasizing the affective processes
enables us to attend to the practices, enactments and automatisms
of everyday life.
Embodiment
Macro-operational
structures
Practices, enactment
and automatism in turn are closely knit to embodiment. In that
regard I would like to draw your attention to the growing psychological
research into the body. In an earlier publication (Voestermans,
1995) I made a distinction between the micro-functional and the
macro-operational body. The latter term refers to the body that
performs operations that are there to see. The macro-operational
body walks, is gracious or rude, clumsy or elegant, female or
male. It is the body of the farmer, the priest, the truck-driver,
the dancer. The micro-functional body is studied in biology and
physiology. The macro-operational body figures in philosophical
discourse about the 'corps sujet', the inorganic body, and the
expressive body. It is also the body around which Marcel Mauss
launched his program of research into the "techniques du corps",
the corporeal techniques which comprises particular skills such
as walking, giving birth to children, ritual dancing and so on
(Mauss, 1934). He counted the marching styles of the English and
French armies under it as well. One particularly important offshoot
of his program is Bourdieu's research into the bodily practices
of the habitus, a concept first used by Mauss. Habitus to me is
a catch word, really. I have studied Bourdieu quite thoroughly
for years now, and I don't think the notion is psychologically
viable without conceptual refinements of other than sociological
nature. In Bourdieu's approach, the problem of social reproduction
of relations of power is quite dominant. To that end, he has emphasized
the dual objectivation of relations of sex and class in the institutions,
on the one hand, and in the habitus, on the other. Psychologically
speaking, his theory is thin and borders on some form of crude
behaviorism without really saying so, of course. In psychological
anthropology, Csordas (1990) formulated embodiment as a paradigm
for the study of culture and self. He uses Merleau-Ponty's notion
of the body and Bourdieu's concept of habitus in order to explain
certain phenomena in religious revival movements. In his view,
the body is not the object of culture, but its existential ground.
Sensorium
This implies a dialectic
between body and culture. Csordas borrows from Bourdieu the idea
that on the one hand the body does carry certain dispositions
or senses from which people draw their cultural involvement, while
these dispositions and senses on the other hand are culturally
informed. Apart from the five senses, other senses are listed.
They are drawn from Bourdieu seminal work on 'le sens pratique',
the logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). In Bourdieu (1977,
p. 124) we find the sense of duty and of necessity, the sense
of direction, the sense of reality, the common sense, the sense
of beauty, etc. What we have here is a mere enumeration of rather
crude, rather general 'dispositions' through which people are
committed to and involved in cultural practices. What I think
is a valuable suggestion is the idea that embodiment implies the
development of a 'sensorium' (Ong, 1967). The sensorium comprises
not just a 'sensitized' body, attuned to certain tastes and preferences,
but foremost a body inscribed by objective conditions of life
to which it has been exposed and which caused some form of affective
priming expressing itself in bodily styles or practices. As I
have tried to emphasize in earlier publications, it is not so
much that I want to return to the phenomenological body like Csordas
does. The 'corps sujet' lacks culture and history and is conceptualized
in terms of a rather abstract "pre-design of sense and meaning"
(Voestermans, 1991, p. 240, Van der Merwe & Voestermans, 1995a,
p. 42, and Voestermans, 1995, p. 129-130). The notion of 'sensorium'
refers to a body which can be conceived of as a detection instrument
equipped with culturally induced affective sensibilities that
initiates an ideational process in its own right.
Ideo-motor
action and skill training
The body is also
the source of what William James has called 'ideo-motor action'.
In his view ideo-motor action is involved if one single idea to
do a certain thing is given in consciousness, whereas no other
idea exist to not do that kind of thing. Action then follows automatically.
One need not presuppose a homunculus that approves of the intended
action. James did not believe that the brain issues a certain
command, since consciousness has no direct access to the apparatus
of nerves and muscles. The only thing that can be presupposed
is a memory trace of some sort, which has undergone a definite
form of training. The training involves in the beginning the explicit
use of instruction involving visual, kinesthetic and auditory
images, but later on only one trigger suffices, be it visual,
auditory or otherwise. The concept of skill is important here.
So in skills, a series of ideational process are involved, whose
properties still need to be outlined in more detail, particularly
the way these ideational processes are linked to culture and history.
That would be one of the most fascinating things to get a hold
on. Establishing a theory of embodiment, that does not take the
domain of skill and skill training into account, is quite fruitless,
I think. Sampson (1996) has tried to establish embodiment in psychology
by pointing out how little is achieved by creating an "object-body"
and how much is gained, if research takes its point of departure
in
"the inherently embodied nature of all human endeavor, including
talk, conversation and discourse itself. (…) Mouth, lips, lungs,
vocal cords and breath patterns are socialized to form the sounds
that are the words we speak. (…) We are socialized into postures
of listening and hearing that are in various ways part of the
responsive process that occurs in any conversation. (…) This embodied
responsivity, then, is also included in my notion of embodied
discourse." (Sampson, 1996, op. 609).
He
goes on by showing how feminism, Buddhist thought and practice,
and Pentecostal religious revival all suggest a larger cultural
trend away from mere talk and toward the embodied nature of human
action. Sampson doesn't mention Csordas, but Csordas has applied
his theory of embodiment to spiritual healing practices and the
practice of Pentecostal glossolalia in which the participants
show all kinds of bodily experiences. Yet, he also remains somewhat
on the surface of embodiment. Csordas emphasizes the body's expressive
form and the importance of a non-dualist stance towards the body.
Explanations grounded in the objectivist mind-body dichotomy are
rejected, because explanations in terms of learning, suggestion
and physiological mechanisms, which this objectivism entails,
fall short of understanding the immediacy and power that goes
with the embodied ritual practices. The objectivist dichotomy
needs therefore to be replaced by conceiving of the body as some
sort of synthetic force which puts together not just 'percepts',
distinct perceptual elements, but "an infinite series of perspectival
views in each of which the object is given, but in none of which
it is given exhaustively" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 16, cited in
Csordas, 1990, p. 35) as well. Csordas argues for a paradigmatic
shift in which perception is no longer seen in function of cognition
only, but with respect to self, emotion and cultural objects like
supernatural beings and in relation to the other senses as part
and parcel of social practice.
Presentation
instead of representation
I consider these
admonitions to be the least we should do. It is probably the easiest
that can be done also, since a change of philosophy is within
every scholar's reach, but that is not enough. What we need is
a conceptualization of body and embodiment which is attuned to
the great variety of phenomena that speak of the body's capacity
to function as a reagent. That function includes language and
speech as bodily skills. The list of enigmatic phenomena regarding
the body's skillful capacity is endless. Who has not been surprised
by his or her own skill to react to an insult by a life-long companion
in such a manner, that in a fraction of a second those words are
voiced that hit the friend right were he/she is most vulnerable?
It is as if living with a life-long companion produces a field
of meanings in which certain lines of power are drawn, which can
be activated in just a flash and in a fully automated way. The
mind is dragged along with the body, so to speak. Why? Because
we do realize after the fact, that we went too far. Glossolalia,
fierce bodily movements, effervescence, trance, but sexual attraction
and many other expressive forms as well do in fact refer to the
same capacity of the body to present in a rather articulated form
a bodily style. This style presents directly how one undergoes
the situation. It mobilizes macro-operational features that present
without any representation what is required as a reaction in turn.
If one tries to reflect on it one can tell what triggered the
behavior, but in practice it went on uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
In reacting, one devised the means on the spot, spontaneously
and automatically. The means run from speech through gestures
and postures to a smile which either lasts so long as to communicate
that one wasn't amused at all, or is timed so perfectly that onlookers
are relieved to see the joke was taken rightly.
The
skill paradigm
In order to deal
with the body fruitfully, a couple of additional requirements
need to be met. What needs to be accomplished first is an understanding
of meaning in which embodied meanings, which are established in
skills, go along with propositionally and argumentatively devised
actions or activities. The former are as important as the latter,
to say the least. Methodically, it needs to be shown that fully
automated bodily patterns through which meaning gets an experiential
inevitability require some sort of skill paradigm. This paradigm
needs to be fully integrated in some form of cognitive science,
which enables us to look at these patterns as forms of ideation
to be put alongside the traditional ideational processes we all
know so well from whatever probing into mental structures. To
me, this is the most difficult point in bringing psychology back
into our dealings with culture. So far psychology has been either
positivistic or hermeneutic, both fall short in doing justice
to the bodily form of meaning. Both -but indeed from an entirely
different vantage point- take their departure in the body as sign
and signal. Hermeneutics adds the cream of symbols, positivism
adds the down to earth chemicals of tissues and brain, but such
additions render their analyses of meaning obsolete, because what
people of flesh and blood really do and strive for needs to be
investigated with tools that deal with experience, not with mere
conceptualizations of it, be it of materialistic/mechanistic nature
or of interpretative nature. What we need is a psychology turned
into a science, which needs to be as scientific as physics, but
with an indispensable twist: the focus needs to be on something
living that, unlike nature, continuously responds and answers
in return to what science makes of the things and events people
are involved in.
Co-regulative
bodily skills
The devising of such
a methodology will be dealt with in another paper of this symposium,
but on the conceptual side a further requirement can be articulated.
We need a conceptualization of bodily communication which does
not suffer from the flaws of the discursive paradigm's dealing
with the body. Baerveldt and Voestermans, (1996) have tried to
develop a view on communication in such a way that bodily conduct
is included, which contributes to the production of meaning and
which is socially regulated. This requires a redefinition of communication
in terms of co-regulation. Communication needs to be broadened
to include non-linguistic presentational forms, which are found
in artistic expression, dance, ritual and everyday emotional expression.
Presentational forms cannot easily be translated into articulated
statements of a discursive repertoire. They derive their meaning
from simultaneous coordination of the whole to which a description
of 'discrete state communication systems' like the one made of
propositions and arguments solely does not apply. That 'whole'
can better be seen as a 'continuous process communication system'
in which there is no sender or receiver, but in which the communication
unfolds itself as a ceaseless flow of mutually induced action
and adaptation of bodily forms. To such communication, co-regulative
bodily skills are central. These skills are not learned by imposing
prescribed form upon individuals, but by the progressive development
and refinement of bodily sensitivity. In order to relate the required
skill to what I said earlier about emotion and feeling and ideo-motor
action, this sensitivity does not concern some private world of
inner feelings and deliberations, but rather bodily informed participation
in the life-world. This life-world is culturally framed, and informed
by practices that someone needs to feel from the inside. That
happens through training by those who have already mastered the
right forms and techniques. The body then becomes the natural
juncture of co-regulative skills.
The
cases revisited
If we now return
to the cases reported at the beginning of this paper, we can easily
see what living in two cultures really entails. Bi-culturalism
brings to the surface what normally remains hidden underneath
self-evident practices. Boys who have been in contact with not
just the ritualized and skilled bodily patterns of masculinity
as mastered in the ethnic group they belong to, but who are confronted
with Dutch sensibilities and practices as well, cannot simply
stick to their own habitual patterns. For they include degrading
sentiments with respect to women who in their eyes speak rather
loosely of sex and meet the strictures of their primary group.
These sentiments are normally fully automated and find their expression
in bodily conduct which in itself is not communicated from sender
to receiver, but is created on the spot by means of co-regulated
bodily skills. Skills that feed on, so to speak, group support
and group-related co-regulative practice. Only training can be
of any help. One cannot just talk to these boys and tell them
that Dutch women need to be respected, if the sentiments and practices
which are learned within the community are not in correspondence
with this way of working on someone. As is generally the case
with the habitus and habitually organized behavioral patterns,
the learning history is gone, forgotten, and remains in the shadow
of the self-evident behavioral style of culturally informed masculinity.
Culture
as a system of chronic priming
It is about time
to turn to culture. Taking together the developments I have been
describing so far, culture can better be seen as a system for
chronic priming. People get exposed to all kinds of things in
the course of their lives. Particularly in vital areas like the
relationship between man and woman, the relations between parents
and children, between the elderly and youngsters, in the domain
of wealth and status, and in the domain of identity and alterity,
modes of operation get established without really knowing how
and without explicit training. A utomaticity of perception, motivation
and evaluation Priming is an experimental technique, which is
used to get the treatment group in a certain operating mode. The
experimental subjects are not aware of the things they are exposed
to, but in the course of the experiment it becomes apparent that
certain automaticities of everyday life are activated. The control
group is not primed. In an article by Bargh (1997) about the automaticity
of everyday life it is demonstrated that in discovering the "situational
causes of thinking, feeling and acting in the real or implied
presence of other people, it is hard to escape the forecast that
as knowledge progresses regarding social psychological phenomena
there will be less of a role played by free will or conscious
choice in accounting for them.(…) Social psychological phenomena
increasingly will be found to be automatic in nature" (Bargh,
1997, p.1). That is not to say that cognition doesn't have any
bearing on what people do. Even the fact that cognitive processes
can mediate the effect of situational stimuli on responses does
not mean that the effects are any less automatic. Much of everyday
life is automatic in that it is tailored to current features of
the environment. To these features belong people, objects, behavior
of others, settings, roles, norms, values and so on. These features
are mediated by automatic cognitive processing and not by conscious
choice or reflection. The technique of priming is used for the
study of automaticity. Priming prepares a mental process that
occurs in real time at the moment the environmental information,
which triggers the response, is given. Bargh claims that the study
of automaticity has progressed to a great extend the past five
or six years. He concludes that what social psychologist have
been priming were not just perceptual trait constructs, but interestingly
enough, "behavioral tendencies and motivations and evaluations
as well" (Bargh, 1997, p.34). He also points out that "no one
general cognitive model can account for all the obtained results".
But as Vera & Simon (1993), but also Dreyfus (1984) have shown,
for the behavior to develop on the basis of preconscious processes,
the processes had to be enacted or engaged in effortfully and
consciously to begin with, and like any skill or mental process
they could recede into the preconscious only after considerable
use. Frequent exposure to or use in the past of important operations
results in preconscious automaticity. Such automaticity models
the regularities in one's reaction to an event. The automaticity
of perception, evaluation and motivation is still being researched
in greater detail and a growing body of evidence is created on
how particularly "automated skills can interact with the environment
in a sophisticated way, taking in the information relevant to
the goal's purposes and directing appropriate responses based
on that information, without the need for conscious involvement
in those responses" (Bargh, 1997, p. 21). Chronic priming versus
language and thought What sets the goals into operation is not
just priming in the form of temporary contextual influences but
also of chronic, context-independent states. The chronic form
Bargh mentions explicitly is the chronic form of individual differences,
but to these can be added group differences and the chronic form
in the sense of a cultural pattern as part of the individual make-up.
So my previous analysis of emotion and feeling, and of embodiment
and ideo-motor action ties in with the social psychological research
into the automaticity of everyday life. I think it is a lot more
fruitful to allow for a conceptualization of culture in terms
of ideational processes that fit in with the automaticity research.
This implies that the received emphasis borrowed from cognitive
psychology on meaning as organized in propositions and arguments,
or in symbol and language should be played down a bit. Not in
order to revive an useless behaviorism, but to sensitize the researcher
of culture to ingrained behavioral processes to which the actor
has almost no or very little access. May-be he/she has some access,
but that will be after the fact, after the automatic pattern has
been triggered and activated as part of the way culture ticks,
so to speak. At the end I would like to draw the threads of my
argument together. My main contention is that the traditional
approach to culture as a symbolic system or a system of meaning
capitalizes on a theory of meaning, which can be qualified and
refined on the basis of new psychological insights in ideational
processes. The contribution of affective processes, embodiment
and the automaticty of everyday life to the meaning giving process
is something that needs to be researched more vigorously than
anything else in an age in which cultures tend to become a source
of conflict. A suitable and viable theory of meaning will enable
us probably to go 'beyond culture' in a world facing planetary
problems.
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