Fundamentals of Research on Culture and Psychology

Theory and Methods

Valery Chirkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317666097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Recherche et méthodologie en psychologie

This unique text covers the core research methods and the philosophical assumptions that underlie various strategies, designs, and methodologies used when researching cultural issues. It teaches readers why and for what purpose one conducts research on cultural issues so as to give them a better sense of the thinking that should happen before they go out and collect data. More than a "methods text", it is about all the steps that go into doing cross-cultural research. It discusses how to select the most appropriate methods for data analysis and which approach to use, and details quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods for experimental lab studies and ethnographic field work.

Part I
Thinking and Reflecting

One objective of this textbook is to highlight the importance of thinking about, reflecting upon, and planning research before any decision about methodology, design, and data generation technique is made. The second objective is to teach students that all studies must be problem-oriented. These two key points should drive research and determine its strategy, purpose, and methods for data collection and analysis.

Part I is devoted to three domains of thinking about research: disciplinary, theoretical, and philosophical. These three types of thinking guide researchers in understanding their stance within corresponding disciplines and their position in relation to content-related theories and philosophical paradigms. Each researcher has to have a clear understanding of the assumptions, underlying beliefs, and ideas that implicitly or explicitly guide his or her research activities. As we will discuss later, one of the objectives of such a strong emphasis on research-related reflections is to help readers discover and minimize research habitus, a taken-for-granted, habitual and unreflected set of beliefs about research (see Chapter 3). Chapter 1 will cover some areas of disciplinary thinking for research on culture and psychology, including anthropology—social, cultural, psychological, and cognitive—and psychology—cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous. In Chapter 2, we will discuss four theoretical perspectives on understanding the psychological functioning of people in sociocultural environments. These perspectives are metaphorically labelled Homo Mechanicus, Homo Bios, Homo Socius, and Homo Interpretans. Chapters 3 and 4 will introduce three philosophical paradigms—positivism, interpretivism, and realism, together with related modes of inference—enumerative-inductive, deductive-nomological, abductive, and retroductive, where the last two are categorized as the ampliative-inductive and ampliative-deductive ways of inference.

1
Disciplinary Thinking

From Anthropology to Psychology

This chapter will:

• Provide a brief historical account of social and cultural anthropology
• Discuss the main theories of culture
• Introduce the idea of cultural relativism and the etic and emic approaches to research on culture and psychology
• Analyze the emergence of and some contribution to psychological and cognitive anthropology
• Examine the accomplishments and weaknesses of cross-cultural psychology
• Consider cultural and indigenous psychology

Introduction

Research on culture and psychology is part of the social sciences that are concerned with investigating societies and people’s functioning within these societies at different levels: individual, social, cultural, and national. These sciences encompass such disciplines as anthropology, economics, sociology, political science, and some fields of psychology. Social in the name of these sciences denotes the sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitical and sociopsychological aspects of people’s lives in the modern world. A goal of this chapter is to provide a survey of the main disciplines that aim at studying human functioning in different sociocultural contexts, mostly in various domains of anthropology and psychology. An additional purpose of this chapter is to show the interdisciplinary nature of culture and psychology research and to demonstrate that compartmentalized disciplinary thinking is unproductive for such investigations. Each of the analyzed fields of study has the potential to make important contributions to understanding people’s behaviors and experiences in socio-cultural environments. I also want to demonstrate that both cross-cultural and cultural psychology are members of a large family of disciplines where scientists want to understand how people, their actions, and experiences contribute to the development of their sociocultural worlds, and how these worlds shape and regulate their behaviors and lives. The third objective of this chapter is to help young researchers to position themselves disciplinarily and reflect on the connections with and insights from other disciplines. Here these reflections are called disciplinary thinking.

This chapter will provide a brief history and a major focus on the methodology of social and cultural anthropology as well as on psychological and cognitive anthropology and cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychologies. These disciplines will be defined and their approaches to culture and people’s behavior and psychological functioning will be outlined. Finally, I will demonstrate how these disciplines may complement each other in resolving the enigma of humans’ sociocultural existence.

Cultural and Social Anthropology

The term anthropology comes from Greek anthrōpos— human being and logia— study. This etymological definition means a study of humans or a science of human beings. But the more accepted interpretation of anthropology is a study of humankind, of human communities of different sizes and their ways of life, rituals, norms, and values. Anthropology is a social science, but it has several divisions, like physical, biological, and evolutionary anthropology, that connect it with natural sciences, biology first of all. There are also divisions, like linguistic anthropology, anthropology of art, religion, and history, that are closely connected to the humanities. The subfields of psychological and cognitive anthropology are the closest to psychology. These varieties of anthropology make it one of the richest social/human sciences, and psychologists interested in studying human functioning in different cultures will benefit by learning more about this discipline.

Anthropology has a long history driven by the interest and fascination that travelers, tradespeople, missionaries, and scholars experienced upon encountering exotic tribes, their unusual rituals and beliefs, paradoxical social arrangements, and many other peculiarities of people’s social lives that seemed amusing and unexplainable at a first glance (see some of their accounts in Launay, 2010). A systematic study of these ‘other’ ways of life started in Continental Europe, where works by German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)—his lectures Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View were published in 1798—and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803)—his 1784 book Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man— laid the basis of the studies of culture. It is believed that their precursors were Italian humanist Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and French lawyer and philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), who each provided a new and revealing look and analysis of the development of human societies (Eriksen & Nielsen, 2001). These thinkers produced the idea of volkergeist, or “spirit of the people” or “spirit of nations” as a precursor to the idea of culture that is shared by people and molds their psychological existence. An important figure, especially for culture and psychology studies, was German scholar Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), who contributed to anthropology, psychology, and the humanities. Bastian suggested the important notion of “the psychic unity of mankind” for investigating the functioning of people in different sociocultural worlds. Under this concept, he understood a set of “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken) that are universal for all people and that manifest themselves in varieties of “folk ideas” (Volkergedanken) that are peculiar for each sociocultural community (Koepping, 1983). It is believed that Bastian’s notion of elementary ideas contributed to the structuralist hypotheses of Levi-Strauss as well to the insights of Carl Jung about the universal themes of collective unconscious. Although there are debates among anthropologists about how to interpret and apply this notion of “the psychic unity of mankind” (see Shore, 1998, for a discussion), it is considered one of the basic principles of modern anthropology and psychology, which states that “humans [are] everywhere born with roughly the same potentials, and inherited differences are negligible” (Eriksen & Nielsen, 2001, p. 17). British anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941) and French social scientists Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) and Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009) are considered to be the founding fathers of modern anthropology.

Nowadays the majority of the anthropologists who identify themselves with the social sciences are divided between social and cultural anthropology. Social anthropology is mostly associated with the British (and partly French) tradition of studying the diversity of human societies. It treats cultures as the outcomes of the social structures and social relations that exist in these societies. According to these scholars, the social is primary while cultural and symbolic are secondary. Cultural anthropology is considered a mostly North American tradition where the cultural is believed to be the primary factor that determines social conditions. There is a tendency in modern anthropology to combine these two disciplines under the title of sociocultural anthropology (Carrier & Gewertz, 2013), similar to merging social and cultural psychology under the umbrella of sociocultural psychology (Valsiner & Rosa, 2007).

Social anthropology has its roots in the works of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), and some other British and Continental social scientists. Most of them were strongly influenced by Darwin’s idea of evolution, which they applied to the realm of the social and cultural development of humankind and their civilizations. Following Radcliffe-Brown, many embraced structural functionalism, which treats societies as complex systems, like organisms, where all their components work together to support the main functions of survival of, coordination, and balance among the people within their social milieu. For psychologists, it is important to consider Malinowski’s functionalist idea that cultures and societies serve as mediators and facilitators for the satisfaction of human physiological and psychological needs. It is believed that this idea laid the foundation of the culture and personality studies later in the United States (J. D. Moore, 1997).

Disciplinarily speaking, social anthropology has been much closer to sociology than to psychology, and its boundaries with sociology are pretty blurry. It had been thought that social anthropology should have been focusing more on primitive societies, whereas sociology should have been studying modern and industrialized societies. Today this division no longer exists, as social anthropologists intensively study various domains and aspects of life both of underdeveloped and of developed and highly industrialized countries (Fardon et al., 2012). It was also believed that anthropologists should have mostly employed holistic ethnographic methods of living and observing natives in their natural environments, while sociologists should have used a more analytical approach, very often quantitative, to study the organizations and functioning of human social communities and societies. This division no longer works either, as sociologists successfully employ ethnographic methods to do their work just as anthropologists do (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007).

A strong critical analysis of British social anthropology was provided by American anthropologist George Peter Murdock (1951), which still bothers these scholars (see Fardon et al., 2012). Murdock’s statements, that social anthropologists are closer to sociologists than to anthropologists if culture is considered the primary topic of anthropology and that in their theorizing they are indifferent to psychology, are important for psychologists who work with social anthropologists. Although the authors of two volumes of The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology (Fardon et al., 2012) try to delineate the disciplinary and thematic boundaries of this discipline, many of the critical reflections of Murdock remain unaddressed.

Cultural anthropology was born in the United States and spread to other countries. German-trained physics student Franz Boas (1858–1942) became a prominent American anthropologist and the father of American anthropology. He was a student of Bastian, who moved to northwestern Canada to study how native people perceive the color of ice and seawater. This topic was driven by his interest in the psychophysics of vision. Then, he naturally moved to study the universal and relative aspects of psychological processes, and these studies provoked his thinking in relativistic terms, emphasizing that each community creates its unique cultures and social institutions that determine the distinctive configurations of the psychological processes of its members. Thus, an idea of culture as a powerful determinant of mental and behavioral differences emerged in anthropology and gave a whole new direction of thinking in comparison to social anthropology. By placing culture at the center of anthropological research, the problem of understanding what culture is and developing theoretical accounts of this phenomenon became important for these scholars.

This culturalist direction of cultural anthropology has been involved in studying the development and evolution of cultures and discovering the regularities and patterns of these developments, comparing cultural communities, and, finally, developing theories of culture. Cultural anthropologists became the leading theoreticians of culture in the social sciences for many years (Harris, 2001; Keesing, 1974, 1990; Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952; J. D. Moore, 1997). This strong emphasis on culture makes them believe in the primacy of culture in determining social structures and human behaviors, and thus they believe that by studying cultures they will provide answers to both the soc...