Culture in Psychology

Corinne Squire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134604838
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Culture in Psychology breaks new ground by attempting to understand the complexity and specificity of cultural identities today. It rejects the idea that Western culture is a standard, or that any culture is homogenous and stable. Equally, it rejects the notion that culture is a mechanism that enhances reproductive fitness.
Instead, it alerts psychologists to the many forms of 'foreignness' that research should address and to alliances psychology can make with other disciplines such as anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis.
Part one explores the origins of the new 'cultural psychology' in social change movements, in fields such as ethnography and cultural studies, and as a response to evolutionary psychology. Part two looks at how people create and sustain the meanings of social categories of 'class', gender, 'race' and ethnicity, while the third part examines the interaction between written and visual representations in popular culture and everyday lived culture. The final part examines the idiosyncratic significance cultural forms have for individuals and their unconscious meanings.

Part I
Reconfiguring psychology and culture

Introduction

Corinne Squire

Interest in cultural phenomena, and in work that takes a cultural perspective, is growing within psychology (Cole, 1996; Shweder, 1991; Unger and Sanchez-Hucles, 1993; the journal Culture and Psychology). This developing framework, exemplified in the chapters that follow, no longer takes western culture as standard, or grounds itself in mainstream western psychology (Woollett et al., 1994). Nor does it aim, like contemporary evolutionary psychology, to turn the study of culture into biological ‘big science’ (Plotkin, 1998:223). Instead, it tries to address the specific characteristics of different aspects of culture. This work breaks with the notion of ‘cultures’ as the fixed properties of stable groups (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). It seeks to understand the complexity of identities and identifications as they cut across established cultural categories. Such work shifts concern with cultural differences from the margins to the centre. It alerts us to the many forms of ‘foreignness’ that psychological research should be addressing (MacPherson and Fine, 1995), and to the potential alliances between them (Unger, 1999)—as well as to the intractable, ‘outsider’ nature of such differences (Unger, 1999:61). In this work, culture is something that is cultivated (Mercer, 1994), made or done; it is not a noun but a verb (Unger, 1999:60).¹ And so culture can happen anywhere, breaching conventional boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. A psychology of culture can itself appear in unlikely places. Some of the most startling and innovative moments in the chapters that follow are when contributors recount instances not just of cultural creativity or resistance, but of cultural theory, in the words or actions of research participants. To live in a culture and to be lived by it is also to ‘make choices, distinguish, differentiate, evaluate’ (Derrida, 1995:4). Research participants and researchers alike are cultural performers and cultural critics at the same time.

In order to examine this new ‘cultural psychology’ in more detail, I will consider briefly the contexts in which it has arisen.

Defining and studying culture within psychology

Defining culture has been, for psychologists and other academics, a project intimately related to studying it. Culture, Matthew Arnold famously said, is ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (in Williams, 1958:124). Today, psychological and other writers on culture still often refer to Arnold’s definition, if only to rule it out (Kuper, 1999; Shweder, 1999). Generally, however, psychologists lean towards a less hierarchical, more anthropological understanding. They look at culture as traditional and communicated meanings and practices, and focus on how these meanings and practices are lived individually, how they affect identities and subjectivities (Griffin, Chapter 1, this volume). Yet psychology has rarely taken the ‘emic’ anthropological approach of immersing itself in cultures and studying their internal structures. Instead, ‘cultural’ psychology has classically been ‘cross-cultural’ psychology, studying culture comparatively.

The cross-cultural, ‘etic’ approach assumes that there are some universal properties of culture, despite difficulties in defining and measuring them, and that they derive from common perceptual, cognitive and emotional structures (Triandis and Berry, 1980). It tries to relate its comparative study of cultural groups to these underlying factors. The approach tends to assume a cultural hierarchy in its choices of what to compare between which groups. Sometimes the hierarchy looks unnervingly like that of Arnold: everyone has culture, but some have better culture than others. In Chapter 10 (this volume), Rabia Malik makes a detailed critique of these tendencies while reviewing cross-cultural studies of the emotions. As she points out, this work focuses on emotions named and recognised in the west, like ‘depression’; it uses methods developed by western psychology to study the same phenomena in non-western cultures; it values western individualised psychological addresses to emotional problems and it treats emotions the west sees as ‘good’, as universal signs of mental health. Malik’s own study displays some of the fallacies of this approach. The notions of depression and the word itself are inadequate to her indigenous Pakistani and first-generation British Pakistani interviewees’ descriptions of transitive, social distress. They prefer social and religious remedies to personal and health-professional ones, and they understand distress itself as a normal rather than an aberrant part of psychic life.² As Malik says, these findings show the severe limitations that cross-cultural psychological research now encounters.

While traditional psychological research on culture sometimes investigates ‘emic’, qualitative differences between cultures, it tends even then to hierarchise these differences by treating them within an ‘acculturation’ framework that assumes a teleological progression from marginal to dominant, usually western culture. Alternatively, such research often describes ‘other’ cultures in its own, western terms without paying sufficient attention to the linguistic and conceptual translation problems involved. This framework also assumes that while individuals may adopt different cultures or aspects of different cultures, ‘cultures’ themselves are fairly stable entities (Marshall and Woollett, Chapter 8, this volume). Malik’s study, again, displays some of the problems with this approach. Of her interviewees, even those who had spent most of their lives in Britain described mental and physical health in terms clearly related to holistic, South Asian Ayurveda and Unani Tibb medical concepts. These concepts seemed to be not defensive but helpful, even to British Pakistanis who were well able to access western psychiatric concepts of depression.

Cultural psychology is increasingly aware of the problems of western-centred methods and theories, such as the notion of ‘acculturation’, and of the need to recognise the specific characteristics of different cultures without subsuming them under existing and familiar conceptual frames. Some work still ends up reinstating the older tradition’s biases and hierarchies, though in subtler ways. Yet as Christine Griffin concludes in her evaluation of this work in Chapter 1, some researchers have made more radical criticisms of the tradition, and construct a quite different version of ‘cultural’ psychology (see also Marshall and Woollett, Chapter 8, this volume). The limitations of the older tradition have been only some of the factors guiding this transformation. For the writers in this volume, perhaps the most powerful impetus has come from social change movements, and it is to their influence that I now turn.

The impact of social change movements

Feminism and complexity

Rhoda Unger and Janice Sanchez-Hucles (1993), editors of the Special Issue on Culture of the US-based journal Psychology of Women Quarterly, place their consideration of culture in the context of the psychology of gender, and more specifically of feminist work in psychology. Feminism, they say, is one of the interests through which, since the 1970s, psychology has integrated concerns with social justice into its search for knowledge, understanding and interventions. They argue, too, that a focus on culture allows psychology to take on the complexity of feminist analyses: to address not just gender differences and similarities but the nature of gender itself. For gender is socially constructed yet deeply felt, relatively stable yet a ‘flickering’ consciousness (Riley, 1988:96), defining us but modulated by other social factors and by cultural representations.

In many of the chapters that follow, such complex feminist voices make themselves heard —in Jane Ussher and her co-writers’ theorisation of women’s accounts of premenstrual and non-menstrual bodies, for example, as instances of mainstream discourses of femininity (Chapter 6). Like the discourses, the women’s accounts polarise between private irrationality, and idealised public control and success. Ros Gill and her co-authors, through listening to men talking about advertising images of men’s bodies, explore the multiplicity and changeability of discourses of masculinity, as well as masculinity’s contemporary convergence, through its visualisation and objectification, with discourses of femininity (Chapter 7). And through their qualitative and quantitative studies of how girls and women in the United States approach cultural sameness and difference, Michelle Fine and her colleagues produce a complex map of how white respondents ‘white out’ differences, and how feminism can promote the recognition of differences, particularly racialised differences, and can preserve a sense of political possibility (Chapter 4).

Sexuality, gender and performance

Feminist contributions to psychology have always been implicated with critiques of dominant discourses of sexuality. Contemporary versions of this work, emphasising the ubiquitous yet flexible interconnections of sexuality and gender and insisting that performances of them occur everywhere, all of the time, are having powerful effects on cultural psychology (Butler, 1993, 1997), as many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate. Ussher and her co-writers, for example, discuss the premenstrual body’s transgression of a normative femininity defined by its heterosexual relationships with men, as well as relationships with children, friends and at work. Gill and her co-authors explore the erotising of men’s bodies within consumer culture: heterosexual-identified men start to recognise, and often reject, the desirability, in both senses, of these bodies. More generally, Christine Griffin’s emphasis on the practice of culture, which is taken up by other contributors, draws in part on analyses of culture as performance in recent work on sexuality and gender (Butler, 1993).

Class, power and change

Other social justice movements have also been important in generating new forms of cultural psychology. Arnold’s meritocratic notion of culture failed when confronted with the English working class, which appeared to him, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, as a ‘magnified image of the Rough’ (1958:134), culture’s feared Other. Mainstream psychology’s rather similar fear and neglect of class Others has given rise to a long-standing critical tradition influenced by liberal and socialist thinking. This tradition has emphasised the independent existence and non-pathological functioning of class Others, and has made innovations in research methods, often in qualitative research (Brown, 1973). This critical-psychological tradition has also incorporated some postmodern political thinking, notably Foucault’s analysis of discourses as forms of power (Henriques et al., 1998); Parker, 1992; Rose, 1996; Walkerdine, 1997). And Foucauldian analyses have perhaps the most impact for psychologists when they are applied to culture, since it is cultural phenomena that are most likely to disappear when approached either quantitatively or through ‘personal experience’. In Chapter 3 by Frosh and his co-writers on young white British men’s discourses of ‘race’ and racism, the men’s speech is analysed not as a quantitative indicator of their behaviour, or as a guide to their personal feelings, but as a sign of the cultural resources available to them, resources that are importantly determined by class as well as by gendered, historical and racialised positionings: a ‘whirlpool of forces’ (p. 57). In such work, ‘culture’ loses its comfortable independence from politics, and the inevitable involvement of cultural psychology in cultural change becomes explicit.

‘Race’, hybridity and creativity

Implicated with social change movements focused on class, sexuality and gender, are initiatives directed against racism and towards pluralist cultural formations within which ‘minority’ cultures can be sustained. Such initiatives are crucial to any reformulation of cultural psychology, partly because of the traditional equation of ‘culture’ with ‘race’ (Kuper, 1999), but more importantly because cultural formations in the west are always traversed by racialised identities and differences. Much psychological work around ‘race’ has addressed omissions and prejudices in research and practice. However, considerable effort has also gone into examining the nature and effects of racialised culture, as for instance in the work that began with Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s influential studies of black children’s preference for white dolls in the later 1930s (Clark and Clark, 1947) or, in the 1980s, Stephen Reicher’s (1984) much-cited portrayals of the St Paul’s (Bristol) uprising as a racially plural, politically engaged social system rather than the irrational black riot pictured in the popular media and predicted by mainstream crowd research. Today, in conditions of multiple diaspora, increasing transnational migration and moves towards both localisation and ‘globalisation’, antiracist initiatives coexist in psychology with sophisticated analyses of what Paul Gilroy calls the ‘lived profane differences within cultures’ (1993:1)³ and the hybridising negotiations and struggles between them (Bhabha, 1994; Bhachu, 1997). Such analyses appear, for example, in Malik’s careful charting of ‘distress’ in British and indigenous Pakistani interviewees in relation to both western and South Asian concepts of health and illness; Fine and her co-writers’ descriptions of ‘race’, ethnicity and gender as flexible categories and feminism as a lens that makes whiteness invisible but politics visible, and Frosh and his co-authors’ account of a white British masculinity defined in uneasy relation to the Othered masculinities associated with black British men of African Caribbean and Asian descent—historically and socially particular varieties of ‘blackness’.

Bipasha Ahmed (Chapter 5) focuses on a topic psychology has neglected, the effects of racism, but refuses, like her interviewees, second-generation Bangladeshis, to turn racism’s subjects into either victims or self-deluding deniers of racism. If these young middle-class interviewees assert that racism is both less than it was, and more ineradicably subtle, she argues, this is both because they will not let it structure their lives, and because they recognise that their experiences as young middle-class British Asians are quite distinct from those of their parents or their working-class Asian contemporaries. Harriette Marshall and Anne Woollett present a hopeful, though modest prototype of hybridity in an account of their ‘Changing youth’ research on young women’s and men’s transitions to adulthood (Chapter 8). They analyse the video diary of a 15-year-old Asian woman, Kavita, looking at the varieties of ‘raced’, gendered and other religious, historical and everyday lived cultures on display. In this case, representations drawn from Hinduism, Madonna, Frida Kahlo, antiracism, a contemporary Hindu youth movement and the young woman’s mother’s life all appear within an apparently straightforward and singular self-presentation. Moving further away from particularity, Erika Apfelbaum (Chapter 11) explores the conditions of uprootedness and unfamiliarity that increasingly break up our cultural lives, geographically but also through language, history, work and values. She argues that the translations such fractures require are difficult but potentially creative, and that we can still pursue a limited but concrete universality across cultural dispersion.

In the Conclusion to this book, Valerie Walkerdine deploys the term ‘hybridity’ to describe the contributions, and applauds their emphasis on cultural survival and expression at the expense of more obviously political, ‘resistant’ aspects of culture. It would be a mistake to see cultural moments such as Kavita’s multiple video images of herself, or the ambiguous self-positioning of Ahmed’s interviewees, bracketed off from racism though still touched by it, as weightless and insubstantial, part of the cloud of ideology that Marxists used to argue obscured the reality of material, economic relations. Nor are such moments ‘mere’ entertainment or escapism, as they would appear in dominant liberal discourses of culture as an unpolitical realm, only aesthetically contentious. Arnold’s own idea of culture was of something that must be struggled for and won at the level of the state (Said, 1984; Williams, 1958). Such struggles can have regressive effects (Jacobs, 2000). Here, though, they include moments of critical, oppositional ‘individual consciousness’ (Said, 1984:14): the new articulations of identity emerging from Kavita’s video, or Ahmed’s interviewees’ understanding of currently developing forms of cultural difference, or the brief queering of heterosexual men’s lives described by Gill and her co-writers, or the white girls and women in Fine and her co-authors’ studies who preserve, through feminism, the possibility of political alliance and change.

A focus on culture may be a depoliticising force within psychology, a ‘substitute for religion’ (Williams, 1958:134);⁴ or it may be a form of action. A relativist, ‘culturalist’ concern with lived differences in cultures may fail to analyse them either theoretically or politically (Spivak, 1996), and may overestimate their value. In the chapters that follow, however, cultural psychology is a kind of culture-making in itself—as indeed all psychology is, only here the endeavour is self-conscious and reflective. Such an endeavour does not preclude theory, but it does also make psychologists aware that their research participants are themselves producers of culture, and sometimes theorists of it too (Spivak, 1996). As Peter Wollen puts it, ‘creativity always comes from beneath, it always finds an unexpected and indirect path and it always makes use of what it can scavenge by night’ (1993:209–10).

Disciplinary intersections

Social change movements are not the only factors in the emergence of new kinds of cultural psychology. Related disciplines—sociology, anthropology and cultural studies—have had their own effects. While psychologists in general, as Unger and Sanchez-Hucles (1993) say, ignore variables belonging to these disciplines, in the realm of cultural psychology this neglect is difficult to sustain. The chapters in this book signal a marked shift in psychology’s relations with other disciplines.

The debt to anthropology: reflexivity, reality and history

Many of the chapters owe a debt to work in anthropology, a discipline that has a long history of debate with psychology over culture. A productive early moment in that collaboration occurred with the plan of Edward Sapir in the 1930s to produce a really ‘social’ psychology of how mind is constituted in and ‘thought through’ culture and history (Sapir, 1994:72; see also Shweder, 1991). Psychology tends to ignore the history and cultural meanings of symbols and to reduce culture to personality, Sapir claims, but it also pays attention to idiosyncratic events that anthropologists ignore. A ‘science of man’ could result from the expansion of either field: ‘the anthropologist…needs only to trespass a little on the untilled acres of psychology, the psychiatrist to poach a few of the uneaten a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Reconfiguring psychology and culture
• 1 More than simply talk and text
• 2 Gender, genes and genetics
• Part II Culture and social formations
• 3 Cultural contestations in practice
• 4 White girls and women in the contemporary United States
• 5 Constructing Racism
• Part III Culture and representations
• 6 Good, bad or dangerous to know
• 7 The tyranny of the ‘six-pack’?
• 8 Changing Youth
• Part IV Culture and the emotions
• 9 Culture, psychology and transitional space
• 10 Culture and emotions: depression among Pakistanis
• 11 The impact of culture in the face of genocide
• Conclusion