Working at the Interface of Cultures

Eighteen Lives in Social Science

Michael Harris Bond, Michael Harris Bond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317380771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Etnopsicología

Behind the mask of objective science lie the dynamics of what happens to scientists who go to live and work in another culture. Those who work and study in an alien culture often find themselves changed in ways that affect their scientific work. How does this challenge, stimulate, provoke, suggest and inspire advances and novelty in their theories, methods and instruments?

Originally published in 1997, each of the essays in this title explores these issues through the experiences of a distinguished practitioner, describing the process of intellectual growth and development. Chosen for their extensive experience with people holding a different worldview, the authors have all achieved renown for their contributions to the social science of culture.

1 What kind of game in a far-away forest?

Ernest E. Boesch

THE QUESTION

Every science has its subjective side. Our motivations do not stem from mere rational considerations; a study of the subjective roots of scientific zeal would in fact be very promising. Yet, although scientists do not object to the analysis of the more private sides of geniuses like Einstein or Freud, they not only tend to resist strongly any attempt at looking behind their own professed objectivity, but also to look askance at those who more candidly confess to their more subjective motivations and reactions. Objectivity, too, exacts a price, although different: it consists in creating a make-belief-reality of abstract concepts and, all too often, unrealistic data. Thus, the task we face is to find the balance between an honest assessment of one’s own role, a gathering of culturally valid data, and the critical evaluation of both.

Yet, to which purpose this ‘honest assessment of one’s role’? After all, we want to produce findings useful to others, be they researchers or practicians – soul-searching appears irrelevant: if Cole and Scribner (1974) discover that the development of Piagetian concept constancies is influenced by schooling, this finding is practically useful without any recourse to the subjectivity of its authors. If a doctor cures a patient, we are not interested in knowing whether he did it for money, by professional duty or by human compassion; yet, if the doctor happens to fail systematically certain cures, his personal motives might become relevant. But there are more general reasons for self-reflection: should we try to be aware of our subjective goals, should we stop confounding personal motives with objective necessities, would not our life become richer, and academic life more relaxed?

Self-scrutiny might be even more fitting in our somewhat strange endeavour to carry our psychological research into alien lands. Research on other peoples demands much modesty and detachment, while unfamiliar surroundings generate reactions of insecurity, often complex, defensive or compensatory. Self-awareness might then, for instance, prevent us from speaking of ‘natives’, ‘subjects’, ‘cases’ and ‘samples’; it would contribute to a less pretentious language and to a more humble conception of our role as ‘researchers’.

Thus, I see many uses for this kind of self-scrutiny, but does it have to be published? Public ‘confessions’ are always suspect; they are never entirely candid, revealing either too much or too little. But striving to draw an honest picture, one may hope to encourage others to look more closely at their own ‘reasons which the reason ignores’ – and thus, by being subjective, to make science more objective. Yet, in order to prevent the ‘self-disclosure’ in these pages being misunderstood as a lack of scientific objectivity, let me stress that it describes the subjective side of a research process the ‘rational’ side of which has been documented in various other publications (for a bibliography see Boesch, 1991, 1992). Of course, our scientific work did proceed along the usual routines of hypothesis formation, data gathering and analysis, but let us keep in mind that without subjective motivations it would have been done differently – or rather, not at all.

What then were my reasons for working in Thailand? I am sorry not to be able to tell that already at an early age I felt attracted by the enigmas of that or any other culture. It is true that as a young boy I was an avid reader of American Indian stories but I cannot recall that they stimulated any more general cultural curiosity. When, in 1955, the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) unexpectedly offered me the directorship of the International Institute for Child Study in Bangkok, I ignored both the location of Bangkok and the country to which it belonged (Thailand was then not yet a tourist destination), and had developed neither a particular interest in alien cultures nor any culture-escape nostalgia of which I would have been conscious. Yet, why then did I accept UNESCO’s offer?

GETTING ON MY WAY

I had left my own country, Switzerland, only four years ago for Saarbrücken, to join what it was hoped would become the European University. Until that time I had worked as a school psychologist, and thus, when accepting the chair of psychology, I had no other university experience than that of my own student days. When UNESCO’s offer reached me, I had just about become reasonably familiar with my work and the internal academic routines. It was therefore very hesitantly that I went to see our then French Rector about it. His reaction was simple: ‘Monsieur Boesch,’ he said, ‘the offer honours you and it honours our university. If you accept, you will learn something, and the university will profit from it. So you accept.’ I must confess that later I found such generous common sense to be rather rare in university life.

If the Rector’s reaction cleared the way, it does not explain my personal acceptance. This, I surmise, relates to a number of factors, both old and recent, more or less personal ones. I had grown up in a divorced family, had received a strict, narrow-minded religious education; between the two world wars, we suffered severely from the economic recession, soon even to be darkened by the shadow of the growing German Nazism up to, finally, the four-year-long threat of a Nazi invasion of Switzerland. It was a sombre world of limited opportunities, and under such conditions, a youngster will tend to develop escape strategies. Mine was to become a poet, but with this plan in mind – I decided to study medicine. A writer, I thought, should live close to real life and not just in the world of books.

For financial reasons, I soon changed from medicine to psychology, and it so happened that to realise this plan I was in the best possible place at that time. I had chosen to study in Geneva, the university farthest away from my home town during the war – another escape gesture – and there was the Institut Jean Jacques Rousseau with professors as renowned as Claparède and Piaget. However, my studies and my subsequent work as a school psychologist having, as far as I can see, no particular bearing on the problem discussed here, I shall not consider them any further.

Yet, to accept in 1951 the call to the University of the Saar was perhaps an escape, too, although I did not realise it as such: an escape from what I felt to be the narrowness of my home town and its connections with my childhood, but also an escape from the limitations my school psychological work was subjected to. Did university life really turn out to be more rewarding? As mentioned, I was not prepared to be a university professor, and thus, although probably discharging my duties honourably and genuinely interested in my work, I was bound to a heavy routine of ‘catching up’ and of groping my way. I did not consciously suffer from it, but it confined me in an intellectuality rather adverse to my former artistic leanings. Adding to this situation a seriously disturbed marriage, the Bangkok offer could indeed have appeared to open the door toward a new kind of life, full of uncertainties, but also of promises.

I had never seriously dreamed of going to exotic places._#Yet the frustrations and denials we suffer in our lives will induce images of alternative forms of existence, which tend to trace a ‘wish-course’ for the future we anticipate or hope for; I called these images ‘fantasms’ – a term I have explained and justified elsewhere (Boesch, 1976, 1983a, 1991). These future projections, however, often remain vague, somehow waiting for specific situations in order to become concrete. It is like being in love with love: we may yearn for a lover, unable though to conjure up his or her image, but suddenly, in a perhaps unexpected encounter, we ‘recognise’ the hoped-for one. Although often remaining largely unconscious, such fantasmic anticipations tend to direct powerfully our actions, evaluations and choices. Thus, the opportunity to go to Thailand did not correspond to any conscious planning or even daydreaming – yet, once on the table, it was like an unexpected and nevertheless fitting promise.

ON THE TRAIL

I did not, of course, accept it as such, but in all conscious honesty as a limited professional task, certainly exciting, but not viewed in any way as an escape. The time perspective was three years, and I planned to fill them with serious work useful to the Thais as well as, on my return, to my university. I did, indeed, work seriously and hard, but not in the way I had anticipated; goals, particularly as unspecified ones as the one given to me in Thailand, may develop in unexpected ways according to situation – and to underlying subjective tendencies.

At that time, I was less astonished to be selected for the mission than I am today. It is true that, by some advisory activity in the Pestalozzi village (for war orphans) in Switzerland and during international meetings of UNESCO, I had caught some glimpses of alien cultures, yet I did not possess any of the required knowledge, neither in anthropology, nor in cultural psychology, not even in geography. I naively accepted the offer by UNESCO as a token of my qualification as a child psychologist (which was reasonably justified), and as naively thought that qualification would be of use also in Thailand (which it was not). The task given to me was to prepare local staff in psychological techniques and theory in order to do research on the role of culture in child rearing and its impact on child development. I knew thus that I would enter the field of cultural psychology, but I was unaware that I was also going to start on a long track of discovering the cultural limitations of Western psychology.

UNESCO was not much help. The obligatory, so-called ‘briefing’ consisted of much useless advice from people who from all appearances had stayed in Thailand not more than a couple of weeks or in the sheltered confines of some embassy; I was even warned that, ‘Nothing there would be the same as here, not even the leaves of grass.’ I got the cholera-typhus-paratyphus inoculations with their terrifying fever reactions, and I bought myself a pistol before embarking, which was idiotic (in spite of some military training) because useless against really dangerous beasts (which, besides snakes, I would never meet) and not at hand if needed anyhow. But the prospect of an alien land is always unsettling in some ways, and we therefore tend to cling to symbols of our action potential.

And unsettling it was, indeed. Not because of wild animals, although my first night in a kind of wooden hut over a pond was filled with unknown and somehow disquieting noises (Boesch, 1994); otherwise, although I met many curious and interesting things, nothing seemed to be unsettling. I was well received by the staff of the Institute, was promised every help by the Ministry of Education, received friendly help, too, from Robert Textor at the Cornell Center (under Professor Lauriston Sharp), was well lodged in a modest, but comfortable house with a friendly and efficient servant, bought myself a car and enjoyed the support of the local UNESCO mission: all was well arranged for embarking me on a career as another of those foreign ‘experts’ who brought their wisdom to underdeveloped Thailand. What, then, could have unsettled me?

When first meeting the staff of the Institute, they asked me whether I wanted to learn Thai. My answer was affirmative, although there was no apparent need – all the people I had to deal with spoke English, I could teach in English and would scarcely be expected to engage in psychological work with Thai children myself. And friends familiar with the country warned me that Thai was a language too difficult to learn during my relatively short stay. That, however, challenged me – I would show them! Yet, more deeply, self-other fantasms may have been at work: I had always been forced, against many odds, to prove myself – accepting defeat threatened my self-image; not understanding the language would exclude me from much social contact, but I wanted to be ‘one of them’.

LANGUAGE AND IDENTIFICATION

This can be a strong but dangerous wish. ‘Wanting to belong’ may induce one to overestimate closeness, and to form wishful images of the target group. Yet, it was, I surmise, essentially this wanting to be ‘one of them’ which put me on the way to becoming a cultural psychologist. Thus, before and after my work at the Institute, I spent long hours learning Thai, spoken as well as written, and found this challenge extremely stimulating. The staff at the Institute helped me, but of greatest help was Luang Kee from the Ministry of Education. He had written four primers for teaching reading and writing to Thai children, at that time among the best ones I knew in any language; they contained easy short descriptions from everyday Thai life, and thereby not only helped me to learn the language, but also familiarised me with aspects of Thai life which my daily Bangkok experience could not show me. I made quick progress and in about six months was able to sustain a simple conversation in Thai – although not without occasional hilarious tone mistakes (as when, wanting to buy a shirt with short sleeves, I asked for ‘a tiger with shaking arms’; or when much later, lecturing to an audience of doctors and nurses, I transformed a ‘tendency towards’ into an ‘an oblique breast’ – to the obvious amusement of the giggling nurses). Yet, such small challenges only added to the general fascination and satisfaction the Thai language held for me.

The language, of course, opened doors. Not only the door to chatting and conversing, but to more ‘serious’ activities. An early one was translation. I had until then never worked in other than European languages which, after all, are rather like dialects of a common idiom, while with Thai I met a really different language. Soon, the translation of questionnaires or of test items raised unsuspected problems; I realised that the rituals of translation-back-translation did not suffice to guarantee linguistic equivalence. In the beginning, I wrote out questionnaires in English, and then the whole staff convened to translate them; we sat in a circle of about ten people, but once each had suggested a version he or she deemed correct, they often agreed on a formulation mainly due to fatigue or boredom or in deference to the proposal by the highest ranking among them. I started to understand that a translation could be correct and wrong at the same time: in each language one and the same word may mean several things, and only some meanings in these denotational clusters would correspond; furthermore, even among apparently similar denotations, connotations might strongly differ, and connotations being partly individual and often unconceptualised components of meanings, agreements were indeed difficult to reach.

A second aspect of language new to me was its hierarchical anchoring: not only did the terms used with persons of different standing – by age, by sex, by social status – partly differ, but one did also say things differently, or not at all. This nicety raised, of course, awkward problems for the methodology of interviewing. Seeing pupils kneel when speaking to their teacher, I could not help wondering what they would dare to express and what not. Language, I began to realise, was more than simply a medium for communication: to speak was a social action. By its form and content, language was to shape social relationships, and therefore, to understand speech, understanding the words was not enough: one had also to understand its context. This all the more, since language also helps to create fictitious realities, not only by lies or confabulations, but by the less obvious, subtle art of make-believe, combining the tone and the form of language with smiles or other signs. This richness exists, of course, in all languages, but how much familiarity does it take to understand, leave alone to master, it in an alien culture?

My progress in learning the language was highly rewarding; yet, it not only opened doors towards otherwise inaccessible areas of Thai culture, but closed others. Indeed, the more I understood the subtleties of language and social interaction, the more I began to doubt the possibility of transferring psychological methods, and particularly questionnaires, from one culture to another. This doubt, however, was more than technical; it had to do with my identification, with my wanting to be ‘one of them’.

So let me go back to this motif. Wanting to be one of them is, of course, not automatic; it depends upon the nature of ‘them’. What was it that ‘hooked’ me in Thailand? In some ways, Thailand was the complete opposite of my past: hot and sunny in contrast to cold St Gall and grey Saarland, friendly smiling and relaxed people in contrast to the purposefully serious Europeans, a compassionate, tolerant religion in warmly coloured temples instead of culpabilising Christianism in gloomy churches; a teeming, animated nature, contrasting with the secretive one in Europe, which captivated my interest (in my house and garden I encountered – besides termites, stinging black and burning red ants – turtles, six different kinds of snakes, tukaes, house geckos, bats, all kinds of birds, toads and frogs); I found food to my taste, acquired new habits of socialising, of clothing, of body care, learned even more spontaneity, curiosity and fresh awareness – it would have been interesting to examine in which respects I changed, in which ones I remained constant; although, more likely, I both changed and remained constant in every respect, albeit to varying degrees.

Thus, wanting to be ‘one of them’ soon became more than simply wanting to share social togetherness: it turned into a wish to identify. One does not apply questionnaires and tests to people one identifies with; they cease to be ‘subjects’. Instead of observing and measuring detachedly, one would rather tend towards some kind of ‘empathic understanding’. To dispel any suspicion of having gone uncritically native, we did, in fact, not only use questionnaires and other methods presumed to be ‘culture-free’, but even attempted, for some time, to apply them in cross-cultural comparison (e.g., Boesch, 1960, 1975). But my belief in our methods was progressively waning (see Boesch, 1971), and over the years I tried to convince myself that free interviewing should be the voie royale – with, as I will have to confess, much disappointment, the reasons for which I shall explain later.

RELATING TO THE PREY

While I learned the language, we pursued of course the training and planning activities at the Institute, where my local colleagues became as much my teachers in Thai culture as I was theirs in psychology. Needless to say, I also spent much time filling my gaps in anthropological knowledge and in Thai research. We carried out a kind of pilot research project in Bangkok schools which, however, served more to train the staff in psychological techniques than to investigate a specific problem (Boesch, 1960).

In fact, we tested children and interviewed parents with the hope of finding the thread by which the ‘real’ research could start. This was, indeed, a major preoccupation: the assignment I had been given was to study the impact of culture on...