Table Of Content

Valsiner 1 Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology Jaan Valsiner Clark University, USA Worcester (cid:198) New Delhi May, 2006 Valsiner 2 Author’s Preface This book is an adventure into the synthesis of ideas in the field of cultural psychology—building on the know-how of developmental science, anthropology, sociology, history, semiotics, and philosophy. Its basic focus is deeply phenomenological—human lived-through experience—rather than behavior-- is taken as the basis for the science of psychology. Psychology has in its history constantly struggled to prove its belonging to the pantheon of science—by way of adopting superficial understanding of the objectivity of its subject matter (in case of the widespread notion that it studies behavior), or of its methods. None of these efforts have succeeded, and in the case of the topic of the present book— cultural psychology—we face the most complex and most fascinating task of suggesting new leads for the construction of a discipline that is both general in its basic knowledge through representing human particulars in all their richness. Psychology can become science through fully accepting the centrality of human living experience within its social contexts and in all of its uniqueness. Yet—as a Wissenschaft—it builds abstract, generalized knowledge. I do not subscribe to the empiricist claim that is widespread in much of contemporary social sciences that the latter cannot lead to generalized knowledge because of the extreme context-dependency of its phenomena and the uniqueness of human experience. Somewhat paradoxically—or it may seem so at the first glance—I claim that it is precisely because of the maximum uniqueness of human psychological phenomena1 that the science of human psychology can arrive at general knowledge. Yet this knowledge is not of the classic Aristotelian – classificatory—kind. It entails the focus on basic processes of experiencing that generate the whole range of human life experiences. The specific forms of human psychological phenomena vary across time, persons, and contexts— but the ways they are organized are universal. This is a book within psychology—yet without the orthodox mindset of contemporary psychology. It is meant for readers who want to find answers to the basic question—how is every person who lives in any location in the contemporary World integrating culture into one’s psychological life. How is culture present in human feeling, thinking, and acting—and how do human beings guide their own subjectivity through various cultural means. with a goal orientation of outlining the basic foundations for cultural psychology as a basic social science. My special gratitude for reading various drafts of the chapters, and giving me criticisms which did not let me become intellectually lazy through writing down too many words, go to my colleagues in various universities (Nandita 1 This is axiomatically given by the irreversibility of human life-time. Valsiner 3 Chaudhary at Lady Irwin College, New Delhi; Angela Branco at University of Brasilia, Brady Wagoner at University of Cambridge, UK.) and to my students in the Advances in Cultural Psychology seminar in Spring 2006, where we discussed various drafts of the first seven chapters. The helpful additions to the materials in the book by Anna Kupik, passionate reading of the text by Jayme Harrison, constructively ironic challenges by Kirsten Reed, and complementary suggestions by Alessa Zimmerman made significant contributions to the re- writing of the initial drafts. Danielle Kenneally, Scott Bernhegger, and Jen Bartko were always careful readers of the chapters and made very useful suggestions for extending the existing text when it was becoming too much abbreviated. Dave Messing was adamant in his insistence on the elaboration of human values that were visible behind my abstract schemes in the book, and Jonathan Mathews set his photographer’s mind up to suggest betterment of both text and figures. Boyd Timothy productively challenged my sometimes too excessive critiques of the existing “normal science” practices of contemporary psychology. Of course it is only some of the constructive solutions that were offered during the four months of the weekly seminar that I could use in the final version of the book. But the ideas will live on and may re-appear in the next work. Selective discussion of some of the ideas of semiotic mediation in our “Kitchen Seminar” at Clark, particularly the intellectual input of Nick Thompson, Roger Bibace, Vinny Havern, Emily Abbey, Sarah Strout, Rose Sokol, and Genie Giaimo is gratefully acknowledged. Part of my focusing on the dynamic social structure of humab living received input from my teaching a seminar on cultural and social psychology of genocides. The discussions of how most ordinary people may move between amity and atrocity with Becky Phillips, Tiberiu Galis, Naama Haviv, Stephanie Fischer and others were helpful for my better understanding of that part of human psyche we usually prefer not to think of—violence and politics. The book began as a plan to re-write my monograph of 2001— Comparative study of human cultural development, published in Madrid—but very quickly moved on to become a new book on its own. Still a few themes— and materials—carried over from that book. Some themes were borrowed from my other book—one can find a new version of the coverage of family and marriage here that started from my Culture and human development (London: Sage, 2000, chapter 6). While preserving the theoretical developmental core of my thinking in previous books, the present one is unique in its elaboration of the dynamic social structure within which human beings exist. The focus on child development that was present in the previous books has here almost but vanished, and replaced by a generalized interest in human development at any age level. A number of colleagues graciously allowed me then to re-print their photographic materials, as well as provided with valuable feedback. Usha Menon of Drexel University helped me with the figure of Kali (Figure 5.9.), as well as with my interpretation of the role of that powerful and ever-transforming deity. A special gratitude goes to my Editor at Sage, Tejeshwar Singh, who carefully Valsiner 4 charted out the making of this book, and its fit into the wider framework of the readership in India, as well as elsewhere. I am particularly pleased to publish this book in India so that my efforts to slowly learn about the intricacies of living in varied social contexts in the rich and heterogeneous cultural worlds present within the borders of India. I have so far learned from distance—and I hope the results of this learning would be a starting point for my direct experiencing of India in the future. In my personal development, this book is a milestone in a number of ways. First, it is the first time that I fully accept the identity of belonging to cultural psychology. Despite editing the major journal Culture & Psychology in that field since 1995, I had been reluctant to use the label cultural psychology for many years, despite many colleagues’ good advice. In a way, my own relationship to the imaginary “ingroup” of “cultural psychology” is as liminal as is the notion of the generic person who strives towards the center—while keeping oneself on the periphery. To me the label “cultural psychology” seemed too vague—or too fashionable—which for me are both good reasons to not take it seriously. The world is filled with nice labels that fight for social recognition at a superficial level, and I did not want to join the race for the fame with inventors of the world-saving claims of emotional intelligence, codes in the paintings of well-known artists, or mystiques of the psyche of a young boy. There is no suspense in this book. Instead, the reader finds here systematic, sometimes very realistic (and other times very remote) effort to construct a general theoretical framework of cultural psychology. After finding a satisfying solution of translating the ill-defined notion of culture into by far more circumscribed notion of semiotic mediation, I found that the identity of cultural psychology becomes acceptable for myself. A by- product of that focus is the synthesis of psychology and semiotics in this book. Secondly, the book emerged very quickly in the process of becoming well after a sojourn as a participant observer of the life of hospitals. The resulting desire for living passionately and moving ahead with ideas is behind the urge to get this book written. I would feel gratified if the result provides serious reading for intellectually sophisticated thinkers. The real joy of human living is in the play—of ideas, and practices. Cultural psychology as conceived here is the study of the extraordinary nature of the most ordinary aspects of human daily living in any place on the Globe. We are all one—by being individually unique. Jaan Valsiner May, 2006 Worcester, Ma.—Chapel Hill, N.C Valsiner 5 List of Contents Chapter 1. Approaches to Culture— Semiotic Bases for Cultural Psychology Culture within the tradition of cross-cultural psychology Social anthropology, folk psychology, and cultural psychology The question of transfer of culture Semiotic basis for culture: the legacy of Charles S. Peirce Ambiguity re-presented: combining icon, index, and symbol The principle of redundant control Regulating the subjective future: the Promoter Sign Constraining dynamics across the semiotic regulatory hierarchy Summary: Culture as semiotic regulation system Chapter 2. Society and Community: Interdependence of Social Webs Society—a functional abstraction and a semiotic mediator Social Structures and their Differentiation Communication Processes-- Within society and community Generalized meaning fields: collective making of “the society” Summary: Socially guided subjectivity Chapter 3. Making Oppositions: Dialogical Self and Dualities in Meaning Making Boundaries: created in space and irreversible time Looking at “the others”: multiple ways Bi-directionality of cultural understanding: partnership Duality in the social sciences: Dialogical models The Dialogical Self (DS) Theory Meanings emerge through oppositions Summary: oppositions in the semiotic fields of the self Chapter 4. Minimal Communities and Their Organization: Kinship groups, families, and marriage forms Quasi-stability of social identity environments The family: Ideologically presented unity of a part of the kin group Efforts to specify types of family Family as an organized small group Psychological functioning of the joint family context Valsiner 6 Marriages as arranged frameworks Marriage as transformation of relationship forms The polygynic marriage The polyandrous marriage The conjoint (polygynandrous) marriage The monogamous marriage Summary: minimal communities in action Chapter 5. Cultural Wholes on the Move: Maintenance and Crossing of Boundaries in the Semiotic Universes Meanings and movements Cultural psychology of pilgrimage Crusades: unity of war and pilgrimage The CONSTRUCTION<>DESTRUCTION dialectics Crossing borders: within personal cultures, and between Rhetorical guiding of human development Ernst Boesch’s symbolic action theory Basic duality: myths and counter-myths Dialogical processes in myth stories Conclusions: Textured dramas Chapter 6. Thinking as a cultural process Three logical processes in human reasoning Generalization and indeterminacy. Unity of reasoning through abduction Abductive reasoning in practice Overcoming uncertainties: probability as logic Cognitive heuristics as cultural mediation complexes Strategic uses of reasoning Conclusions: abduction as process of innovation Chapter 7. Semiotic fields in action: Affective guiding of the internalization/externalization process Human development: microgenesis, mesogenesis, and ontogenesis Affect—feeling fields and emotion categories Semiotics of the domain of feelings Cultural-historical promotion of affective field construction Rituals as promoters of hyper-generalized feeling fields Valsiner 7 Promotion of different levels of affective sign fields in different societies Cultural framing of affective development Dynamics of affective fields: coordination of person al and collective cultures Internalization and externalization Creating as-if structures through internalization/ externalization Structure of the internalization/ externalization process Conclusion: Functions of the multi-level affective self-regulation Chapter. 8. Methodology for Cultural Psychology: Systemic, Qualitative, and Idiographic Reliance on impossible axioms Methodological objectives of cultural psychology Where democracy fails: in “contributions to the literature” Methodology as knowledge construction process Looking at culturally directed psychological phenomena Systemic Causality What is experiment in the realm of cultural psychology? Modulation of researcher<> phenomena distance The conditional-genetic analysis Generality expressed within specificity Conclusion: systemic methodology within cultural psychology General Conclusion: Culture in minds and societies References Valsiner 8 Chapter 1. Approaches to Culture— Semiotic Bases for Cultural Psychology K: Sir, what does that word ‘culture’ mean? To cultivate? B: It is based on ‘cultivate’. K: That is ‘to grow.’ So we mean by culture that which grows, that which is capable of growth. What benefit is given by culture? B: Science, art, music, literature and technology. Every culture has a certain technology with which it approaches reality; certain methods have been developed to live, to grow things, to make things. K: Has thought created culture? Of course it has. B: Some culture seems to be necessary for man to survive. K: I wonder if it is necessary. B: Perhaps it isn’t, but at least it appears to be. (Krishnamurti & Bohm, 1999, p. 85) Culture has been a difficult term to use in both everyday and scientific discourses in the history of human societies. As a term, it indeed implies some constructive modification of the natural course of affairs. This can take the form of some kind of goal-directed cultivation of features or properties of objects -- be those plants, domesticated animals, or children-- in the process of their development. The whole world of human beings is a cultivated world, where our natural resources – of ourselves, and of our environment—are transformed into meaningful world of objects. Some of those objects become exchangeable as commodities—while others attain the status of personalized and sacred non- exchangeable belongings. Meanings of objects carry their cultivated value—and the objects have their own “cultural biographies.” Thus, cars lose value as they age, until—about the age of thirty they start to belong to the category of “antiques” and as such rise in value year by year (Kopytoff, 1986, p. 80). The same applies to furniture or other household objects of durable character2—only at a different time scale. 2 Such as vases, silverware, rugs—but not plastic cups and plates that are functional precisely in their planned disposability. Valsiner 9 Similar value is often put upon human beings—they become symbols for regulating other persons’ social relationships. Together with assuming social roles— in different areas of the World differently—with age, persons may acquire more social value as “wise persons” and may be trusted with complex decisions. This cultural model preserves the accumulation of experiences of persons’ lifetimes. If such focus is not considered of relevance, social actions may privilege the value of the young and inexperienced over the older persons. In various social institutions older people may be forced into retirement and their social value may be limited to the family circles as loving grandparents. At times the value of human beings is expressed in monetary terms—the sizes of payments made to persons in the social roles of slaves, business leaders, professional athletes, lawyers, doctors or academics as communicated in public are examples of creating collective value for the cultivation of social role images. In short—cultivation has its varied time lines, and areas of focus. All human socially differentiated roles are cultivated. What are the ways in which such cultivation takes place in human relations? Note that the noun-- culture -- does not carry the functions that its verb-kind extensions-- "to cultivate" or "to culture"-- might carry. The crucial tension in psychologists' discourse about culture is that between treating it as an existing entity (e.g., "culture IS X"), and a process of becoming (e.g., "culturing leads to X"). All through this book we will emphasize the dynamic, processual nature of the functioning of culture within human psychological systems—both intra-personal (feeling, thinking, acting) and interpersonal (conduct in relation with other human beings). Values in culture. Culture has been – in lay use—a value-laden term. The contrast between “cultured” and “primitive” tribes has been flourishing in European discourse until it has become censored out by our contemporary social norms. Furthermore, the contrasts between “high culture” and “low culture” have been used in social stratification within a social unit. In line with the appeal of the “high culture” we often tend to emphasize our personal ties with people we label “cultured”, in discrimination of the others towards whom we may show some implicitly derogatory attitude behind the mask of social equality. The notion of culture has had a long history in the social thought (see Jahoda, 1993 for a comprehensive overview). In the present state of affairs, the notion of culture is used in psychology in two meanings. First, it has been used to designate some group of people who “belong together” by value of some shared features. Thus, all the Norwegians “belong together” as they are assumed to share the common language3 and happen to also be citizens of the same country. The Welsh “belong together” as they share the common heritage of language, music, and the area of the British Isles where they have lived. The Basques or Kurds “belong together” by way of their shared language and customs, but not by the countries (Spain or France; and Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran, respectively) in which they live. India poses a major puzzle for delineating “the Indian culture”—given the 1612 different languages spoken within the 3 This of course, is outsiders’ belief about the Norwegians who actually “share” the co-presence of multiple “Norwegian languages” Valsiner 10 borders of the State of India (Chaudhary, 2004), and 675 various small kingdoms into which the present-day country was divided in its pre-colonial history4, and not to even mention the caste segregation—what could qualify as “the Indian culture” remains a prevailing mystery. Of course in our everyday talk the use of such general labels “X-ian culture” provides some cognitive economy to the speakers—yet the analytic usefulness of such labels is legitimately questioned. Person and culture: three forms of relations. In the examples above, individual persons “belong to” a culture. This form of making sense of person and culture-- PERSON BELONGS TO CULTURE-- simultaneously denotes the commonality of such belonging (the descriptive, or classificatory role of the use of the term), and some—usually unspecified—causal system that guarantees the relative similarity of all the persons who “belong to” the given culture. This meaning prevails in cross-cultural psychology. Secondly, culture has been treated as an inherent, systemic organizer of the psychological systems of individual persons-- CULTURE BELONGS TO THE PERSON. Cultural means are brought into the personal subjective worlds where they transform subjectivities in unique—yet culturally guided—ways. In this sense, culture “belongs to” each individual person (Boesch, 1991, 2000, 2002a, 2002b; 2005—see chapter 5). It is irrelevant to which ethnic group, or country, the persons “belong to”, since culture is functioning within the intra-psychological systems of each person. The cultural means—nuances of language meanings, social norms, religious beliefs, etc that were developed in the country of origin— do not stop to function in the deep subjective worlds of a guest worker or an immigrant to another country. Thirdly, CULTURE BELONGS TO THE RELATING OF THE PERSON AND THE ENVIRONMENT. Here culture becomes exemplified through different processes by which persons relate with their worlds. If the person and environment are considered as inclusively separated, culture is considered as a process of internalization and externalization or mutual constituting between person and the social world (Shweder, 1990). If the researcher decides to introduce a boundary between person and the social world (e.g., Rogoff, 1990; 2003; Wertsch, 1998), the process of culture becomes elaborated in terms of appropriation, guided participation, or mastery. Culture here "is" these posited processes, rather than an entity. Study of culture as it is manifested in psychology exists along two different trajectories—those of cross-cultural psychology, and—more recently—of cultural psychology. Despite the fact that both of these sub-disciplines use the term culture, and study human beings, their ways of creating knowledge are quite different. 4 not to speak about the heterogeneity of religious systems that have different histories in the North and South of India—Kurien, 2002