The dynamic development of culture, self and social relations

Psychology & Developing Societies http://pds.sagepub.com/ The Dynamic Construction of Culture, Self and Social Relations Michael F Mascolo and Sunil Bhatia Psychology Developing Societies 2002 14: 55 DOI: 10.1177/097133360201400105 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pds.sagepub.com/content/14/1/55 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Psychology & Developing Societies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://pds.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://pds.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://pds.sagepub.com/content/14/1/55.refs.html >> Version of Record - Mar 1, 2002 What is This? Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 Selves emerge in development through intersystemic co-action To illustrate this position the case of pride, a self-evaluative emotion, is used It is argued that language and other semiotic vehicles of culture are instrumental in the social mediation of the shared meaning systems that frame the development of self-evaluative emotions Illustrations from interviews with participants from India and the US suggest similarities as well as differences in the kinds of ideologies, values and myths that are employed to talk about and structure pride experiences The American individual endorses a system of pride relevant cultural values that is organised around low interdependent themes, which are prominent among Indians However there are commonalities between the American and the Indian participants too The themes such as "helping others", "taking care of one’s children and family’; "helping those who are in need" and "working hard" were common to both It is suggested that it might be useful to think of the cultural differences as embedded within similarities The Dynamic Construction of Culture, Self and Social Relations* MICHAEL F MASCOLO Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts SUNIL BHATIA Clark University Traditionally, many theorists in psychology have made sharp distinctions between notions of self and other, subject and object, or individual and culture (Shweder, 1990) Drawing on such dichotomies, many psychologists have proceeded under the assumption that it is * This article was supported by a Ciejek Grant for Research in the Humanities (Merrimack College) and a Merrimack College development grant The authors wish to thank Nicholas Buehler, Laura Craig-Bray, Carol Ann Dalto, Kurt Fischer, Mirium Itteyerah, Bonnie Kanner, Marc Lewis, Girishwar Misra, Catherine Raeff, and Raymond Shaw for their contributions to the ideas expressed in this article We also would like to acknowledge the kindness of Daniel and Linda Ciejek whose generous support made work on this article possible Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 56/ possible to study &dquo;the behavior of individuals&dquo; independent of any particular analysis of culture From such a view, psychology proceeds as an attempt to uncover universal laws that govern the psychological functioning independent of one’s sociocultural environs More recently, sociocultural and social constructionist scholars have proposed accounts which maintain that culture plays an important role in the actual constitution of human action and meaning (Cole, 1996; Harre & Gillett, 1994; Rogoff, 1993; Shweder, 1990; Valsiner, 1997) From these views, there can be no accounting of human activity that does not consider the particularities of culture and context Nonetheless, in some versions of social constructionism, notions such as individual and self are so attenuated that they play virtually no meaningful role in understanding human functioning (Gergen, 1991; Kvale, 1992; Sampson, 1994) In this paper, we advance an epigenetic systems approach to an analysis of individuals and culture (Bidell & Fischer, 1996; Gottlieb, 1992, 1997; Mascolo et al., 1997) In so doing, both individuals and the cultures of which they are a part are understood as multileveled, emergent, and coacting systems The organism-environment system is organised in terms of a series of embedded biogenetic, agentive, dyadic and cultural systems Although each level or class of processes functions as a set of distinct systems, no single system is privileged in an analysis of the construction of culture or self Thus, an epigenetic systems view suggests that individuals and cultures function as distinct yet embedded systems which mutually make each other up (Shweder, 1990) , The Concept of Individual in Psychology The view that one can study human activity independent of any particular analysis of culture has been manifested in psychology in many ways For example, in their authoritative elaboration of the information processing approach to cognitive development, Kail and Bisanz (1992) hold that cognition can be understood in terms of mental representations and processes that &dquo;intervene between observable stimuli and responses&dquo; (p 230) From this view, in studying cognitive development: the primary focus is on internal factors Rather than external environmental factors the mechanisms that enable development to occur are assumed to be internal to the system itself, rather than imposed Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 / 57 by the environment, and hence development is construed as selfmodification This orientation does not deny the importance of environmental events for cognitive change, but it represents the view that ’whatever the form of the external environment, the information-processing system itself must ultimately encode, store, index and process that environment’ (Klahr, 1989, p 138, as cited in Kail & Bisanz, 1992, p 232) asserting a strong dichotomy between internal processes and the external environment, the information processing view implies that what is &dquo;out there&dquo; is largely independent of the &dquo;architecture of cognition&dquo; that defines the main focus of psychological inquiry To be sure, culture and environment affect cognition, but culture is not regarded as an essential ingredient in understanding human acts of In knowing Such views also prevail in various areas of social psychology For example, consider the classic work of Levenger (1980; Levenger & Snoek, 1972), whose innovative analysis of close relationships continues to inform current theory and research (Baron et al., 1994) Levenger proposed a model in which mutuality in close relationships undergoes a series of systematic changes, beginning with no contact at all and proceeding through higher-order levels of increased mutuality Level involves no contact between two unrelated persons Level involves a unilateral awareness of impressions and attitudes of the other, but without social interaction Level involves surface contact, which involves the exchange of attitudes within limited social interaction Levels of mutuality increase with additional social interaction Levenger represents these changes in mutuality in terms of a series of increasingly intersecting circles (representing the self and the other) within a series of Venn Diagrams At level 0, separateness of self and other is represented by two circles which neither touch nor intersect; increasing mutuality is represented in terms of increasing intersection between Venn Diagrams representing self and other Levenger’s (1980) focus on the development of mutuality through social interaction captures important changes in the development of close relationships Nonetheless, in Levenger’s model, relationships have their origins in the coming together of two initially isolated and separate individuals In doing so, Levenger’s model does not consider the necessary embeddedness of distinct individuals in social relations and sociocultural systems from the very beginnings of life Through Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 58 their embeddedness in social contexts defined by shared social meanings, individuals virtually never encounter each other from the standpoint of total unrelatedness To be sure, mutuality in close relationships undergoes massive transformation in development, even in ways described by Levenger’s model; but it is a mistake to imply that development proceeds from a state in which individuals are initially isolated from each other One might argue that much of current social psychology continues to proceed from the standpoint of the isolated individual For example, the study of social cognition (Bercheid, 1994; Fiske, 1993, 1995) examines ways in which individuals represent knowledge about social relationships with other people This work proceeds from the view that individuals regulate their social behaviour by drawing on knowledge represented in memory about social relationships that is garnered from past social interactions Despite the emphasis on social cognition, studies often focus on internally represented resources that individual actors are assumed to draw upon to regulate their behaviour in relation to others Rather than focusing on static knowledge structures that are assumed to exist within individuals, one might suggest that there is a need to examine ways in which social knowledge is produced and negotiated between people in actual on-line social interactions Concepts of Culture in Psychology Although psychologists often work to examine the role of culture in the genesis of human activity, culture and social context are often treated as external entities that function independent of individual action, rather than as a part of the very process of human functioning For example, Bond and Smith (1996, p 207) maintain that: Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior Its presumptive goal is to achieve universal status by generalizing results found in particular ecological, social, legal, institutional, and political settings Such a generalization requires testing in maximally different cultures ’In no other way can we be certain that what we believe to be regularities are not merely peculiarities, the product of some limited set of historical or cultural or political circumstances’ (Kohn, 1987, p 713) Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 / 59 This view implies that culture functions as an external variable that must be controlled or explained away rather than investigated in its own right As such, culture is a variable that can obscure a scientific analysis of individual behaviour and human nature, the quest for which is seen as the legitimate subject matter of psychology Again, Bond and Smith (1996, p 209) hold: adopt Poortinga’s (1992) broad position on culture as a set of ’shared constraints that limit the behavior repertoire available to members of a certain group’ (p 10) This definition of culture may be married to a position of universals, in which ’it is assumed that the same psychological processes are operating in all humans independent of culture’ (Poortinga, 1992, p 13) Cultural constraints then limit and shape the behavioral expression of the universal We process As a set of external &dquo;constraints&dquo;, culture provides the &dquo;boundary con- ditions for behavior&dquo; (Poortinga, 1992, p 12) Such constraints &dquo;limit&dquo; the overt expression of internal processes that are understood to be fixed and culturally universal In this way, culture is treated as an external variable which influences the behaviour and internal processes of bounded individuals, rather than as an actual part of the process of human activity itself The goal of studying culture as a variable in psychological research has prompted attempts to quantify cultural variability using a series of comparative dimensions For example, social psychologists (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1990, 1996) have compared cultural groups in terms of the individualism-collectivism dimension Cultures may be defined in terms of &dquo;cultural syndromes&dquo; which consist of &dquo;shared attitudes, beliefs, norms, role and self-definitions, and values of members of each culture organized around a theme&dquo; (Triandis, 1996, p 407) Individualism refers to the belief that individuals are ends in and of themselves, and that individuals should actualise their selves in contradistinction to forces that promote conformity (Gould & Kolb, 1964) Collectivism refers to the subordination of individual needs and goals to the goals, standards, norms of the larger cultural group Triandis and others have produced a variety of indices to differentiate individualist and collectivist cultures North American and Western European nations are generally considered individualist, whereas many Asian cultures are consider collectivist Cross-cultural psychologists have Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 60 reported clusters of differences between individualist and collectivist cultures in cognition, motivation, emotion, self-representation, and social behaviour (Marcus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1996) Recently, Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) attempt to define and categorise culture through dichotomous distinctions such as &dquo;individualism and collectivism&dquo; and &dquo;independence and interdependence&dquo; has come under criticism Solomon (1994) has argued that Markus and Kitayama’s definition of the Western self as &dquo;independent&dquo; and the Asian self as &dquo;interdependent&dquo; inappropriately represents each culture as homogeneous and monolithic Similarly, Hermans and Kempen (1998) have argued that cultural dichotomies such as individualism and collectivism not fully capture the complex relationship between global cultures and the construction of self They note that globalisation has led to a hybridisation of cultural practices and meanings that: may create such multiple identities as Mexican School girls dressed in Greek Togas dancing in the style of Isadora Duncan, a London boy of Asian origin playing for a local Bengali cricket team and at the same time supporting the Arsenal football club, Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, and native Americans celebrating Mardi Gras in the United States (p 1113) The above examples demonstrate that, for many of us, cultural identities cannot be described in terms of fixed or narrow categories Rather, as Hermans and Kempen (1998) argue, it might be more appropriate to describe cultures as constantly &dquo;moving and mixing&dquo; (p 1117) Such an enmeshed process of identity construction may reveal that individuals and groups from different cultures could hold similar, yet distinct views about the meaning of a particular emotion, a nonverbal sign, or a social ritual In the words of Shweder and Sullivan (1993), human action may exhibit universality without uniformity Cultural Psychology and Social Constructionism recent years, a variety of approaches have emerged that argue for the centrality of culture in understanding the production of human action These approaches include cultural psychology (Cole, 1996; Shweder, 1990; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993), cultural-historical psychology In Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 61 (Cole, 1996), sociocultural psychology (Rogoff, 1990, 1993; Valsiner, 1997; Wertsch, 1991), social constructionism (Burr, 194; Gergen, 1989; Shotter 1997) and discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Harre & Gillett, 1994) Although these approaches differ from each other, they generally embrace a set of common assumptions First, sociocultural psychologists reject the idea that individuals can be understood in terms of the operation of a central processing mechanism that functions independent of culture and social context According to Shweder (1990), &dquo;[t]he main force in general psychology is the idea of [the] central processing device The processor, it is imagined, stands over and above, or transcends, all the stuff upon which it operates It engages all the stuff of culture, context, task and stimulus material as its content&dquo; (p 80) In rejecting the notion of transcendent central processor, cultural psychologists seek to understand &dquo;the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and ground, practitioner and practice, live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up&dquo; (p 73) As much, culture, values, shared meanings and social context help constitute the very process of human activity, and thus not stand outside of it Thus, the explication of humah activity requires the study of persons as intentional beings-agents whose actions are always directed toward some aspect of a sociocultural environment, which itself both structures and is structured by human intentional states (beliefs, desires, emotions, values, shared understandings) Common to sociocultural approaches is a strong appreciation of the role of semiotics and tool use in the mediation of all higher-order psychological processes (Cole, 1996; Harre & Gillett, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991) This view can be illustrated through an analysis of Vygotsky’s notion of thought as internalised speech According to Vygotsky (1978), thinking has its origins in sign activity that emerges first between persons on the social plane of action As children gain the capacity to internalise and use socially-created signs, they begin to use signs to organise their own thinking and action This occurs first in the form of private external speech, and later in the form of inner speech, or thinking Because signs represent shared meanings that exist prior to any given individual within social relations and cultural traditions, thinking becomes governed by the informal rules and meanings of one’s local linguistic community (Harre & Gillett, 1994) As such, thinking and higher-order psychological functions have social rather than personal origins Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 62/ Mindful of the dangers of discounting human agency in sociocultural models of mind, several sociocultural psychologists have addressed the issue of how individuals participate in the cultural construction of meaning (Harre & Gillett, 1994; Shweder, 1990; Valisner, 1996) For example, Rogoff (1990, 1993) has criticised the traditional concept of internalisation as an explanation for the processes by which socialisation occurs Rogoff argues that the notion of internalisation implies the presence of a barrier between a child and his or her social world That is, through internalisation, cultural forms that initially exist outside of the child are transmitted and transferred to the intrapsychic sphere to form internal representations From Rogoff’s (1990, 1993) sociocultural view, there is no barrier between the self and other to be traversed To Rogoff, development occurs through a process that she calls guided participation Children necessarily act as participants in socioculturallydefined activities As participants, they are necessarily involved and help constitute the social interactions of which they are a part Children cannot be said to simply internalise cultural forms that exist initially outside of them Instead, children appropriate-take for themselvesaspects of the co-constructive activities and meanings that evolve between them and socialisation agents (Vygotsky, 1978) In so doing, children not only transform the social interactions of which they are a part, they also modify cultural meanings as they appropriate them to existing understandings and skills Thus, sociocultural approaches explicitly reject the notion that the subject matter of psychology consists of analyses of the bounded individual Questions for a Sociocultural Approach to Human Activity Sociocultural approaches take the study of human action beyond the idea that individuals and cultures represent bounded and independent entities Nonetheless, the compelling idea that psyche and culture &dquo;make each other up&dquo; (Shweder, 1990) raised important questions for any complete analysis of culture and individual First, to say that self and other make each other up implies that although selves are not independent, they must nonetheless function as at least partially distinct entities or systems It makes no sense to say that self and other make each other up if self and other cannot be regarded as in some way distinct from each other (Mascolo & Dalto, 1995) If individuals are distinct Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 63 yet interpenetrating systems, to what we refer when we speak of individual selves? Second, if individuals and cultures make each other up, how does this occur? If individuals develop by appropriating cultural meanings from their everyday interactions, then just what is it that individuals actually when they appropriate such meanings? (Mascolo et al., 1997) As meanings are appropriated and used, how interacting individuals transform the local cultures of which they are a part? Third, the idea that self and other participate in each other suggests of relational rather than linear causality The activity of any given individual, dyadic or cultural system arises from relations among elements rather than from isolated elements alone However, there are multiple levels and layers of the systems that make up individuals and their social contexts Any given human act is necessarily and simultaneously a biological, psychological, social and cultural product As such, there is no reason to privilege any particular process, element or level of analysis in the study of human activity, whether that level is culture, individual or some process that is regarded as a central component of individuals (cognition, affect, etc.) If culture goes all the way down, then surely biology goes all the way up As such, a complete psychology would be bio-psycho-socio-cultural psychology rather than simply a cultural psychology As long as the various layers and components of human systems are seen as interpenetrating rather than independent, nothing is lost by embracing a more encompassing theoretical framework for thinking about the production of activity and meaning In the beginning, we suggest that epigenetic systems approaches to human development hold out the promise of offering integrative metaphors for thinking about the interpenetration of individual and culture ’, The Dynamic Construction of Culture, Self and Interpersonal Relations In recent years, systems metaphors have become increasingly prominent in the analysis of psychological processes (Barton, 1994; Bidell & Fischer, 1996; Fischer & Bidell, 1998; Fogel, 1993; Mascolo & Harkins, 1998; Mascolo et al., in press; Thelen, 1990) Recently, scholars have proposed epigenetic systems approaches to psychological development Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 Downloaded from pds.sagepub.com at MERRIMACK COLLEGE on December 9, 2012 C ~ ~ O C ~ ~.~ c: ~ S-2 ~ol -gs~~~ M~ 11~~! +-&dquo;,~ro~Q) -!! 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