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Cultural psychology
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.
It is based on the premise that the mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The concept involves two propositions: firstly, that people are shaped by their culture, and secondly, that culture is shaped by its people.
Cultural psychology aims to define culture, its nature, and its function concerning psychological phenomena. Gerd Baumann argues: "Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract analytical notion. In itself, it does not cause behavior but abstracts from it. It is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining how people understand and act upon the world."
As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche. This results less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."
Yoshihisa Kashima talks about cultural psychology in two senses, as a tradition and as a movement that emerged in the late 20th century. Cultural psychology as a tradition is traced back to Western Romanticism in the 19th century. Giambatista Vico and Herder are seen as important early inspirations in thinking about the influence of culture on people.
Its institutional origin started with the publication of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Folk Psychology and Language Science, scholarly journal founded by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal), first published in 1860.[citation needed] Wilhelm Wundt expanded on this concept, and his volumes on Völkerpsychologie are among the earliest accounts of a cultural perspective within the discipline of psychology. He saw Völkerpsychologie as a cultural-developmental discipline that studied higher psychological processes in their social context. The proposed methods were comparative and historical analyses.
Another early cultural framework is cultural-historical psychology which emerged in the 1920s. It is mostly associated with the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev. They claimed that human activity is always embedded in a specific social and historical context and should therefore not be isolated.
While in psychological research interest in culture had declined, in part due to the popularity of behaviorism in the US, some researchers in anthropology, like Margaret Mead, started to explore the interaction between culture and personality. In the 1970s-1980s, there was an increasing call for an interpretive turn in anthropology and psychology. Researchers were influenced by constructivist and relativist accounts of knowledge and argued that cultural differences should be understood within their contexts. This influence was an important factor in the emergence of the cultural psychology movement. Leading scholars of this movement were, among others, Richard Shweder and Clifford Richards. The launch of a new journal and the publication of multiple major works, like Shweder's Cultural Psychology and Cole's Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline helped to shape the direction of the movement.
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Cultural psychology
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.
It is based on the premise that the mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The concept involves two propositions: firstly, that people are shaped by their culture, and secondly, that culture is shaped by its people.
Cultural psychology aims to define culture, its nature, and its function concerning psychological phenomena. Gerd Baumann argues: "Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract analytical notion. In itself, it does not cause behavior but abstracts from it. It is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining how people understand and act upon the world."
As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche. This results less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."
Yoshihisa Kashima talks about cultural psychology in two senses, as a tradition and as a movement that emerged in the late 20th century. Cultural psychology as a tradition is traced back to Western Romanticism in the 19th century. Giambatista Vico and Herder are seen as important early inspirations in thinking about the influence of culture on people.
Its institutional origin started with the publication of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Folk Psychology and Language Science, scholarly journal founded by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal), first published in 1860.[citation needed] Wilhelm Wundt expanded on this concept, and his volumes on Völkerpsychologie are among the earliest accounts of a cultural perspective within the discipline of psychology. He saw Völkerpsychologie as a cultural-developmental discipline that studied higher psychological processes in their social context. The proposed methods were comparative and historical analyses.
Another early cultural framework is cultural-historical psychology which emerged in the 1920s. It is mostly associated with the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev. They claimed that human activity is always embedded in a specific social and historical context and should therefore not be isolated.
While in psychological research interest in culture had declined, in part due to the popularity of behaviorism in the US, some researchers in anthropology, like Margaret Mead, started to explore the interaction between culture and personality. In the 1970s-1980s, there was an increasing call for an interpretive turn in anthropology and psychology. Researchers were influenced by constructivist and relativist accounts of knowledge and argued that cultural differences should be understood within their contexts. This influence was an important factor in the emergence of the cultural psychology movement. Leading scholars of this movement were, among others, Richard Shweder and Clifford Richards. The launch of a new journal and the publication of multiple major works, like Shweder's Cultural Psychology and Cole's Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline helped to shape the direction of the movement.