Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology [1 ed.] 9781620816042, 9781604561739

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Copyright © 2008. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGY

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No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services.

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Copyright © 2008. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGY

Copyright © 2008. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

CARL RATNER

Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Copyright © 2008 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. For permission to use material from this book please contact us: Telephone 631-231-7269; Fax 631-231-8175 Web Site: http://www.novapublishers.com NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers’ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works.

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Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ratner, Carl. Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology / Carl Ratner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62081-604-2 (eBook) 1. Ethnopsychology. 2. Social psychology. I. Title. GN502.R3735 2008 155.8--dc22 2007045967

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

New York

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Contents

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Introduction

vii

Chapter I

Cultural Psychology

Chapter II

Concrete Culture

11

Chapter III

The Dialectical Relation between Cultural Factors and Psychology/Subjectivity/ Consciousness

17

Chapter IV

The Culturally Concrete Character of Psychology

27

Chapter V

Cross-Cultural Psychology

31

Chapter VI

A Dialectical Conception of Analysis and Cultural Comparison

47

Chapter VII

Generalizations

51

Chapter VIII

A Concrete Analysis of Abstractions

53

Chapter IX

Political Implications of Cross-Cultural Psychology

57

Chapter X

Indigenous Psychology

61

Chapter XI

Analysis of the Meanings of Indigenous Psychology

63

Chapter XII

Scientific Cultural-Psychological Theory and Methodology

75

Chapter XIII

A Realistic, Universal, General Cultural-Psychological Theory and Methodology

81

Chapter XIV

Scientific Cultural Psychology and Indigenous Psychology

85

Chapter XV

The Politics of Indigenous Psychology

91

References Index

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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Introduction∗ Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology are the major psychological approaches to studying the relationship between culture and psychology. The three approaches have developed in relative isolation from each other, and each has accumulated a substantial corpus of theoretical and empirical work. The time is ripe for assessing and comparing these similar yet different approaches. Indeed, some confusion reigns concerning why all three exist, how they compare, and whether they can be synthesized to form a unified study of culture and psychology. This book compares the similarities and differences of the three approaches, and it assesses their strengths and weaknesses. My goal is to use the comparison to select the most useful and valid elements and combine them in a coherent, logically consistent, valid paradigm for understanding the relation of culture and psychology. I argue that this goal is more useful and scientific than eclectically combining incongruent, flawed theories wholesale; or minimizing their differences in a false picture of basic harmony. Since the objective of the book is a paradigm of general principles, the comparison of the three approaches shall analyze their treatment of broad issues. These include the nature of culture, the nature of psychology, the manner in which cultural factors organize psychology, the manner in which psychology guides cultural behavior, the nature of agency, what kind of data is most revealing of the cultural organization of psychology, is a general science of cultural psychology possible or does each culture require a distinctive theory and methodology? These broad issues are indispensable for conceptualizing and researching the cultural character of psychology. The book demonstrates that cultural psychology is the most comprehensive and valid of the three approaches and should be used as the foundation of a paradigm. At the same time, it has gaps that can be filled in by contributions from cross-cultural psychology and indigenous psychology. These must be reconstituted so as to be congruent with the framework of cultural psychology.

∗

This book has benefited from discussions I had with Ajit Mohanty and Minati Panda during my Fulbright Fellowship at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 2006-2007, and from discussions I had with Serena Veggetti at a University of Rome seminar that I gave in May, 2007.

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Carl Ratner

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The book additionally emphasizes that the three approaches, like all social science theories and methodologies, rest upon political assumptions about the social system in which we live. They have political implications for this system as well. This concerns the extent to which they implicitly support or challenge the status quo. Seemingly abstract, theoretical issues thus have practical import for daily life. I demonstrate that political assumptions and implications of the three approaches shape their scientific aspects. The scientific aspects are illuminated in a new light that deepens our understanding of them.

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Chapter I

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Cultural Psychology Cultural psychology is not a single discipline or approach. Diverse approaches compete within the rubric of cultural psychology. Competition rages on the theoretical and methodological issues. It rages over the definition of culture, which cultural factors are central to cultural systems and to psychological phenomena, the origins and nature of psychology, the origins and nature of agency, the relation between cultural factors and psychological factors, whether cultural and psychological phenomena can be objectively described and explained, and how information (e.g., narratives) should be elicited and interpreted in order to comprehend the cultural organization of psychology (cf. Ratner, 2006, 2008). I have developed one approach within cultural psychology, known as “macro cultural psychology.” Elsewhere I have explained why this approach is more comprehensive, valid, and useful than others. I will explain (and develop) this approach to cultural psychology in relation to cross-cultural and indigenous psychology (cf., Kalmar, 1987; Ratner 2006, pp. 3540 for the intellectual history of this approach).

The Cultural Nature of Psychology Macro cultural psychology emphasizes macro aspects of culture in relation to psychological functioning. Macro aspects include social institutions, social class, infrastructure, artifacts, and cultural concepts dialectically related to form a social system. The manner in which these factors form and are formed by psychological phenomena is the field of macro cultural psychology. The discipline identifies the cultural content of emotions, cognition, perception, self concept, motivation, memory, developmental processes, sexuality, agency, anti-social behavior, and mental illness. It traces this content to the organizing power of particular macro cultural factors. It explains the enculturation process by which psychological phenomena acquire the content of macro cultural factors. And it addresses the ways in which psychological phenomena adapt themselves to particular conditions to construct, maintain, and transform cultural systems. Macro cultural psychology emphasizes the idea that culture and psychology are not distinct phenomena, but are rather two sides (moments) of one thing, or different sides of

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each other: Culture contains (objectifies) psychological phenomena, and psychological phenomena embody culture; psychological phenomena direct the formation of cultural practices, and cultural factors shape psychological phenomena. Cultural factors do not simply “influence” psychology, they are psychological in the sense that they objectify psychological phenomena. Psychological phenomena are not simply “influenced” by culture, they are cultural in the sense that they arise within and embody cultural form and content, moreover they construct, maintain, and reconstruct cultural factors. Macro cultural psychology is a psychological theory of culture and a cultural theory of psychology. Macro cultural psychology is helpful for understanding culturally distributed psychological issues such as eating disorders, the psychology of gender, romantic love, the individualistic self, and class differences in school achievement, smoking behavior, sexual practices, and mental illness. Macro cultural psychology also introduces a psychological perspective on social reform. It identifies social structural changes (e.g., in school curricula) that will enhance psychological functioning. It also identifies psychological changes that will facilitate reforming macro cultural factors – e.g., the acceptance of public transportation, energy conservation, new pedagogical techniques, new management styles. Rather than defining macro cultural psychology in a list of principles, which are really just claims or assertions, I will develop an argument that draws out (unfolds) principles logically from each other. This methodology explains (justifies) principles; it eliminates the arbitrariness (and dogmatism) of listing them by fiat.

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Human Culture and Psychology The argument begins with an obvious fact: culture is the uniquely human way of surviving in the world. Where animals grow anatomical organs to adapt and survive, humans grow culture. Culture is our adaptive organ, our survival mechanism. This social world is a wholly new order of existence that no other species has. It is a world within a world, a social world within the natural world. We have created our own world of institutions, artifacts, and concepts (which Popper called world 3) that has become our primary mode of existence. We have to maintain and advance it just as animals maintain their biological organs in order to survive.1 Whereas animals primarily (if not exclusively) directly live in the natural world and interact with it via natural biological mechanisms (instincts, anatomical organs) of their individual organisms, humans live in a man-made, collective, cultural world – that consists of relations with other people, getting to work, finding a job, buying a house, shopping. Any

1

Culture is prerequisite to our biological survival (as fully functioning human beings) as much as biological survival is prerequisite to cultural existence. In fact, losing culture is more devastating to our physical survival than most biological deficits are. We can survive a biological deficit (such as loss of an arm, leg, eye, ear, lung) quite well through compensatory artificial devices and social support systems. Surviving cultural deprivation is more difficult because it deprives us of our most effective ways to acquire food, shelter, and other necessities of biological survival. Biological compensation for cultural loss – e.g., by increase in musculature, auditory or visual acuity – is more limited than cultural compensation for biological loss. This is why cultural adaptation is more efficient and effective than biological adaptation is.

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Cultural Psychology

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contact we have with nature is mediated through culture – through telescopes, bicycles, cars, tents, sleeping bags, baskets, bottles, maps, conversations, social knowledge, and rules. Culture is a more effective adaptive/survival organ than anatomical changes are. Culture adapts more quickly to new situations than anatomical changes do. That is why humans can move from any kind of environment to any other kind, whereas animals are only adapted to one setting. And culture combines individual strengths into a collective body to effectively work on nature. Organizing 1,000 individuals in a workplace to produce something is incomparably more productive than individuals working separately. Culture is a unique form of adaptation in several ways. 1) Culture is a collective product. Culture is a pooling of strengths and adopting a collective praxis that includes common behavior, perception, emotions, self, motivation, cognition. Collective culture synthesizes individual behavior in a new form. This synthesis is called an emergent product. It is analogous to the way that water is an emergent product from hydrogen ad oxygen (at room temperature, at least) and has a form that is entirely different from its components. An emergent social product is not merely the sum of separate individuals. It is a synthesis. The simplest example of this is interpersonal behavior such as two boys carrying a log. The boys postulate a common purpose and adjust their actions to each other and to the object in order to achieve the joint purpose. The unity of purpose embraces the participants. Their performance is a new product, unlike what each participant would do singly and also unlike the sum of their separate exertions (cf. Ratner, 2008b). Culture is thus not a sum of individuals; it does not spring from individual behavior or motives. On the contrary, individuals postulate common purposes and then adjust their behavior to fulfill this collective, transcendent objective. This is how culture is a unification of individuals that enables them to outperform separate individuals. The s eparateness of individuals must be overcome to have culture and the advantages it affords. Reducing culture to sums or sequences of individual behavior destroys culture and its advantages. Larger social units, such as teams and institutions, are more complex syntheses of many individuals and manifest other kinds of emergent properties. These include objectified behavioral codes, sanctions, and a physical infrastructure. A school is an objectified institution codified in general policies and physical infrastructure. The policies transcend particular administrators, teachers, or students. They are external to them in this sense. Of course, cultural factors are devised and implemented by individuals. But not as individuals. Rather, individuals function as cultural members. They work with others to construct and maintain an emergent culture that transcends their individuality and shapes it. Animal behavior is primarily individual and natural. Each animal interacts directly with nature (killing and eating its prey, building a nest from pieces of grass) primarily acts on its own on the basis of its organismic mechanisms (genes, hormones, instincts) and organs (large teeth, long necks, strong jaws). Of course, action often occurs during the co-presence of several individuals and in response. But each individual still resonds on the basis of internal individual mechanisms. For example, one animal’s warning call animates others to act. The call is an instinctive, involuntary call determined by intra-organismic mechanisms that elicits an automatic response in other individuals because of their individually acquired biological program. The animal is not deliberately calling to the others for their benefit; it is not employing a collectively devised code. Of course, the highest animals such as chimps have a

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more active social life. However, it is primitive compared to humans (Ratner, 1991, chap. 1; Mithen, 1996, chap. 5). Chimps have no emergent, transcendent, objectified collective culture that remotely approaches human cities, health care systems, factories, schools, books, banks, art, stories, communication, or concepts. Attempts to equalize chimpanzee and human culture (i.e., to find the animal basis of human culture) – either by exaggerating chimpanzee culture or reducing human culture to natural behavior – are clearly specious (Penn, Holyoak, Povinelli, in press). Reducing culture to natural animal behavior destroys its distinctive characteristics that benefit humans. The unique features of culture are pivotal to human survival and fulfillment. 2) Culture is a constructed world. It is created and recreated by people; it entails creativity. Animals do not create their anatomical organs. Culture is a creative process. The notion that culture occurs without human activity, or displaces it, is clearly false. On the contrary, culture stimulates creativity. No animal is as active and creative as humans because no animal has real culture (Ratner, 1991, 2006, 2007). 3) Culture is artificial. It is created by humans, it is not an outgrowth of natural mechanisms. Being a created, artificial product means that culture is changeable. Natural behavior is not. 4) Culture is a new order of life. It has its own principles, dynamics, structure, and content. The characteristics of societies, and the ways they are sustained and changed have nothing in common with the production or character of natural products such as a long neck. Individuals are subject to the forces of the system they have created. Individuals are the product of their product. The fact people create culture does not mean they can capriciously use it or ignore it. People are subject to the culture’s collective, objectified character. This is the advantage of culture, why people create it in the first place. They need and want the collective, objectified, stable power of culture to augment their limited, easily exhausted, individual competencies. They neither want to, nor can, circumvent culture if they are to exist as human beings. Given this, the way to effectively change behavior on a wide scale is through changing the cultural system that supports it, and constructing an alternative cultural system that supports new behavior.

The Cultural Basis of Psychology This new cultural order of life (reality) must entail new behavioral mechanisms that generate and sustain it. Automatic biological mechanisms (instincts, hormones) that generate animals’ individuals interactions with nature cannot suffice to create and maintain culture. That is why animals do not have culture. The behavioral mechanisms necessary to construct, maintain, evaluate, and change culture (in a short time period of several years) are what we call psychology/subjectivity/consciousness/mentality. Macro cultural psychology contends that psychology developed in order to direct cultural behavior. Macro cultural psychology thus explains why psychology has a cultural basis, function, and character. Psychological phenomena have the capacity to enable all the features of culture. One of the characteristics of culture is that it is constructed by humans. Consequently, one function of psychology is to enable this construction, maintenance, and improvement of culture.

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Cultural Psychology

5

Creativity must be part of human subjectivity/psychology/consciousness because that quality is necessary for constructing and reconstructing the cultural environment in which people need to live. Higher cognitive functions similarly have a cultural function. Imitation, communication, empathy, theory of mind, planning, social intelligence, social comparison, and social referencing (social learning) enable cultural interactions. Learning, like intelligence, is essentially a social function devoted to dealing with cultural information, and culturally mediated information about nature. Since our interaction with nature is mediated through culture, our competencies for dealing with nature are really cultural competencies for utilizing cultural means (concepts, artifacts) for dealing with nature. For instance, the characteristics of human learning are adapted to learning cultural behavior more than to directly learning about nature. Humans do not learn about new ecological conditions through the natural sense organs of their individual bodies. They learn through groups. A group implements a division of labor wherein different sub-groups of individuals explore different sectors of the ecology. The sub-groups communicate within themselves and then later with other sub-groups. This pools the strengths of diverse individuals and allows them to share the results of their explorations. This communication across division of labor is far more effective than each individual exploring alone and confined to its own limited sensory information. The flexible, rapid, comprehensive learning that humans are capable of is adapted to cultural interactions, not directly to nature. Human’s culturally-based and culturally-oriented psychology is prepared by an equally distinctive biology: “biological systems implement social processes and behavior.” “The human brain has evolved to deal with complex social coordination that supports higher social cognitive functions such as imitation, communication, empathy, theory of mind, interactions, relationships, and collective enterprises” (Cacioppo, et al. 2007, p. 99-100). The brain’s neuroanatomy is even culturally organized. Human neurons contain a complex protein that receives signals from the audiovisual/language neuronal complex and transmits them to the synapse-regulating machinery of the cell! Thus, this new gene connects an important perceptual-language part of the cognitive apparatus to the complex apparatus regulating the formation of synapses between neurons in the executive (frontal and prefrontal) region of the brain. This connection profoundly changes the direction of the developing structure and connectivity—hence function—of the brain by adding linguistically cognitive information, including the abstract—stories, religion, folklore— to the influences on continuing brain development. Her neuronal connections are being streamlined, directed efficiently to handle the cultural and intellectual world into which she was born. Her assimilation of cultural information is thus embedded in her brain … and her brain has been physically oriented to process the information as if it had long been bathed in that very cultural tradition. This adds lingual and cognitive culture as a component of any other memory she acquires and of her decisions and planning, a quantum leap from the tool-related “culture” attributed to the chimpanzee (Page, 2007, p. 771).

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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Darwinism and Macro Cultural Psychology Emphasizing the unique mental/psychological and biological mechanisms that enable and govern cultural behavior is a Darwinian argument. Darwinism is a radical environmentalism that states that an organism's characteristics are a function of its environment. Since the human environment is primarily cultural, it follows that humans must have qualitatively different behavioral mechanisms from animals who live in a natural environment (Ratner, 2006, pp. 201-208). The Darwinian argument leads to regarding psychology from the vantage point of culture; what culture needs psychology to be and do in order for psychology to be adaptive to culture, construct and maintain culture.

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Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Psychology This is the framework in which Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology fits. Vygotsky brilliantly articulated a psychological theory that explains the cultural basis, character, and function of psychology/conciousness/subjectivity in accordance with the foregoing argument. According to Vygotsky, culture does not simply stimulate psychological competence or express it; it constitutes it (Vygotsky and Luria, 1993, p. 206). Culture is in our mind, and ultimately is our mind since it is the mechanism of our subjectivity. "Behavior becomes social and cultural not only in its contents [i.e., what we think about] but also in its mechanisms, in its means…A huge inventory of psychological mechanisms -- skills, forms of behavior, cultural signs and devices -- has evolved in the process of cultural development." In particular, "Speech enriches and stimulates thinking, and through it, the child's mind is restructured, reconstructed" (ibid, pp. 170, 203, 205). In a perfectly Darwinian statement, Vygotsky and Luria said: “Paralleling a higher level of control over nature, man’s social life and his labor activity begin to demand still higher requirements for control over his own behavior. Language, calculation, writing, and other technical means of culture develop. With the aid of these means, man’s behavior ascends to a higher level” (ibid., p. 139). Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory is radically anti-naturalist. He argues that cultural factors such as linguistic symbols replace natural behavioral mechanisms operative in animals and infants. Natural mechanisms produce automatic, unconscious, involuntary, fixed responses to stimuli. Conscious, subjective, willful, intentional, controllable behavior cannot emanate from the maturation of natural mechanisms. It can only emanate from new behavioral mechanisms that are cultural (ibid., p. 180). The transformation of natural into cultural mechanisms of behavior occurs both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. It characterizes the evolution of man from apes, and the development of the adult from infancy (ibid., pp, 177, 193). "The child's natural memory is replaced by the new artificial [notational] methods…His memory begins to work in a new manner" (ibid., p. 179, 186). The fact that the child is able to acquire in 7 years the psychological competence that took hundreds of thousands of years for primitive man to acquire testifies to the enormous power of established culture to spur psychological development.

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Cultural Psychology

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Mind/consciousness/subjectivity/psychology must be composed of social competencies, mechanisms, and content in order to gear itself to constructing particular cultural systems, and in order to adapt to ongoing cultural systems that require corresponding behavior. Vygotsky’s anti-naturalism is consistent with the Darwinian argument I have composed. This is clear in the statement "this industrial environment altered man himself; it called forth complex cultural forms of behavior that took the place of the primitive ones" (Vygotsky and Luria, 1993, p. 170; cf. Ratner, 2007). Similarly, "The use and `invention' of tools by anthropoid apes bring to an end the organic stage of behavioral development in the evolutionary sequence and prepare the way for a transition of all development to a new path, creating thereby the main psychological prerequisite of historical development of behavior" (ibid., p. 37, my emphasis). This contention is supported by research on emotions. In humans, emotional arousal depends upon social cues that are interpreted through social constructs. There are no clear cut physiological (organic) underpinnings of human emotions (Ratner, 2000). A recent telling example is research that subjected people to conditions of low and high social anxiety. The subjects experienced different levels of anxiety, and they reported different levels of physiological agitation (heart rate, breathing, blood pressure). However, objective physiological measures were indistinguishable across the two groups (Mauss, Wilhelm, Gross, 2004). The independence of emotions from actual physiological arousal confirms Vygotsky’s radical argument that in human psychology social mechanisms have replaced natural (organic) mechanisms as determinants of specific psychological content such as anxiety, love, anger, fear. (Of course, physiology operates as an energizing substratum, but not as a determinant of psychological content.)2

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It is perhaps not surprising that most American “Vygotskyians” have abandoned these core tenets of Vygotsky’s theory. Valsiner, Wertsch, and Rogoff started this defection a decade ago; it has recently been joined by Cole. Cole (2007, pp. 203, 208, 209) denies 1) the cultural break that Vygotsky discovered between humans and animals. He claims that tool use and manufacture, as well as culture, are not unique to humans. 2) the break between adults and infants, 3) Vygotsky’s claim that psychological processes develop increasing complexity and sophistication with cultural complexity. Cole contends that “attempts to verify the idea that cultural forms in both cultural history and ontogeny replace natural forms of cognition have generally failed” (p. 209). Instead of culture replacing natural behavioral mechanisms, “for at least the past 5 million years, cultural evolution and phylogenetic evolution have been part of a dialectically constituted process as both cause and effect of the evolution of modern Homo sapiens” (p. 208). Cole replaces Vygotsky’s idea of qualitative difference between culture users and natural creatures (humans vs. animals, adults vs. infants), and between people at different cultural levels, with a harmonious continuity. All three of Cole’s claims rely on statements from the anti-Vygotskyian, naturalistic perspective of evolutionary psychology, and all are factually wrong (Ratner, 2006, pp. 201-209). Cole uncritically endorses this perspective as confirmed without mentioning the raging debate it has generated or the fatal criticisms that have been leveled against it. No animal uses and manufactures tools at the level of humans (Ratner, 1991; Mithen, 1996). Human culture is unique to humans because no animal has the sophisticated, complex kind of culture that humans do (cf. Tomasello’s research for some documentation). It is pedantic to state that culture and tools are not unique to humans. Everyone knows that higher animals have a capacity for some primitive tool use and culture. The important question is how animal and human capacities for tools and culture compare. To simply say that animals and humans both have culture and tools is misleading because it implies they are comparable. In fact, animal tools and culture have nothing in common with human’s. They are qualitatively inferior. Cole’s claims are trivial when pedantically interpreted (of course animals and humans use tools in some fashion); they are wrong when interpreted realistically in light of the truly profound differences between animal and human tools and culture.

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The mind is so profoundly constituted by cultural stimulation and mechanisms that “The ability to make use of tools turns out to be indicative of the level of psychological development” (ibid., p. 174). The absence of tool use from a person's behavioral repertoire is

Cole is also wrong about the joint contribution of phylogenetic and cultural evolution to homo sapiens. The past 40,000 years have witnessed enormous cultural changes in man without any fundamental neuroanatomical changes. Even significant physical changes in cortical localization of functions are culturally organized. Other physical changes as in body weight are cultural, not phylogenetic. One can compare photographs of Americans before and after 1970 to see the enormous increase in obesity that developed in a single generation because of cultural life styles, alone. In humans, culture does replace natural processes as determinants of behavior (Ratner, 1991, chap. 4). Finally, Cole’s contention that psychological functions do not change in complexity with cultural complexity is false. A great deal of research proves that modern culture stimulates abstract, deductive logical reasoning that is absent from pre-modern cultures. Pre-modern people reason on the basis of empirical experience not on the basis of abstract, counterfactual principles The sociologist of science, Toby Duff states that scientific abstraction correlate with economic, political, legal, philosophical, religious, and social factors. Some societies are more scientifically advanced than others. If we consider the main fields of scientific inquiry that have traditionally formed the core of modern science – namely, astronomy, physics, optics, and mathematics – it is evident that the Chinese lagged behind not only the West but also the Arabs from about the 11th century... Chinese geometry cannot be compared with Greek geometry because the Chinese did not have the slightest conception of deductive systems…Geometry as a systematic deductive system of proofs and demonstrations was virtually nonexistent in China, as was trigonometry. These were the special branches of mathematics needed to advance astronomical model building (Duff, 2003, pp. 242-243). Chinese thinking about nature and mathematics was thus not at the same level of abstraction as other cultures. Chinese culture was so anti-scientific that it prevented Chinese scholars from absorbing science from Muslim scientists who were employed by the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy in the 13th and 14th centuries (ibid., p. 244). “The main defects of Chinese mathematical and scientific thought were both substantive and logical. With regard to logic, Chinese thought lacked the logic of proof as well as the concept of mathematical proof” (ibid., p. 290). Congruent with cultural psychology, Duff traces the low level of scientific abstract thinking in China to the low level of legal abstract thinking. As late as the 1920s there was no Chinese system of law based on predetermined, universal, and transcendent rules to be applied by an independent judiciary. Instead, what we find are systems of discipline in which order, mandates, and edicts are issued by a de facto authority… Chinese legal thought did not move to that higher level of abstraction which considers local variation in customs and which simultaneously postulates a higher level of sacred order, eternal, and even divine, which is associated with natural law in the West…It is precisely because it is above these local variations that it is thought to be natural and imbedded in nature (ibid., pp. 263, 265). The notion of universal, abstract laws of nature has a cultural basis in social laws. The cultural differences in abstraction, that span thinking about society, law, nature, mathematics, and deductive logic, confirm Vygotsky’s point that different levels of cognitive abstraction indeed exist among different peoples. Cole’s attempt to deny this and equalize all people at the same psychological level (Cole, 2007, p. 209) is a politically driven attempt to preempt discrimination of certain groups of people on the basis of inferior competence. However, denying differences in scientific competence is a “moral censure” that is as unjustifiable as an injunction against asking why Hispanics have low educational levels or why Koreans have high educational levels in the U.S. (Huff, 2003, p. 249). Cole’s injunction masks real cultural differences in cognition and prevents truy overcoming them through social reform. Postulating equality when it does not exist precludes making it exist. This is one example of how liberal humanism is actually conservative. Cole’s denial of Vygotsky’s core tenets is theoretically untenable as well as empirically and politically flawed. For it eliminates the foundation of cultural psychological theory. Cole does not explain what remains of cultural psychology after incorporating his attacks on its core principles. We would be left with either denying any distinction between natural and cultural forms -- culture would add nothing to natural processes -- or with engaging in the quantitative game of assigning relative weights to natural and cultural influences as the IQ pundits do. Neither of these alternatives is empirically adequate, and none allows for the survival of a distinct discipline called cultural psychology.

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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a diagnostic sign of retardation. Vygotsky says that an 8-year old who fails to utilize a stick to reach a suspended apple, and who instead uses a natural act such as jumping to grab it, is retarded because he is still at the stage of primitive development and has not yet shifted to using cultural tools to achieve his ends.

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The Cultural-Historical Character of Psychology General, basic, core psychological competencies as well as specific psychological competencies are both cultural products. Vygotsky demonstrated that what psychologists regard as “basic” processes are culturally organized. Conceptual thinking, logical reasoning, learning, perception, emotions, motivation, attention, self, social referencing and comparison, joint attention, mental illness, and developmental processes possess unique human characteristics because they are formed in and through cultural interactions and under their stimulation and affordance. Social communication through speech produces abstract symbols that constitute distinctive psychological mechanisms of all human beings. In addition to these universal, core psychological competencies that are generated by general, universal, basic features of cultural interaction, humans possess concrete psychological phenomena that are organized by concrete cultural features. The individualistic self, romantic love, free recall, syllogistic logic are examples of such culture bound (relative, concrete, historical) psychological phenomena. Even our senses have a specific historical quality. The fact that our interaction with nature via our senses is mediated by cultural practices, concepts, and artifacts, means that physical smells, sounds, tastes, and images are imbued with a cultural-historical significance. They are not experienced as raw sensory data. This cultural-historical significance is the subject matter of the discipline known as the history, and anthropology, of the senses.3 Regarding sounds associated with activities related to slavery: Historians are more interested in the meaning the slaves, the masters, the plantation visitors, northern abolitionists, and a whole host of contemporaries attached to these sounds. How these people listened is not only more important than what they heard but, in fact, constitutes what they heard. The sound of the whip, the slaves' midnight whispers, the plantation work song, held such radically different meanings to multiple constituencies in the past that we can understand (and interrogate) the sounds only on the terms described by those constituencies (Smith, 2007, p. 848). [Similarly] The sounds of bells to particular groups held an emotional meaning that went deeper than even music, and could elicit reactions that would be largely unintelligible to— and hidden from—a wholly visualist history… Peals solemnized an occasion and gave rise to or expressed rejoicing (ibid., p. 851). 3

It is the organization of psychology that language and other cultural factors influences. They affect how we perceive -- i.e., the emphases, interpretations, distinctions, and relationships among things we perceive. This is what Vygotsky, Sapir, Whorf, and their followers claimed. It would make no sense to claim that language determines that we receive sensory input. Sense organs accomplish this. Indisputably, anyone with functional sense organs will see a tree, a car, or snow near him. Different languages -- and other cultural factors -determine what is salient, unusual, familiar, distinctive, and similar about sensory properties of things that our sense organs convey to us. Evidence certainly bears this out.

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Among a particular generation in the U.K, the scent of wintergreen was associated with medicine and ointments used during the Second World War (not the best of times). Conversely, wintergreen in the U.S. is the olfactory cognate not of medicine but of candy (ibid. p. 847-848). Wintergreen has a medicinal scent in Britain and a confectionary scent in the U.S.

The fact that senses and perception possess a cultural quality that emanates from social institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts, rather than from the physical properties of the stimuli, means that reproducing the physical sounds, smells, tastes, and images from other epochs is uninformative about how they were actually experienced (sensed) by those people. Conversely, the absence of physical stimuli does not prevent us from knowing how people experienced them, because the experience is not directly determined by the stimuli. We can learn a great deal about sensory experience from linguistic descriptions which are preserved in print. The reason is that sensory experience is not purely sensory. As per Vygotsky, sensory experience is also cognitive and can be preserved in cognitive objectifications (words, symbols) more accurately than in sensory reproductions such as recordings, and pictures. “In fact, smells are accessible to the historian precisely because—not in spite of— most written descriptions of smells from the past tell us what smells smelled like… If the print revolution did, in fact, elevate the eye and denigrate the nose, ear, tongue, and skin, printed evidence and the sensory perceptions recorded by contemporaries constitute the principal medium through which we can access the senses of the past and their meanings” (ibid., p. 849). Psychology must be imbued with cultural features so it directs cultural forms of behavior. If it did not have cultural characteristics it would be culturally neutral, or, what is the same, culturally irrelevant. This would prevent concrete cultural forms of behavior from occurring. There would be no cultural content to our motives, perceptions, emotions, thinking, and selves that would generate specific shared (common) cultural behaviors. Since cultural behavior is our organ of survival and fulfillment, a non-cultural psychology would return us to the level of animals.

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Chapter II

Concrete Culture A distinctive emphasis of macro cultural psychology is its conception of culture as a concrete system. This leads to a distinctive view of cultural factors and the psychological phenomena that are part of them.

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Dialectical Interrelationship of Cultural Factors In cultural psychology (Ratner, 2006, 2007a, b) there is no such thing as a factor, per se. A factor is really a moment, or manifestation, of a network of factors which permeate it and imbue it with various, variable concrete qualities. The internal relatedness of factors within a system means that each one of the units expresses the complex system. It is a total social fact (Bourdieu, 2005, pp.1-3). Childhood, sexuality, work, sports, motherhood, masculinity, clothing, architecture, technology, and music each crystallizes and represents the social system from a particular vantage point; they are windows into the system. This is depicted in figure one, which shows the concrete quality of education as an institution administered by particular policies and pedagogy, and serving particular groups of children. In reality, the related factors overlap each other. Gender overlaps the family and the value of education in traditional societies where fathers discourage girls from going to school. Figure one shows that the quality of education is a function of its organic, mutual relationship with other factors; it is neither independent of them nor mechanically and unidirectionally caused by them. Quality cannot be presumed to be single, homogeneous, universal and constant. Quality must be actively investigated using qualitative methods. A dialectical epistemology known as cultural hermeneutics elucidates the manner in which a factor embodies and reveals the social system as a whole. Cultural hermeneutics reveals the concrete bourgeois character of schools, sports, popular music, and news programs. It reveals capitalism through these cultural factors (cf. Dant, 1999; MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999; Bourdieu, 2005 for a cultural hermeneutics of material culture). Vygotsky (1987, p. 46-47) explained this hermeneutical epistemology: "A psychology concerned with the study of the complex whole must replace the method of decomposing the whole into its elements with that of partitioning the whole into its units… in which the characteristics of the whole are present." "In contrast to the term `element,' the term `unit'

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designates a product of analysis that possesses all the basic characteristics of the whole…The living cell is the real unit of biological analysis because it preserves the basic characteristics of life that are inherent in the living organism."

Family Govt. policies

Work rules & opportunities

Education As Institution

Gender/ Ethnicity/ Class

Value of education School building, supplies, books, transportation

Figure 1. Education as a Concrete Cultural Factor.

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Dialectical ontology and cultural hermeneutics refer to the structure of cultural and psychological factors and the manner in which they must be considered – as interpenetrating and interdependent. They do not address the origins of the content of these factors. That requires an additional perspective, a political perspective.

The Political Nature of Culture A political perspective is a crucial element of macro cultural psychology, for it deepens an understanding of culture and the psychological phenomena that are cultural products. A political view of culture highlights the fact that factors and systems objectify particular interests of particular groups. Economics, or work, for example is different under capitalism where it is controlled by capitalists, than it is under feudalism where it is controlled by feudal lords. Capitalists impose private property and the profit motive on economics/work. They stamp work with a distinctive quality that benefits their mode of enrichment and control. Politics makes cultural content concrete. Politics makes economics and work specifically capitalist. This concrete political quality of work is embodied in all the psychological phenomena that are affected by work. The struggle that produces the concrete political character of cultural factors and systems makes the outcome more or less different from what either group originally intended. The struggle is not merely verbal, as many post modernists and discourse/narrative analysts claim. It involves strikes, demonstrations, arrests, court sentences, prisons, laws, lobbyists,

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corruption, transforming social institutions, and armed conflict such as the American Revolution. Macro cultural psychology is the only psychological approach that emphasizes the politically concrete features of cultural factors and psychological phenomena. Cultural psychology identifies dominant and subordinate groups in society, and the ways in which the social organization of behavior/psychology benefits the dominant group and stultifies the subordinate group -- relative to the fulfillment that is possible under a non-exploitive social system. (Marx observed that the politics of domination, whereby a ruling elite extracts surplus value from a population, defines a society). Macro cultural factors are designed and maintained by social leaders, not generally by the populace at large. Churches are designed by church leaders, not by congregations. Schools are designed by administrators, not by the pupils. Factories are designed by their owners, not the workers. Since psychology is instantiated in macro factors, the social leaders who dominate institutions, artifacts, and concepts are also social leaders of psychology. Psychology is no more democratically constructed than churches, factories, or schools are! Psychology is controlled by the same leaders who control other aspects of society. Psychology is just as political as government, business, education, and religion. Psychology serves to promote macro cultural factors and the social relations that control them. This is why the struggle to change psychology must be a struggle to change culture (cf. Skeggs, 2004). Emphasizing that politics, power, and struggle are central to culture dispels any illusion that culture is reified. It also dispels the illusion that culture is personally or interpersonally invented. Cigarette smoking exemplifies the political character of cultural behavior. Smoking at the turn of the 20th century objectified, and also promoted, a number of cultural practices, social distinctions, categories, and meanings. Smoking totalized (Sartre’s term) these social phenomena in the sense of bringing them together. “Choices of smoking products, the decision to smoke, when one smoked, and `the freedom to smoke’ were governed by conventions of etiquette and taste, what can collectively be called prescriptions. For the most part, these prescriptions set out what was respectable `masculine’ and `feminine’ activity, with the smoker’s reputation on the line” (Rudy, p. 4). These prescriptions were expressed in etiquette guides, fiction, poetry, cartoons, newspapers and trade journals. Smoking was political in the sense that it objectified and promoted social practices. Smoking was a male activity for all classes. It expressed this social distinction and it also enforced it. (In Geertz’s terms, smoking was a model of existing behavior and a model for how one should act.) Women were prohibited from smoking, which separated them from men in this domain. The physical act of smoking or not smoking expressed and enforced a social relation. Women’s use (or non-use) of the culturally significant artifact (of cigarettes) was an indication of their social-psychological competence. If they violated social norms governing its use, and did smoke, they would be regarded as socially and psychological remiss. Personal attributes were defined in terms of one’s use of macro cultural factors (cf. Skeggs, 2004). (Prostitutes deliberately violated the sanction and did smoke as a way of displaying their nonnormative social role to potential customers. In this sense they adopted and reinforced the social prescription that women smoking was disreputable. They used the normative, conventional, objectified meaning of smoking to indicate their availability for unconventional

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behavior. Their customers shared the normative meaning of meaning and thus comprehended a prostitute’s smoking as indicating her participation on non-normative behavior). Rudy observes that this collective representation of smoking represented a change from mid-19th century when women did smoke. He does not explain this change. Clearly some systematic social-political movement was involved to account for the systematic change that occurred. This was no coincidental occurrence of independent personal choices to suddenly stop smoking. (Nor does Rudy explain why smoking was selected as the objectification, or totalization, of this totality of cultural distinctions and meanings.) Rudy does explain the political forces that led to cigarettes taking on new cultural significations, objectifications, and totalizations in the 20th century. A primary force was the manufacture of mass produced cigarettes. Industrial capitalism generated profit by mass producing and mass distributing low-cost products. Cigarette-making machines produced 200,000 per day in contrast to the 2,000 that hand rollers produced. Manufacturers had to dispose of this huge additional supply. They did so by encouraging more people to smoke and absolving social restraints against it. The profit motive of industrial capitalism encouraged women’s smoking to consume more product and generate more profit. This economic motive was complemented by social changes. After World War I, more women worked in the labor force and demanded the same social rights as men. Many adopted smoking cigarettes as a social symbol of their equality with men. Women’s demands to smoke thus had a social basis. It “totalized” new social and economic conditions. This new cultural practice and signification to women’s smoking rejected the previous cultural meaning that smoking was disreputable for women. It brought women to the level of male respectability by sharing in the practice and signification of male smoking. It incorporated a previously male symbol of respectability into femininity. This was a different gambit from the way prostitutes used smoking at the turn of the century. They had accepted the cultural meaning of smoking as disreputable for women. This cultural history of smoking demonstrates that artifacts and practices are invested with cultural significance that represents the social agendas of social groups(cf. Ratner, 2002, p. 46). The cultural significance of cultural factors includes social and psychological elements such as status, freedom, respectability, modernity, intelligence, sexuality, popularity, efficiency, happiness, and insecurity. Smoking illustrates the dialectic of macro cultural factors and subjectivity: economic conditions (women working in the labor force, and mass-produced cigarettes) led capitalists to encourage women’s smoking as a way of drawing them into the economy; women accepted this association between smoking and participating in the new economy; women took it over as their own demand for the “right” to smoke; advertisers used this demand/desire in their advertisements. Women’s agency accepted, totalized, and promoted the new economic conditions in their demand to smoke. Their agency did not create the demand out of personal choice. (Of course, individuals can utilize cultural factors to express idiosyncratic needs. However, unless this idiosyncratic use grows to encompass a number of people, it is not a cultural psychological issue).

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Concrete Culture

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Applying this analysis to collectivism reveals that it is not a formal, simple, obvious, fixed, familiar thing. It has a complicated, subtle, variable, concrete cultural content that is political. For instance, modern Chinese collectivism is part of concrete Chinese society. It was formed by the political system of the 1950s-1980s. In this period, every aspect of life was controlled by the Communist Party. People were forced to identify with and obey their culture. Chinese citizens who associated with foreigners were tracked by secret police and informants. They were punished and prevented from having further foreign contacts. Citizens were forced to study Party documents every week, and to use specific political terminology in school assignments and scientific reports. Foreign travel was restricted to prevent defections. This concrete collectivism was not a quaint solidarity among a community of friends. As a cultural factor, or unit, individualism similarly rises from the abstract, incomplete definition of "self-interest," and takes on concrete features (cf. du Gay, 2005). In capitalism it includes competition, private ownership of property, instability, alienation, utilitarianism, and hedonism.4 The concrete cultural quality of a factor must be included in its name. Instead of "collectivism," we would identify "politically coercive Chinese collectivism," or "hunting and gathering collectivism," or "contemporary cooperative, democratic collectivism" (such as that practiced by the worker-owned Mondragon cooperative in the Basque country of Spain). We would differentiate "subsistence, North American Indian individualism," from "bourgeois individualism." Such terminology and reconceptualization would preserve the culture-as-awhole in each factor. Each factor would be a form of the culture, qualified by the culture.

4

A few cross-cultural psychologists attempt to study concrete cultural variables rather than abstract ones. Peng and Nisbett, for example, attempt to study the cognitive effects of dialectical philosophy. Unfortunately, they misunderstand dialectics, confuse it with Confucianism and Taoism, and deny its presence in Western thought when it was influential in German and ancient Greek social philosophy (Danziger, 1997, pp. 24-26; Ratner & Hui, 2003; Ratner, 2006, pp. 153-154).

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Chapter III

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The Dialectical Relation between Cultural Factors and Psychology/Subjectivity/ Consciousness This dialectic refers to the interdependence of psychology and culture; the fact that they are two sides of the same coin; mutually constitute each other, and express each other – while also being different. (They couldn’t constitute each other unless they were different units with different qualities to contribute to the other.) Culture is psychological, and psychology is cultural. Culture contains psychology, and psychology contains culture. The dialectical unity of differences may be depicted as in figure 2. In the dialectic of culture and psychology, psychology animates cultural factors. It is the motivation, reasoning, communicating, perception, and emotions that generate the behavior which constructs cultural factors. Cultural factors do not exist on their own or form themselves. They are guided by psychological phenomena.

Social Institutions

Cultural Concepts

Artifacts

Psychological Phenomena

Figure 2. Dialectical Relation between Cultural Factors and Psychology. Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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As we have discussed earlier, psychology is the behavioral mechanism that has the capacity to form culture. Cultural factors embody and express emotions, self concept, perception, sensation, thinking, memory, and motivation. For example, consumer marketing (packaging and advertising) is created specifically to crystallize and express a psychological state. The psychologically-laden images include sexual imagery, friendship, romance, relaxation, superiority, self-confidence, success, overcoming fears, efficiency. These psychological issues are built into the product design, packaging, and advertising in order to motivate particular cultural behaviors. Voodoo dolls are similarly created to represent a fearful act. Culturally informed people who are aware of the psychology that is crystallized in the dolls become panic-stricken when they encounter one. Women’s lingerie similarly is designed to embody and express sex. Sex is built into it, sex is not simply a by-product of lingerie. Similarly cathedrals embody and express a psychology of awe. They are designed to objectify the grandeur of god and church, and the humility and helplessness of the devotee. A capitalist corporation is likewise designed to have the organizational structure as well as the physical infrastructure maximize the control and self-enrichment of the owners-investors. Self-interest animates and is built into the interstices of every strand of the corporation. Psychology is not a by-product of culture. It informs culture. At the same time psychology is formed by culture. This occurs in two ways. Both of them entail the active participation of psychology. Psychology is not culturally organized in a passive, mechanical process whereby psychology is the by-product of cultural factors. (1) Culture acts as a goal, or telos, that psychological phenomena/subjectivity/ consciousness/agency strive to construct. Psychological phenomena construct cultural factors to enable people to survive and fulfill themselves – i.e., fully develop psychology. Psychological phenomena form themselves to construct particular cultural factors. In order for psychology to construct culture, it must take account of existing cultural and natural conditions, and it must envision viable new cultural factors that it will create. Culture acts on psychological phenomena as a goal or telos, even before it is constructed. (As Marx observed, humans construct their world in their mind before they make it, in contrast to animals whose behavior is not guided by a plan of what is to yet transpire.) Aristotle called this teleological cause a final cause. The psychology that constructs culture does not do so as a free, capricious, self-determined activity (as Berger and Luckmann suggest in The Social Construction of Reality). Culture is built into psychology from the outset. As we have discussed earlier, psychology is an adaptation to culture. In this teleological cultural organization of psychology, psychological phenomena and cultural factors mutually depend upon and form each other in the following dialectic: Psychological phenomena form themselves accordance with cultural conditions and a cultural objective; they instantiate their culturally organized/oriented psychological qualities in new macro cultural factors; the latter objectify, or crystallize the (cultural) psychology that created them.

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(2) Cultural factors are existing parameters that structure the form and content of psychological phenomena in two ways. a)

As external structures that require certain thinking processes, emotionality, motivation, self-concept, memory, and perception. Workplaces structure the psychology of employees, schools structure the psychology of students, churches structure the psychology of devotees, advertisements structure the psychology of consumers. b) As tools which people internalize from culture and use as means for constructing their behavior. In using cultural tools, people internalize the culturally organized psychological content that is objectified in them. Cultural tools act as a Trojan horse inside the mind to structure it from within. Vygotsky called this latter “mediational means” (cf. Lantolf and Thorne, 2006, pp. 59-81).

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Mediational Means Mediational means denotes the fact that people actively use cultural artifacts, practices, and concepts as their tools for navigating the world. In so doing, people unwittingly incorporate the psychology that is objectified in these macro cultural factors. People don’t create their psychologies from cultural factors. Rather, they incorporate culturally formed psychology that is already embedded in the factors. Mediational means denotes the fact that people actively take over both the physical, social, and conceptual features of cultural factors, and psychological features that are objectified in them as well. Mediational means really refers to a process of enculturation whereby people actively participate in their own enculturation by actively using and taking over cultural factors as their own mechanisms of behavior. A factory worker uses the assembly line as his means for earning a living. In the process, he submits himself to its conditions and adjusts his body and mind to them. A bank teller and law clerk similarly adjust their demeanor, speech, posture, and gestures to work rules in order to succeed. A student who seeks admission to a university must employ admissions criteria as her "mediational means" for gaining acceptance. She adjusts her concentration, memory, vocabulary, reasoning, motivation, emotions, choice of reading, extra-curricular activities, appearance, and demeanor to conform to these factors. We define our stress in psychiatric terms such as "depressed," "hyperactive," "schizophrenic." These terms mediate and shape our experience of being stressed, they do not simply express our experience. We utilize cultural ideals of beauty as the "mediational means" through which we perceive ourselves and feel attractive or not -- as social reference theory emphasizes. We utilize child advice books and articles as the means for understanding and interacting with our children. Cultural factors become the operating system of our consciousness, or psychology; they become the technologies of self (cf. Burkitt, 2002; Clark, 2006; Ratner, 2006). We think, perceive, and feel through, with, and in terms of cultural factors. "it is through technologies that the self is produced in all its aspects, including those that serve domination and those that

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challenge it through the powers of critical reason." (Burkitt, 2002, p. 236; Ratner, 1997, 2002, 2006, 2007). An illustrative example is the fact that color perception depends upon cultural, linguistic color categories – not a natural afferent transmission of an object’s wave length to the retina. Luria found that pre-modern, unschooled, self-sufficient Russian peasants associate color with particular objects. Cow-dung is a color as well as an object. As a result of this cultural association of color and objects, colors appear similar to the extent that objects are encountered together. Modern people abstract color from objects. Brown refers to color, not to any object. Consequently, shades of brown appear to be similarly colored to us because they fall within the abstract color category brown. These same shades appear distinct to the peasants who associate them with different objects (Ratner, 2006, pp. 93-97). Linguistic, conceptual categories become the operating system that processes wave length and generates perception of color. The research on emotions cited earlier demonstrates that cultural concepts are the operating mechanisms of sensory feelings. High and low anxiety subjects felt different physiological experiences such as heart rate, sweaty palms, blood pressure, blushing, yet objective measures revealed no physiological differences. The explanation for this result is that high and low anxiety are cultural concepts that carry prescriptions for physiological sensations. The physiological sensations are generated by cultural prescriptions, not by physiological reactions. When someone feels anxious, they draw on the cultural schema of anxiety to experience the normative sensory feelings that are prescribed, or embodied, therein. Anxious people are supposed to sweat; this is why they feel they do, despite the fact that they do not sweat (more than low anxious subjects). Cultural scripts supercede physiological reactions to generate sensory experience. Cultural mechanisms even determine where psychological functions are localized in the cortex. Japanese and American subjects process the perception of fearful facial expressions in different parts of the brain because this stimulus is more affect-laden for Americans than for Japanese (Moriguchi, et al. (2005). Similarly, American men and women engage in different mental processes when they perform mental rotation tasks, which results in this activity being processed in parietal areas of men's brains, but in inferior frontal regions of female brains (Hugdahl et al. (2006). Psychology, subjectivity, and agency are so profoundly constituted by macro cultural mediational means, that "the history of behavioral development transforms into the history of the development of artificial, auxiliary `means of behavior'" (ibid., pp. 77, 105, 118). For instance, modern arithmetic includes abstract concepts for 5 and 2. We can add these concepts together and instantly arrive at the sum of 7. Primitive people who lack this abstract cultural symbol must add by individually counting each of the unitary objects. These people arrive at the sum of 7 by an entirely different mental operation than we do. The thinking process depends upon the nature of the cultural means of thinking. Our abstract numbers function as a "thought machine" that perform calculations for us and save us the effort of

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enumerating individual units (ibid., pp. 130-132). To understand our psychology and behavior, is to understand the social means that we use to construct them.5 Mediational means explains how psychology is acculturated by macro cultural factors. The explanation is simply that psychology is in cultural factors where it is permeated by their qualities. Consequently, using cultural factors simultaneously incorporates the psychology that is objectified in them. The church member who enters the Catholic cathedral feels the grandeur of god and her own humility and helplessness that are objectified in the structure. The modern factory and school are designed to facilitate certain kinds of activities, perception, emotionality, selfconcept, memory. These psychological phenomena were built into the physical design. The artifacts would be difficult to use by people who possessed a different psychology. A different psychology would be transformed by the physical and social activities that are afforded by the artifacts. It is difficult for pupils to cooperate socially and to think collectively when they are seated at separate desks. The artifacts convey a particular psychology as they are used. Using an artifact is not psychologically neutral, it is an acculturating agent of a particular psychology. Cultural factors acculturate psychology in people by transferring it from macro factors to the individual’s mind. Psychology is not produced from afar by “independent,” nonpsychological, cultural factors – which would be impossible. Conversely, psychological phenomena form themselves in and through cultural factors. They are cultural from the outset. Culture is not added to a non-cultural psychology that develops apart from culture. The influence process – whereby culture influences psychology and psychology influences culture – is not an adding of an external element to something. Rather it realizes an internal relation that was already present from the outset. This conception is the essence of Hegel’s dialectical ontology: things are internally related from the outset. Influence and development consist of developing this internal relationship, not connecting disparate things up anew. People use mediational means to express themselves in communication with other people. When you say “I am happy” or “I love you” you are using cultural terms to express your emotions. Women express their sexuality through the cultural artifact of tight, revealing clothing. You express your religious belief by wearing a cross around your neck. Other people comprehend your mental, subjective, psychological state because they have the same sense, or signification, of the mediational means that you do. Their sense of “I love you” is the same sense that you have; that is why they understand what you mean when they hear the verbal mediational means that you use. Cultural mediational means are only possible if subjectivities are objective. Mediational means and subjectivity must correlate. Subjectivities cannot be independent of mediational means – i.e., idiosyncratically personal – if they are to communicate through mediational means. The latter must denote a common subjectivity to the individuals that use them. Of course, the reason diverse individuals possess the same psychological significations to mediational means is because they learned them from mediational means to begin with. They

5

One’s competence with macro cultural factors is also used to define one’s psychological attributes. Intelligence is defined by one’s success on cultural artifacts such as timed vocabulary tests.

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learned the psychological significations that were built into the mediational means which they used. “I love you,” or tight pants, or a religious cross denote an objective emotion, sexuality, or religious belief in the sense that these are cultural and extrinsic for others to see and comprehend; they are not individual and purely internal. To communicate, individuals search for a cultural mediational means that embodies the mental/subjective/psychological phenomenon they wish to express and which they know others will comprehend in the same sense that they intend.

Structuring Structures

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Existing institutions, artifacts, and concepts structure psychology by setting out social, conceptual, and physical requirements that psychology must adapt to. Just as women learn to balance their bodies in order to utilize the mediational means of high heeled shoes, and athletes adapt their bodies to effectively use athletic equipment (high jump bars, acrobatic devices, tennis racquets, baseball bats), and factory workers adapt to machines, so people learn to adapt their minds to the requirements of social institutions, artifacts, and concepts. Macro cultural factors are “psychological amplifiers:” Cultural activities are amplifiers when they require, stimulate, increase, or expand the quantity, quality, and cultural values of adaptive intellectual skills. Some obvious cultural amplifiers in Western middle-class eco-cultural niches include handling technology, participation in a large-scale economy, negotiating bureaucracy, and urban life. These cultural activities require and enhance intellectual skills such as abstract thinking, conceptualization, grasping relations, and symbolic thinking that permeate other aspects of life. Each eco-cultural niche presents a wide array of cultural amplifiers of the intellectual skills that are required for success in that particular niche. Different eco-cultural niches require different repertoires of intellectual skills. Some skills enhanced by activities specific to one niche may also be of value in other eco-cultural niches. Other examples of cultural amplifiers and the associated intellectual skills found in various eco-cultural niches are pottery making-conservation, market tradingmathematics, foraging-spatial perception, video games-spatial perception, and verbal games-verbal abilities (Ogbu, cited in Ratner, 2002, p. 22).

Fatalism Martin-Baro (a priest and psychologist who was murdered by a Salvadorian death squad for his political actions) explained how fatalism among Latin American peasants is structured by macro activities and concepts: Fatalism is a way for people to make sense of a world they have found closed and beyond their control; it is an attitude caused and continually reinforced by the oppressive functioning of overall social structures. Marginalized children in favelas, or champas, or

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other shantytowns of Latin America internalize fatalism not so much because they inherit it from their parents as because it is the fruit of their own experience with society. Day by day they learn that their efforts in school get them nowhere; the street does not reward them well for their premature efforts at selling newspapers, taking care of cars, or shining shoes; and therefore it is better not to dream or set goals they will never be able to reach. They learn to be resigned and submissive not so much as the result of the transmission of values through a closed subculture as through the everyday demonstration of how impossible and useless it is to strive to change their situation, when that environment itself forms part of an overall oppressive social system. Though fatalism is a personal syndrome, it correlates psychologically with particular social structures…We do not to assume a mechanical cause-and-effect relationship or to postulate a "basic personality." We are simply noting the obvious fact that the organization and functioning of each social system favors some attitudes while impeding others, and rewards some kinds of behavior while prohibiting and punishing others…Fatalism is a behavioral pattern that the social order prevailing in Latin America encourages and reinforces in certain strata of the population (Martin-Baro, 1994, pp. 210-211, 213).

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Adolescence Condon (1987, pp. 7-8) explains how changes in technology and social institutions among the Inuit Eskimos fostered adolescence and adolescent psychology. In traditional times, before Euro-Canadian contact, the transition from childhood to adulthood was rapid and unaccompanied by a prolonged period of adolescence. The harsh arctic climate and scarcity of resources forced children to quickly acquire adult skills for survival. They did so in the isolated nuclear family which was dispersed over a wide area with little inter-familial contact. Interactions with parents far outweighed in importance interactions with peers. This complex of factors precluded an adolescent social and psychological stage in between childhood and adulthood. In the modern period, interlocking technological and institutional changes have dramatically changed the progression of Inuit life stages. Increased economic prosperity and security allow parents to earn a living without the contribution of their children. This allows children to attend school instead of working. In addition, the population is concentrated into settlements which enables children to form a peer culture. This peer culture adopted many of the styles portrayed on television, which became affordable with the new standard of living. These interlocking factors place children in a separate social position from their parents, which was impossible earlier. They contribute to the elaboration of a stage of life now referred to as the "teenage" years. The social position of adolescents generates a distinctive psychology of adolescence. The psychological dispositions would be impossible without the social position, as Bourdieu emphasizes.

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Personality Susman (1979, p. 213) explains that “as cultures change so do the modal types of persons who are their bearers.” In 17th century England and America, personality became felt as within the individual as institutional life became more impersonal. Internal personality was originally construed as “character.” “The concept of character had come to define that particular modal type felt to be essential for the maintenance of the social order” (pp. 213214). Character was defined as citizenship, duty, democracy, work, honor, morals, manners, integrity, frugality, humility, self-sacrifice, self-control, and guilt over violating social norms. It was integral to meeting and sustaining the requirements of community oriented, small scale commodity production. By 1905, a new vision of self developed. It was known as personality. It emphasized individual idiosyncracies (magnetic, fascinating, creative, forceful, humorous), personal needs and interests, and self realization, fulfillment, self-gratification, self-expression, and confidence. This modal personality type was better suited for consumerism, unfettered profit motive, and free market labor. Earlier features of character interfered with the new economy and had to be superceded (cf. Skeggs, 2004). Masculinity followed this general change in personality. As the United States underwent a transformation from a producer-oriented to a consumer-oriented society in the first three decades of the 20th century, Americans began to articulate fundamentally new understandings of what it meant to be a man by dominant cultural standards. A modern ethos of masculinity supplanted earlier 19th century notions of manliness that characterized a society dominated by Victorian values. Manhood became less defined by production, character, respectability, and the producer values of industry, thrift, regularity, and temperance. Rather, middle-class Americans began to define it [manhood] in terms of consumption. One's manhood became more and more defined by the consumer goods one owned, the leisure practices one engaged in, and one's physical and sexual virility. Respectability, or the public performance of producer values, also became less important in middle-class constructions of masculinity (Summers, 2004, p. 8). Combining the two processes of culturally organizing psychology -- by structuring it and by mediational means -- yields figure 3: Psychology Structuring Structure

Macro Cultural Factors Social Institutions Artifacts Cultural Concepts

Mediational Means

Figure 3. Dual Ways Cultural Factors Organize Psychology. Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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Figure 3 separates psychology from culture in order to identify the cultural origins of psychology’s form and content. In reality, the psychology and cultural factors are internally related as we have emphasized. Psychology is not a secondary by-product of structures and mediational means; it is intrinsically part of them and reciprocally constitutes them. "Mediational means" and structuring structures are explanatory constructs that explicate the internal, dialectical relationship between cultural factors and psychology. They explain why and how psychological phenomena have cultural origins and characteristics. They are explanatory constructs that advance cultural psychology beyond descriptive correlations of cultural factors and psychological factors, and makes cultural psychology an explanatory science.

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Chapter IV

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The Culturally Concrete Character of Psychology The psychology that is organized by cultural factors embodies their concrete political content. The whole point of our extensive discussion of the concrete political content of cultural factors was to sensitize the researcher to recognize this content in psychological phenomena. We have seen that personality, masculinity, adolescence, color perception, voodoo, and sexuality have specific cultural content that springs from their internal relatedness to macro cultural factors (for additional examples see Ratner’s citations in the references section). Macro cultural psychology comprehends the concrete character of psychology better than other approaches because it is guided by a concrete political perspective and a dialectical ontology of cultural factors. Other approaches that lack this cultural theory will have an impoverished view of the concrete character of psychological phenomena. The concrete cultural character of psychology is depicted in figure 4. The figure depicts the manner in which students' psychology in school is organized by a web of interrelated cultural factors. Each macro cultural factor has a political character that is achieved through social struggle among interested parties. Social struggle occurs over text books, media content and availability, amount and kind of peer contact, value of education, access to education by girls and ethnic groups, extent and content of consumerism that is allowed to be presented to school-aged individuals, and certainly the way work is structured. This complex of factors organizes the educational psychology of students as mediational means and as structuring structures. Macro factors model psychology, direct attention, memory, and reasoning in certain directions and away from other directions, require certain kinds of reasoning rather than others. Students form their psychology from these psychologically-laden cultural factors. Their psychology therefore is politically and culturally laden.

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Family

Gender/ Ethnicity/ Class

Consumerism

Work rules & opportunities

Concentration Motivation Memory Reasoning

Peers

Media School building, supplies, books, transportation

Value of education

Figure 4. Educational Psychology of Students.

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It is incumbent on educators, parents, and students, themselves, to realize that students’ psychological processes are not culturally neutral, just waiting to be stimulated and filled with academic content. These psychological processes have a cultural form and content that may interfere with the competencies necessary to learn academic material. This cultural content of psychology must be challenged before pupils can fully absorb academic material.

The Progressive Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology Macro cultural psychology emphasizes that a psychological phenomenon is part of, and therefore a window into, society. A psychological phenomenon is political in the sense that it embodies and promulgates the political interests which dominate macro cultural factors. Psychological debilities (such as mental illness, aggression, loneliness, selfishness, ignorance, passivity, apathy) testify to societal debilities. And a critique of psychological debilities is a political critique. The academic discipline of macro cultural psychology is political in calling attention to this fact. With cultural factors being socially constructed, varying in quality with the context of related factors, and being politically organized, qualitatively different forms of macro factors are possible. Cities, schools, commerce, work, government, democracy, and labor can be socially reconstructed and imbued with new politics and principles. We are not restricted to quantitative adjustments in cultural phenomena. Cultural change is not confined to adjusting the tax rate, interest rate, and minimum wage up or down. Rather a new cooperative

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economic system is possible in which people democratically control their economic institutions and labor activity. Psychological phenomena are also opened to qualitative change. Aggression, selfishness, mental illness, fear, irrationality, insecurity are transformable into qualitatively new phenomena such as kindness, cooperation, and security if they are encouraged by new cultural factors. Psychological change is not restricted to quantitative decreases in aggression, selfishness, or mental illness. Kagitcibasi (Friedlmeier, 2005, pp. 255-272) makes this point. She maintains that modernization is not a singular variable with intrinsic, fixed, universal content. Rather Asian modernization includes different social relations from Western modernization. Thus, Asians can participate in modernization without adopting Western forms of it: "as societies modernize (with increased urbanization, education, affluence, etc.) they do not necessarily demonstrate a shift toward western individualism" (Ibid., p. 267). Different forms of modernization generate different psychological effects: "accompanying multifaceted societal modernization, psychological modernization also manifests multiple outlooks" (ibid., p. 266). Western modernization generates autonomy that prizes independence and self-interest. Asian modernization generates autonomy that utilizes the accomplishments of the individual for his social relations. Autonomy can be associated with social relatedness instead of social isolation. The progressive political implications of concrete factors can be seen in Panda's (2006) research on mathematics learning among the Saora people, a tribal group in Orissa, India. She elucidated the concrete cultural quality of Saora mathematics (as a cultural factor). It has a distinctive number system with its own algorithms. Yet it has no written symbols and is only expressed in verbal words like "two." Moreover, Saora math is confined to working out simple problems of everyday life, such as finding posts strong enough to support the weight of a hut. Saora math operates at a low level of abstraction. It includes few abstract terms -one of which is weight; it does not use abstract principles that can be generalized to other phenomena; it does not include hypotheticals or idealizations. (This further refutes Cole’s disavowal of differences in abstraction among peoples, cf. footnote 3). Panda explains that the distinctive character of Saora mathematics has a cultural basis. It is organically part of their social and moral life; it is learned in practice rather than in school; it is not formalized in symbols or books; it is not practiced as a separate discipline; it is not regarded as a topic in its own right; there are no exercises or homework to work on and think about. These can be diagrammed in a figure similar to figure 4. The cultural character of Saora math shapes the cognitive processes that can be invoked to solve mathematical problems. When a mathematical word problem includes some unethical behavior that contradicts everyday social norms, the Saora cannot perform the abstract calculation necessary to solve the problem: "Ajit bought 100 kg. of rice for 4 Rupees/kg. He mixed 5 kg. of stones in the rise and sold them at the same rate of Rs 4/kg. How much profit did Ajit make?" Saora children and adults alike became incensed at Ajit's behavior and said he should be punished for mixing stones with the rice. They refused to treat the problem as a calculation of abstract, hypothetical, idealized numbers, according to general principles. (This is another illustration of how cultural factors become the operating system of mental processes).

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Panda emphasized how this concrete cultural quality of mathematics (and mathematical thinking/cognition) must be respected in the schools. This cultural-historical character of mathematics (and mathematical thinking) interferes with learning abstract mathematics, which is the culturual quality that math possesses in contemporary societies. If one wants to teach the Saora abstract mathematics, one must bridge the cultural mathematical system and cognition they learn at home, with the modern cultural system and cognition. Forming this bridge requires constructing a broad network of cultural practices to facilitate this pedagogical transition. All the cultural factors that support traditional mathematics must be duplicated in modern form to encourage modern mathematics. This includes government support, job opportunities, gender equality, family support, textbooks. Simply imploring Saora students to study modern math in the classroom instruction is insufficient. School administrators in Orissa have not accepted this cultural perspective. They treat mathematics as a variable with a singular, universal quality that is contemporary, Western, abstract mathematics. No other mathematical system or cognition is acknowledged. Consequently, school administrators make no effort to understand the native mathematical system, or to bridge from it to contemporary math. They simply impose the modern system on the children, believing them to be mathematical virgins. However, the children have already acquired a contrary mathematical concept and cognition, which impedes their learning school math. Not perceiving this, administrators attribute the children's failure to innate cognitive and motivational deficiencies. The children are blamed and punished for their failure to learn the "universal," "natural" math that children "everywhere" learn. This treatment simply aggravates their failure. Changing psychology requires changing the network of cultural factors that sustain it. This is a Herculean talk that requires enormous bravery and commitment. However, it is the most practical and effective way to enhance psychology. This is the practical value of macro cultural psychology.

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Chapter V

Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Social Life from the Vantage Point of Cross-Cultural Psychology The social world is a smooth, intelligible, harmonious place from the standpoint of crosscultural psychology. Our social world consists of simple, obvious, separate, fixed factors that transcend time and place, and are readily practiced and comprehended by large masses of people. There are schools, cities, commerce, parental control, and conformity that are broadly the same everywhere. They express and cement our social unity. Of course, not all cultural factors are perfectly universal. Traditionalism exists with modernism, individualism exists with collectivism. But each of these "emic" variables is extremely broad and unifies large masses of people in a common culture. While not all people are traditional, millions are over eons of time. Cross-cultural psychologists smooth out differences between societies by reducing them to quantitative differences in broad, shared cultural factors. Germany and Cuba differ in terms of the degree of urbanization or parental control, for example. Schooling Cities Crime

Society 1

Society 2

Society 3

Figure 5. Cultural Variables.

People really only differ in the quantitative extent to which they practice and understand the same basic, widely-shared cultural dimensions. Even anti-social behavior such as crime or terrorism is broadly shared, qualitatively similar, and easily identified by all people. Antisocial behavior is simply another timeless dimension of our common cultural humanity (Ratner, 2004a). The cross-cultural view of culture may be depicted as in figure 5.

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The Cultural Variable in Cross-Cultural Psychology Cultural factors conceived in this way are variables in technical parlance. The cultural variable crystallizes the entire enterprise of cross-cultural psychology -- just as the commodity crystallizes the socio-economic principles of capitalism. Analyzing, unpacking, or deconstructing the cultural variable deepens our understanding of cross-cultural psychology's conception of culture, psychology, the relation between them, methodological principles and procedures for comparing culturally organized psychology, and political implications of cross-cultural psychological theory and methodology. Understanding the cultural variable in cross-cultural psychology also has general value for understanding variables in anthropology, history, sociology, economics, geography, and political science. Finally, deconstructing the cultural variable enables us to perceive that it is a theoretically based conception of culture, psychology, and their relation. It is not a natural or universal view. (Blumer, 1969, pp. 127-139 undertook an analysis of assumptions and implications crystallized in the variable in order to legitimate an agentive view of social interaction). The cultural variable, as we have noted, is a factor that cuts across many societies. Crosscultural psychologists assume, and desire, that cultural and psychological universals exist. Their existence would unify people in diverse societies and facilitate cross-cultural understanding, communication, problem solving, and tolerance/acceptance. Universals would also enable social scientists to have common dimensions for comparing people in different locales. Universals would enable generalizations to be made, which is a key requirement of science. These beliefs/desires about universals are built into the cultural variable and form its essence. The cultural variable presupposes, proves (attests to), and promotes transcultural unity of people. To be a transcendent universal, the cultural variable must possess certain specific properties. It must be unaffected by the social conditions of a particular society. This insulation from other conditions and factors is called "discreteness." The variable must be discrete if it is to transcend diverse societies and unify people across them. If it were embedded in particular societies, it would embody their concrete features and would not be universal. The discrete, transcendent, universal variable is qualitatively invariant. Other factors cannot disturb its insular quality. Qualitative variation would contradict its universal, unitary character. It would undermine its ability to unify people across cultures. Qualitative invariance is the definition of a variable: a variable is a factor that is qualitatively invariant and only varies quantitatively. People across cultures share the same cultural and psychological attributes, they only vary quantitatively on these common dimensions. Discreteness, transcendence, and qualitative invariance go hand in hand. Discreteness is what makes variables transcendent and qualitatively invariant. The universal, fixed quality of a variable is homogeneous and simple. It is not complicated by interrelated factors because it is insulated from them. The singular quality of a variable is obvious and unmistakable. Since there is one simple quality, it stands out for all

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to see; it cannot be confused with any other nor does it have to be teased apart from any other. This overtness minimizes the need for theoretical conceptualization, and probing for hidden qualities in a qualitative analysis. With the quality of phenomena construed as simple, homogenous, fixed, overt characteristics that are obvious in simple, overt behavior, the emphasis of cross-cultural psychology is on operationally defining, recording, or measuring, discrete, quantitative, overt, behavioral manifestations of phenomena. The methodology of operationally defining phenomena is thus integrally related to the notion of a variable (Ratner, 1997, 2006a).6 Cross-cultural psychologists are not interested in particular, concrete, integral, bounded cultures. They are interested in general dimensions that cut across societies. They are interested in collectivism, not German capitalist society, or French medieval society. Variables such as collectivism are severed from real social systems and the human agency, politics, struggles, and social philosophy that construct them. These principles are exemplified in Hofstede's operational definition of individualism and collectivism. Hofstede believed that individualism and collectivism are so simple, homogeneous, invariant, and obvious that entire countries could be categorized as individualistic or collectivistic on the basis of three superficial statements about work -- e.g., "Have a job which leaves you sufficient time for your personal or family life." Variables are abstract. This is a corollary of their being discrete from other factors/conditions and transcending these. A discrete, transcendent variable cannot possess a concrete, rich, complex quality that reflects a particular context, for it is independent of contexts. It can only possess general features that are devoid of specificity. Specificity, like qualitative variation, would extinguish the commonality among cultures that cross-cultural psychologists assume and desire. Cross-cultural variables are thus formulated in abstract terms. Collectivism, for example, is defined very generally as identifying with and conforming to a group. It doesn't tell us anything about the specific relations within a group because these vary significantly in different collective cultures. Collective societies can be autocratic or democratic. Collective bonds may be embraced, or detested. Collective societies include small prehistoric hunting and gathering tribes, massive societies such as the former Soviet Union and China, small modern Israeli kibbutzim, and feudal manors (cf. Ratner, 1997, chap. 1, Ratner and Hui, 2003). Triandis has identified 60 attributes on which collectivist cultures may differ. The concrete political character of Chinese collectivism is expunged by the abstract construct "collectivism." The abstract term leads to construing Chinese collectivism as a quaint, voluntary concern for the group in the same sense as a band of hunters care for each other. However, to discuss Chinese collectivism without referring to the Cultural Revolution 6

Quetelet developed statistics in Belgium in 1853 in order to compare social indicators across European countries. He assumed that crime, poverty, education, urbanization, and religious practice for example, were qualitatively the same everywhere and could therefore be statistically compared. Statistics was thus a technology of internationalization, universalization, and homogenization. However, these assumptions about the nature of social phenomena were and are false. Cultural differences pervade social psychological phenomena and make standardization illusory and unreliable. Most commentators chose to ignore this fact, however. Their drive for universal comparability and exchange led them to accept the illusion of qualitative invariance and quantitative comparability (Porter, 2006).

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is as derelict as discussing globalization without mentioning capitalism, or describing Åmerican democracy without mentioning the domination of the political system by the wealthy elite and the degradation of news reporting that deprives voters of meaningful information on which to make an informed vote. The sense of abstraction is brought home by other variables that appear in cross-cultural research: "long vs. short term orientation," "value past vs. future," "specificity vs. diffusion," "neutrality vs. emotionality." All of these dimensions are deliberately general and avoid specification of different particular forms these take. Even social power is converted into a quasi-natural, singular variable called power distance. It is defined as the amount of power difference that people accept. The variable "power distance" has nothing to do with concrete forms of power such as Catholic priests extracting a tithe from parishioners by threatening them with damnation; or capitalists organizing factory production in a way that forces workers to work at a particular speed and manner. Nor does power distance include agency, politics, or social philosophy that determine and express power in real life. On the contrary, power distance replaces these with a quasi-natural, reified, depoliticized variable. This fulfills cross-cultural psychologists' desire to transcend cultural contradictions, as the other properties of variables also do.

Critique of the Cultural Variable

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Abstraction Because abstraction is fundamental to the way variables represent cultural and psychological phenomena, and their interrelation, and because abstraction is a major weakness in cross-cultural psychology's theory and methodology, and because overcoming this flaw is vital to constructing a paradigm of cultural psychology (theory and methodology), and because abstraction must be included as one level of an adequate paradigm, we must discuss the issue of abstraction in relation to social science. This philosophical issue sheds light on many specific aspects of theory and methodology. Correctly understanding levels of abstraction helps guide these aspects in a fruitful direction. Cultural factors, like all phenomena, have abstract and concrete features. The relation between the two levels of abstraction may be depicted in figure six regarding schooling (cf. Ratner, 1991, p. 115 for a more detailed analysis). Figure six shows that schooling exists as a general, abstract phenomenon. However, it only exists in and through particular schools. These define what schooling is. People create concrete schools, not schooling. The abstraction derives from the features of the particulars. New particulars alter the nature of the abstraction. If all schools divorced academics from practical experience, schooling would have this character.

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Cross-Cultural Psychology Abstract Level

Concrete Level

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Schooling

School System 1

School System 2

School System 3

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Figure 6. Abstract and Concrete Features of Cultural Factors.

If some schools were found to integrate academics and practice, that would require that schooling be reconceptualized to encompass these schools. Schooling would no longer be defined as separating academics and practice. It would have to be more general to encompass the different kinds of schools ("Planet" similarly has been revised to encompass new empirical evidence. Soter, 2007). Conversely, abstractions define and unify particular examples. Individual schools are schools because they meet the general criteria of what "school" is. As a result of a new conceptualization of planet, Pluto has been disqualified from this category. Related examples of this reciprocal relationship between abstract and concrete levels are cancer, autism, schizophrenia. Empirical evidence leads to refining our understanding of "cancer," "autism," and "schizophrenia," and these general understandings allow for more precise identification of whether a dysfunction is a symptom of cancer or whether it represents an other disease. We know from our discussion of Vygotsky’s theory that both general/abstract and relative/concrete features of cultural and psychological phenomena result from cultural interactions. While the abstract and concrete levels are interdependent -- as depicted with the cyclical arrows in figure 2 -- they are conceptually distinct and must not be conflated. Specific cultural factors cannot be construed as general and abstract. A particular school system cannot be regarded as schooling in general, although it does incorporate general features of schooling. Other schools with other characteristics also qualify to be considered schools. When social scientists correctly identify abstract properties of a factor, I call this a true abstraction or universal. However, social scientists often misconstrue less general and abstract features as more general and abstract than they actually are. I call this a false abstraction or false universal. It makes it appear that a particular form of education, for example American, urban, middle class schooling is schooling in general. This is the essence of ethnocentrism. It makes it seem that everyone must be like us (Ratner, 1991, chap. 3). False abstraction can occur with any variable that is not universal. It can include general variables such as individualism, which are misconstrued as even more abstract and general than they are. False abstraction can also include culturally specific factors: Capitalist schooling can be misconstrued as the prototype of all schooling. A second error is to misconstrue an abstraction as concrete. This occurs when general, abstract features of schooling are invoked to explain particular pedagogy. For example, (universal, general) schooling is said to generate (culturally specific) timed multiple choice

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tests. Or cities (general) are said to be individualistic (culturally specific) in nature. Or family (general) is said to be intrinsically monogamous (specific), and polygamous families are suppressed (by missionaries) as incompatible with family. Or the (general, universal) need for affection is said to generate (culturally relative) romantic love. Or the (general, universal) fact that humans have will or agency is said to explain the (culturally relative) fact that Americans feel responsible for their own behavior. I call this false concreteness because it erroneously construes abstractions in concrete terms, as explaining concrete behavior; yet abstractions are devoid of concrete features. To explain people's concrete behavior, concrete explanatory cultural factors must be identified.

Critique of Truly Abstract Cultural Variables Certain cross-cultural psychologists have begun to raise questions about whether truly abstract, singular variables meaningfully represent culture. Many authors realize that these variables possess culturally specific content that must be acknowledged.

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Harkness, Super, and van Tjen pointed to the problem of classifying cultures only on a general level of individualism and collectivism while neglecting the individual representations of the cultural norms and values. Comparing parents from two "individualistic" cultures, the USA and the Netherlands, these authors demonstrated substantial differences in the parents' child-rearing theories, e.g., in the understanding of independence and dependence. Therefore, individual representations of values should be considered when comparing cultures which have been classified as individualistic or collectivistic (Friedlemeier, et al., 2005, pp. 206-207).

Trommsdorff also demonstrated that collectivism and individualism are intertwined in complex ways in Japan. They are not separate, singular, fixed variables (ibid., p. 261). Similarly, "Independence and self reliance may have a different meaning depending on the cultural context and general value orientation" (ibid., p. 222).7 Schwarz, et al. state that parental control has different connotations in different societies. It is not a singular variable (p. 208). In certain societies parental control is accepted as positive, while in other societies it is disparaged as an infringement. Authoritarian parental control is resented and inhibits school performance in Anglo-Americans, however far less so 7

Matsumoto (1999) reports that Japan is more individualistic and has more individualistic self-construals than the U.S. Numerous studies have found no differences in I/C between the U.S. and Japan (Gjerde, 2001; Takano & Okaka 1999). Paranjpe (personal communication) states that "in spiritual/religious matters, [Asian] Indians are far more individualistic than Americans or Canadians. The Law of Karma, a principle understood and practiced by common folks in India pins responsibility entirely on the individual, and in that sense it is totally individualistic. On the other hand, in the US, loyalty to one’s alma mater and contributions to it, and service to one’s Church is very high; there won’t be any demands made or sacrifices offered by Indian individuals in a comparable manner. In that regard, US is a much more collectivist society: even a local little league team commands more loyalty, the like of which cannot be seen in India." Another contradiction to the individualism in America is the numerous forces that dehumanize, exploit, disenfranchise, and invalidate the majority of individuals. The individual worker in America typically has no voice in his working conditions, and is summarily fired at the whim of his employer.

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among Asian-Americans who accept it as educational (ibid., p. 210). Kim and Park (2006) report that external control and instilling guilt in children have negative psychological consequences for Western children, however, Korean children feel indebted and duty-bound to their parents in return for the hard work and sacrifice parents make for their children. Resentment, rebellion, and other negative behaviors do not result from external parental pressure. Rothbaum and Morelli similarly conclude that "mothers' physical control [of children] relates to insecure attachment in Anglo-American families, but not in Puerto Rican families" (Friedlmeier, et al., 2005, p. 104). Strong physical control was associated with secure 12month attachment status for middle-class Puerto Rican dyads. Despite acknowledging these problems with variables, cross-cultural research continues to recapitulate them. This can be seen in a recent study by Greenfield, Keller, et al. (2003) on individualism/collectivism. In certain passages, the authors treat individualism as an independent cultural variable that explains scientific intelligence: "the goal of scientific intelligence belongs to the individualistic pathway because it emphasizes the person in relation to the world of objects" (p. 472). This statement is partly jibberish -- what does it mean to say that the individualistic pathway emphasizes the person in relation to the world of objects? All viewpoints, not just individualism, are concerned with peoples' relation to objects. Moreover, "the relation of people to objects" is so nebulous that emphasizing it has no intelligible connection to science. In fact, scientific intelligence does not belong to the individualistic pathway. As the sociologist of science, Toby Duff, states, “the path leading to the scientific revolutions of Europe was paved most significantly by Arabic-Islamic scholars” (Duff, 2003, p. 240). Islamic scholars made enormous scientific advances in natural science theory and inductive logic from the 9th to the 12th centuries in the vast Muslim empire that stretched from Spain to Central Asia to Iran and Afghanistan. The empire was hardly a model of individualism, nor is Islam an individualistic Weltanschauung or social practice. The Muslim Empire was ruled by a Calif who was both king and prophet. He and his kingdom owned all the land. Individuals could only use the kingdom’s land as a member of society. There was no private property or individualism. Islam promoted scientific knowledge because it encouraged free thinking about natural phenomena (unlike Christianity) in order to acquire information helpful to military expeditions and rudimentary commerce. The reason Western science developed spectacularly after the 17th century is complex. Among many factors one was political decentralization which freed communities and universities from religious and political strictures on intellectual innovation. Another factor was commercial developments in Europe. Commercial trade and industrial production stimulated science to produce new materials, labor saving technology, and forms of reckoning money, land, produce, and transportation. Commercial revolutions also stimulated a new way of thinking about nature. This included a) the idea that nature operates according to laws and mechanisms like a machine, and that these are the object of scientific investigation, b) the belief that man was distinct from nature and could analyze and reorganize it. These beliefs enabled scientists to discover principles, relationships, origins, and explanatory constructs that contradict given appearances of things and established canons about them.

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Chinese cultural concepts about harmony with nature and a static social structure impeded the ability to ask audacious scientific questions and reconceptualize received notions about matter (Duff, 2003, p. 252). The socio-economic-conceptual basis of science cannot be reduced to the nebulous abstraction "individualism."

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Critique of False Concreteness Greenfield, et al. invoke certain independent cultural variables to explain individualism. They mention "the individualistic ways of the city" (Greenfield, et al., 2003, p.477). They state, "commerce and formal schooling are associated with a more individualistic mode of apprenticeship" (p. 473). They state that "school ecology favors attention to the individual psyche" (p. 476). They also claim that "the interdependent pathway [i.e., collectivism] appears to be an adaptive response to small face-to-face communities and a subsistence economy" (ibid., p. 465). These statements assume that urbanization, commerce, and formal schooling are intrinsically individualistic, and necessarily foster individualistic apprenticeship and cognition. Subsistence economies and small communities intrinsically are collective. However, abstractions do not have an intrinsic, natural, fixed specific character. Schools do not necessarily cultivate individualistic thinking. Schools only cultivate individualism when they are organized as such under the influence of other macro cultural factors such as a capitalist economy (cf. Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). Collectivistic societies such as the former Soviet Union, and China from 1949 through the mid-80s, structured school activities around team work and social responsibility that inculcated collectivistic thinking. Nor are cities intrinsically individualistic. They can have diverse social qualities. Sumerian cities 3,000 years B.C. were clan societies ruled by monarchs. Later Greek citystates were also communal rather than individualistic. Cities only developed individualistic tendencies with the growth of capitalistic economy and politics. Commerce also varies with the cultural context. Commerce in contemporary capitalism -where everything has been commercialized, including genes, ideas, water, and the labor power of humans -- is very different from commerce in 17th and 18th century North and South America -- which was subsidiary to subsistence production within the family, only encompassed a few products, and where labor power was not commodified. This distinction was emphasized by Marx in his analysis of simple commodity production and capitalist commodity production. Bourdieu (2005, p. 4) describes substantial differences between the commerce practiced by the Kybles in Algeria, and the capitalist market. Kyble commerce was not impersonal transactions between strangers in the free market; it consisted of exchanges of the economy of good faith that were guaranteed by friends or relatives capable of limiting and averting the risks associated with the market. Charles Taylor similarly explained how traditional Japanese commercial bargaining was informed by the principle of collective consensus among interdependent social members that was antithetical to the capitalistic bargaining: "Our idea of bargaining, with the assumption of

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distinct autonomous parties in willed relationship, has no place there; nor does a series of distinctions, like entering into and leaving negotiation" (Taylor, 1985, p. 33). Similarly, face-to-face, subsistence economy does not necessarily foster collectivism. Chinese collectivism was an attribute of state controlled, large-scale enterprises and projects well beyond a subsistence economy (Burke and Ornstein, 1995, p. 105). Face-to-face, subsistence societies can be individualistic. The Ojibwa Indians of Northern Canada are one such society who practice severe and premature training for independence and self-reliance. "Their economic and political institutions demonstrate a strong individualism" (Parker, 1960, p. 609). Greenfield, et al.'s use of face-to-face, subsistence economy, urbanization, commerce, and schooling to explain individualism makes them false concreteness. It seeks to explain relatively specific individualism and collectivism in terms of abstract, general factors – schooling. However, individualism is not endemic to any of them. It is only a historical characteristic of the way they have been socially organized at certain times. Greenfield, et al.'s explanation of individualism as fostered by schooling, cities, or commerce, is not only wrong, it is also specious. It pretends to explain individual without actually doing so. The authors merely attribute individualism to cultural factors. No logic, reasons, or processes are provided to explain the association of individualism with these independent variables (cf. Louch, 1966; Smedslund, 1995 for the tautological nature of this kind of explanation).8

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Cross-Cultural Psychology's Conception of Psychological Phenomena Construing cultural variables as discrete, qualitatively fixed, abstract, singular, overt, and obvious leads to construing psychological phenomena in the same terms. This is inevitable because culture shapes psychology, so the nature of culture shapes the nature of psychology. It is impossible for abstract cultural variables to generate concrete, complex, qualitatively variable cultural phenomena. Psychological variables present psychological functions as general, discrete, singular, simple, qualitatively invariant, abstract aspects such as "insensitivity to relationships" (all relationships!), or "relationship orientation," "familial (group) orientation, "generalized other orientation," "sensitivity to authority." For example, Jackson, et al., (2006) construed love as composed of abstract components such as objectification-threat, conflict, and devotion. These are abstractions because they are devoid of specific cultural or psychological content. Devotion and conflict can take many forms. The decontextualized words are uninformative about their meaning. Similarly, things 8

In another publication, I accused Greenfield, et al. of treating individualistic and collectivistic socialization practices and cultural symbols as existing on their own with no basis in social institutions and other macro factors (Ratner, 2006, p. 27). This was overstated, since the authors do attempt to explain individualism and collectivism as emanating from commerce, cities, schooling, subsistence economy, and face-to-face relations. However, because their explanation is not a true explanation, my criticism essentially stands, although imprecisely worded.

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are threatening for different reasons in different societies. To simply say that Joe felt threatened by Jane is uninformative. This weakness is brought out by contrasting Jackson’s account to a culturally sensitive comparison of Japanese and American emotions by Mesquita (2007, p. 412): “In the situation of offense, American appraisal and action readiness were geared towards regaining selfesteem, drawing clear boundaries between oneself and the offender, and regaining control, all responses that serve an independent cultural model. In contrast, Japanese narratives overwhelmingly focused on restoring the relationship with the offender, trying to muster understanding for his or her deeds and minimizing the importance of the situation.” Abstract positivistic measurement Abstraction is built into the positivistic measurement of psychological variables. They are measured as simple, overt (superficial), quantitative behavior, such as number of words uttered, number of pushes, response time, or quantitative agreement to fragmentary questions. Such operational definitions of psychological phenomena are abstract because they do not include culturally specific behavior (Ratner, 2006, pp. 148-162). One of Jackson, et al.’s test statements was "I like it when my partner is a bit hard to figure out." These words are decontextualized so that their cultural significance is unclear. What cultural or psychological meaning does the statement have? We don’t know what kinds of things are hard to figure out, why they are hard to figure out in that culture and person, and what the subject likes about any of this (cf. Ratner, 2002, chap. 4 for techniques for eliciting culturally and psychologically concrete information). The authors coded the statement as objectification-threat. First of all, this category is itself abstract, as we have noted. Secondly, the authors’ categorization of the statement as objectification-threat is dubious. It is oxymoronic to label something pleasurable as a threat. It is also oxymoronic to construe the pleasure of figuring out another person's complexity as objectifying her -- since objectification involves the exact opposite, i.e., simplifying and reifying a person and not figuring her out. Another statement "I devote a great deal of effort and care to my relationship" obscures what effort and care psychologically are. They may involve being careful to maintain a distance from one's spouse who is neurotic and aggressive and unpredictable, or they may involve intimate discussions with a soul-mate, or they may involve letting one's spouse solve problems first and then enter into discussions. These concrete details are the stuff of psychology, yet they are overlooked in the cross-cultural emphasis on generalities. Quantitative measures of abstract, fragmentary, superficial behaviors, which overlook the qualitative character of psychological phenomena, generates numbers that are technically precise (in the sense that they are derived from technically sophisticated scaling procedures and analyzed according to detailed statistical tests of significance) but not accurate. Positivists believe that precision produces accuracy or validity. However, their precision actually impedes validity (Porter, 2006).

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Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Cross-Cultural Psychology's Treatment of the Relation between Cultural and Psychological Variables We have demonstrated that cross-cultural psychology’s abstract conception of cultural and psychological variables obscures vital cultural and psychological information. Crosscultural psychologists might rejoin that they do link psychological factors to cultural ones, and that this procedure discloses cultural origins and characteristics of psychological phenomena. These psychologists do establish this linkage in the form of t-tests and correlations between ecological variables (physical environment, individualism, linguistic terminology, spatial relations, urban vs. rural environment, parenting style) and psychological variables such as recall, mental illness, self-concept. While quantitative relations between cultural and psychological variables can be interesting and useful -- e.g., poverty is related to low levels of cognitive competencies and higher levels of schizophrenia, or Liberians recall fewer items on a free recall test than Germans do, or Western middle class women have a higher incidence of anorexia than African women do – they remain mired in problems. Their data consists of operationally defined, abstract variables (or variables that privilege abstract properties of things over concrete properties) that are inherently uninformative about cultural and psychological issues. Consequently, correlations among these variables will continue to be deficient. In addition, the quantitative relation between the variables obscures their qualitative relation -- what the two factors have in common, why they are related, how each contributes to, depends on, embodies, and affects the other. For instance, Greenfield, Maynard, and Childs (2003) studied the impact of commerce on abstract reasoning among Mayan Indians in Mexico. The authors never defined commerce to identify its concrete characteristics in Mayan society -- cf., Cook, 2006 for a concrete analysis of different forms that commodity production have taken in Mesoamerica. The authors simply computed a correlation between participating in "commerce," and a dubiously conceived “abstract thinking” -- which was 0.12. The authors declined to investigate the reasons for this correlation. They only expended one speculative sentence on it: the exchange of money is abstract and this generates abstract cognition (cf. Ratner, 2006, pp. 158-162 for discussion). Comparing this analysis to Summer's explanation of masculinity or Condon's explanation of adolescence, presented earlier, revels the inadequacy of cross-cultural psychology to illuminate the cultural basis and character of psychology in a meaningful fashion. This does not imply that cross-cultural psychologists are aware of this consequence of their methodology, that they consciously strive to achieve it, or even that all of them follow its tenets completely and consistently. Many practitioners are curious about the reasons and processes which relate psychology and culture. And many of them are quite knowledgeable about it. However, the nature of positivistic methodology (when practiced rigorously) prevents utilizing their vast knowledge in the research enterprise.

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The Historical Development of Positivistic Cross-Cultural Psychology Danziger (1997, pp. 162-179) explains the intellectual evolution (devolution) of this dismissal of qualitative and theoretical issues. The notion of a variable was originally limited to a statistical relation among quantitative measures. Personality was a variable only in the sense of being a correlation among different scores. It was a statistical construct that described measurement operations. It did not imply that personality was itself a variable. However, the positivist domination of psychology in the 1930s (cf. Ratner, 1997, p. 39) led psychologists to confuse their measurement operations with things themselves. They began believing that their statistical variables simulated the actual nature of psychological and environmental phenomena: "the representation of situations and actions in terms of discrete logically independent elements became the model for the conceptualization of all psychological reality" (Danzirger, p. 168). Positivists converted a statistical construct into a psychological construct. This was as foolish as believing that temperature exists as columns of mercury rising and falling in certain degrees, instead of recognizing that temperature is a different phenomenon from the procedures that measure it. Confounding statistics/methodology with psychology (known as "methodolotry") distorted the nature of psychological phenomena (into singular, qualitatively homogeneous and fixed variables). It also distorted the scientific enterprise. Danziger explains that initially, the experimental psychology that arose in Germany at the turn of the century, employed analytical research procedures as means for investigating complex subjective psychological phenomena that were acknowledged to have cultural origins. Stimuli like auditory distances were presented to elicit a sensory judgment or motor response, but these were regarded as mere signs of deeper, complex psychological processes that were elucidated by theoretical work and designated by theoretical constructs such as unconscious inference, apperception. Theoretical constructs reach beyond measured data via rational inference and deduction to approximate the features of phenomena. This is exemplified in astronomy where astronomers use reason to reach beyond the measured light waves recorded on telescopes to determine the existence of galaxies and black holes that cannot be completely represented by sensory data. In the 1920s, under the influence of logical positivism, this scientific distinction between measurement operations and real phenomena had, ironically, been declared non-scientific. A fictitious notion of science (or scientism) arose that insisted that operational definitions simulated the actual nature of psychological phenomena. Theoretical constructs that presumed to explicate phenomena beyond methodological procedures were declared metaphysical and invalid. Actually, presuming that one’s measurement procedures define reality is subjectivistic and metaphysical. Confounding measurement with real phenomena reduced psychological phenomena to behavioral measures, it converted psychology into a technical discipline preoccupied with measurement, and it repudiated theorizing about the nature of psychological phenomena that transcends overt behavioral measures. This is exactly what we see today in positivistic crosscultural psychology. There is no theory of culture or psychology, why psychology has a cultural basis and character, how psychology acquires this character, how psychology

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contributes to culture, or the role of agency that approaches the sophistication of cultural psychology as described in the previous section. Our philosophical analysis of the variable has led to identifying and explaining a broad set of features of cross-cultural psychology -- its abstract conception of factors and its abstract measurement of them; the spurious attempt to reach concrete culture and psychology by conflating abstract and concrete features (in false abstraction and false concreteness); the mechanistic, “black box” relation posited between cultural independent variables and psychological dependent variables, devoid of internal connections or reasons; and its atheoretical (empiricist) tendency to focus on measuring facts. This is the value of a philosophical analysis. It allows us to understand a broad set of particulars as mutually dependent and reinforcing because they emanate from the same basis. (The particulars may be envisioned as sitting on the wide mouth of a funnel where they are all interconnected, and are rooted in the stem of the funnel below.) Parsimonious explanation of diverse phenomena is the hallmark of science. Our philosophical analysis of the variable thus qualifies as a scientific analysis. Our analysis of the interdependent characteristics of the variable demonstrates that measurement is not theoretically neutral. It rests on ontological assumptions about the nature of cultural-psychological phenomena. And it also implicitly imposes these ontological assumptions onto cultural psychological phenomena. The act of constructing standardized, quantitative measures forces one to construe cultural-psychological phenomena as discrete, singular, homogeneous, abstract, and qualitatively invariant (cf. Flores and Sarandon, 2004 for a related discussion of how theoretical values shape measurement).

Integrating Cross-Cultural and Cultural Psychology? The ontology, epistemology, cultural theory, psychological theory, explanatory constructs (e.g, macro cultural factors), enculturation processes, and methodology of cultural psychology correct the errors of cultural variables. Cross-cultural psychologists do not see it this way. They do not acknowledge fundamental flaws in their approach. They regard differences with cultural psychology as differences in emphasis, with both approaches making important contributions. One of the crucial contributions of cross-cultural psychology which they tout is the ability to compare and communicate among cultures through general variables. Cross-cultural psychologists argue that bounded, integral, concrete, complex, variable social systems and psychology (of cultural psychology) render scientific comparison and intercultural communication impossible. Many cultural psychologists accept this claim. The result has been a movement to eclectically combine the two approaches in an effort to compensate their weaknesses. It is currently fashionable to declare that differences between approaches are complementary. Criticism and repudiation are eschewed for being derogatory and exclusionary. Positivistic cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology are said to both be useful in different situations. "The truth is always a little of both. No position has a monopoly on truth." Science is equated with pluralism and tolerance. Rothbaum and Morelli tend toward this view in their

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call for a multi-methods approach that includes ethnographic and qualitative methods as well as standardized methods (Friedlmeier, et al. p. 117). The Handbook of Cultural Psychology (Kitayama and Cohen, 2007) similarly throws together diverse, incompatible traditions under the misleading title of cultural psychology. Contributors to the volume include orthodox positivists such as Leung and Peng, activity theorists such as Cole, and anthropological practitioners of cultural psychology and qualitative methodology such as Miller and Shweder. There is no attempt to raise or resolve fundamental differences in these approaches. I contend this gambit is misguided. It seeks to transpose a political notion of cultural diversity and pluralistic tolerance into science. The fundamental, principled differences between positivist philosophy that underlies variables, and the cultural-historical, dialectical philosophy that underlies cultural psychology cannot be homogenized, papered over, and wished away. Positivists have acknowledged the incompatibility of the two approaches for a century. They have denigrated and marginalized the theorizing and methodology of cultural psychology. Positivists rooted out the cultural sociologists and qualitative methodologists from the Chicago department of sociology in the 1920s. They continue to reject holistic conceptions of culture and dialectical cultural factors. They derogate hermeneutic, qualitative methodology necessary to research such phenomena. As wrong-headed as these attacks were, at least they sought to retain coherent principles. They were the wrong principles but at least they were principles. The movement for pluralist laissez faire appears to be a step forward from the positivistic bias. However, in a way it is a step backward because it jettisons principles altogether. It mindlessly juxtaposes antithetical theoretical and methodological orientations so as to obscure the need to develop coherent principles. Instead of developing better principles, the emphasis is to accept what both camps have already produced and simply juxtapose them. This retards rather than promotes scientific progress. It actually waters down the advances of cultural psychology by accepting contrary positivistic principles as equally valid – in certain situations. Cultural psychology then has no superiority and pursuing it is simply matter of personal appeal. Rather than advancing cultural psychology as a paradigm, eclecticism destroys it as a potential paradigm. In science (as in everyday life), all things are not equally true, useful, and compatible. Science is not a compromise among divergent beliefs for the sake of harmony, tolerance, balance, and mutual validation. Science does not leave flawed concepts in place while supplementing them with discrepant other concepts. The point of science is to eliminate errors, not to supplement or balance them.9 Comparing the two approaches we see that cross-cultural psychology has the strength of comparing cultures and making general statements about the relation between cultural factors and psychological factors. However, its limitations subvert these laudable goals. Superficial, fragmentary, arbitrary, invalid, quantitative data cannot be utilized to compare cultures.

9

When confronted by discrepant theories of relativity physics and quantum theory concerning gravity, physicists uncompromisingly favor one over the other: "If we assume that matter obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and gravity obeys the laws of general relativity, we end up with a mathematical contradiction. A quantum theory of gravity is needed" (Maldacena, 2005, p. 58).

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The challenge of cross-cultural psychology must be taken up and solved within the framework of cultural psychology. This will refine and advance cultural psychology, which is the scientific way to develop a paradigm.

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Chapter VI

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A Dialectical Conception of Analysis and Cultural Comparison Cross-cultural psychologists criticize the dialectical interpenetration of factors for rendering each one complex and indistinguishable from the others. This, they contend, precludes using valuable scientific tools of precise identification and analysis. The organic, dialectical integration of factors in a system is compatible with an analysis of particular interactions within the complex whole. It is also compatible with identifying a general relation between a macro factor and a psychological factor across cultures. An outstanding study that accomplished both of these difficult objectives is Jenkins' (1991) investigation of expressed emotion and schizophrenia. Originated in England by sociologist George Brown and his colleagues, expressed emotion (or EE) refers to criticism, hostility, and overinvolvement expressed by close kin toward a relative who suffers from schizophrenia. Expressed emotion by relatives has been found to exacerbate symptoms in Anglo-American patients. Jenkins sought to investigate the universality of this finding by studying Mexican subjects. Being sensitive to cultural aspects of psychology, Jenkins properly considered the forms in which Mexicans express criticism and emotional over-involvement. Both phenomena are linked to cultural understandings of rules for appropriate behavior, intimacy, affective distance in the context of kin relations, and cultural variations in the construction of selves and emotions. Jenkins found that the kind of emotional material she sought was not transparent in the overt content of interviews. It had to be gleaned from subtle verbal, facial, and bodily expressions. Furthermore, it could only be gleaned from wide-ranging observations of interrelated behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. In contrast to Americans who often express criticism through disliking behavior, Mexicans commonly display criticism through anger. In addition, Mexican EE was tempered by sadness, pity, and even warmth, in contrast to the frustration and indignation which accompanied American EE. Mexican and American relatives were also critical of different behaviors in their disturbed kin. And about the same behavior they were critical of different aspects for different reasons. For example, where the disturbed person was unemployed, American relatives were unhappy about the inadequate personality traits such as laziness or

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impulsiveness that were presumably at fault. Mexican relatives were critical about the loss of income that unemployment caused. Emotional over-involvement (EOI) required a similar cultural sensitivity in order to be meaningfully investigated. In the first place, over-involvement is sensible only in comparison to some normal practice of emotional involvement. According to British criteria, for example, behavior would be considered over-involved if a relative made daily visits to the hospital and brought homemade food to the patient. However, this is standard practice among Mexicans and cannot be construed as excessive or sacrificial. Moreover, the form in which EOI was expressed by relatives was distinctive among Mexicans. Mexican relatives often endangered their own lives by enduring extremely threatening behavior of the patient (e.g., physical violence), they frequently contemplated suicide over their concern for the patient's illness, they developed somatic and psychological symptoms of stress, they experienced states of fear and anxiety over the patient's condition, they altered their usual family structure to provide more direct care to the patient, they ceased previous social activities to remain home with the patient, and they became more vigilant about the patient. These behaviors were regarded as over-involved because they were unnecessary in light of the actual circumstances. In the judgment of the researchers, the patient's condition did not require the extent of concern, protection, vigilance, fear, or anxiety that relatives manifested. In one case, a father suffered an "ataque de nervios" because his 18 year(c)old daughter failed to hold his hand when crossing the street. Defining criticism and EOI in culturally appropriate terms paved the way for quantification. Quantification presupposes qualitative equivalence. We must know that two things are qualitatively equivalent to avoid conflating the proverbial apples and oranges. Quantification requires a qualitative investigation to determine that British EE and Mexican EE are forms of the same thing (EE). Jenkins' rigorous qualitative procedures successfully substantiated this and enabled her to perform quantitative calculations on these qualitatively equivalent behaviors. She found that American families were more critical of their schizophrenic relatives than Mexican relatives were. The mean number of critical comments for Mexican relatives was 3.3, compared with 7.5 for British and 6.9 for American relatives. On overall expressed emotion, 41% of Mexican households were classified as high EE as compared to 48% of British and 67% of American households. This contrast is further sharpened when ethnic subsamples are matched for socioeconomic status. When lower socioeconomic status Mexicans and Anglo-Americans were compared, 43% of Mexican and 83% of Anglo households scored high in EE. Once criticism and EOI were defined in culturally appropriate terms and situated in culturally appropriate circumstances, their impact on psychological dysfunction could be ascertained. Dysfunction must be construed in cultural terms, just as EE is. Unfortunately, Jenkins did not undertake this comparative analysis. She relied on conventional, British behavioral definitions of dysfunction. Jenkins found that high levels of criticism and EOI had negative affects on the course of schizophrenia in both samples. This study allows us to identify the steps that are necessary to identify general crosscultural relations between cultural and psychological factors from culturally specific forms of behavior.

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The first step is to use an indigenous cultural factor, e.g., British EE, to extrapolate a general, abstract essence that may be manifested in other forms, e.g., Mexican EE. The abstraction EE allows a bridge between the two concrete forms. The abstraction must be broad enough to allow for different forms of the same thing, rather than simply recapitulating the specific native form in multiple cultures. EE must allow us to identify British and Mexican forms of EE, and not simply look for the British form in Mexican samples. Expressed emotion must also be sufficiently specific to be meaningful and useful for understanding schizophrenia. An extremely abstract construct such as "emotionality" would not help understand particular phenomena such as schizophrenia because it refers to the expression of any and all emotions which have little relation to schizophrenia, per se. Emotional expressivity refers to certain kinds of emotions expressed in certain ways. It is specific while being abstract. This procedure of extrapolating a useful abstraction of a concrete factor and then investigating a different cultural form of it that can be compared to the first form, is depicted in figure seven as steps 1, 2, 3. The next step is to repeat the same procedure with the psychological phenomenon, e.g., schizophrenia. From the British form of schizophrenia, a general, abstract essence must be extrapolated that captures the distinctive, defining features of schizophrenia anywhere and can be used to identify different forms in Mexican people. This process is depicted in steps 4, 5, 6. The abstract essence must be general enough to allow for different forms of schizophrenia. It cannot merely duplicate the British form because this would disqualify other forms, and would universalize and naturalize the British form. Nor can the essence be so nebulous that it obscures concrete, useful attributes which distinguish the factor from others. This is unfortunately the case with psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia. They define it as being delusional and having flat affect for at least 6 months. 9) 2) Abstract EE

1) British EE

3) Mexican EE

5) Abstract

4) British Schizo.

Schizophrenia

6) Mexican Schizo 7)

8) Figure 7. Steps in Drawing General Cultural-psychological Conclusions from Concrete Data.

This is a nebulous abstraction that expunges all psychological content. People can be delusional for many reasons, some of which are not schizophrenic. The delusion that one is speaking to god is unrelated to schizophrenia. The abstraction of schizophrenia must be described more specifically in order to be meaningful. Laing's notion of the divided self is an

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example. Individualism and collectivism are other abstractions that are too nebulous to be useful10 Steps 1-6 involve moving back and forth among different levels of abstraction. Concrete behaviors are used to generate abstractions, and abstractions are used to discover novel concrete forms of the behavior. This dialectic is depicted in the circular arrows of figure two. Concrete behaviors can be compared on the basis of a shared abstract essence. Once we have identified cultural forms of phenomena that share a common essence, we can make meaningful comparisons because we are comparing different forms of the same essential thing/phenomenon. We may then compare the effect of British EE on British schizophrenia (step 7), and the effect of Mexican EE on Mexican schizophrenia (8). Quantitative measures of effects, and quantitative comparisons of the strength of the effects are perfectly appropriate, and highly useful in order to specify the comparison. This data culminates in drawing a general conclusion about the relation of EE to schizophrenia (9).

10

Anorexia is another nebulous abstraction devoid of cultural-psychological content. It is defined as exaggerated reduction in eating. While this appears to be a specific behavior, it is actually nebulous. It categorizes together a devout nun who eats little in order to stifle bodily pleasure, and a Southern California girl who eats little in order to be sexually attractive and active. A meaningful abstraction must include more specific culturalpsychological content, the way EE does. Similarly, categorizing a spiritual monk and an abused New York City boy as introverted is a nebulous abstraction that is both meaningless and useless.

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Chapter VII

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Generalizations General abstractions need to be derived from concrete cultural features. This methodology preserves the concrete level and makes it the basis of abstractions. It enables abstractions to represent meaningful concrete features in abstract form. The abstract is dialectically related to the concrete. It grows out of it, represents it, and generalizes it. Whether a particular factor can be abstracted in a way that meaningfully represents its concrete features and generalizes them cross-culturally is an empirical question. It cannot be presupposed. We must determine whether EE or schizophrenia can be meaningfully abstracted and generalized in a form that represents their useful features and does not rise to such a high level of abstraction as to lose all significance. In other words, if we define schizophrenia abstractly as having delusions, or being out of touch with reality, this is such a high level of abstraction that it loses all meaningful representation of the specific symptoms that American schizophrenics have. It would be as uninformative as defining love as caring deeply about someone. This abstract definition loses all connection with the specific features of modern romantic love, or Puritan love, or the love that emerges in arranged Indian marriages. This abstract love does not meaningfully represent these concrete culturalpsychological forms of love. This is the problem with abstractions such as individualism and collectivism. They do not represent any meaningful cultural psychological phenomenon. Jenkins empirically found that EE can be meaningfully abstracted and generalized from England to Mexico. The abstraction EE contained sufficient specific content as to be a useful construct in both countries. However, EE might not be meaningfully generalizable to all countries. Some countries might have no phenomenon analogous to EE. The extent of the generalizability of a cultural psychological phenomenon is an empirical question. Positivism makes an unwarranted, a priori assumption that variables are intrinsically and necessarily universal or nearly so. And to ensure generalizability, positivists typically employ very high levels of abstraction -- such as collectivism -- that permit generalization and comparison across large numbers of countries. But this sacrifices meaningful, useful content. This error is avoided by suspending the assumption of universality, beginning with concrete characteristics, and then empirically determining how generalizable they are at low levels of abstraction that retain specific features.

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After factors have been defined at meaningful levels of abstraction (that represent useful, concrete features), their relation in one country can be compared to their relation in other countries in order to determine how generalizable this relationship is. The relation between EE and schizophrenia that is found in England may generalize to Mexico, however it may not generalize to Japan. It is an empirical question as to how generalizable the relation is. Our discussion has broadened cultural psychology to delineate a methodology for analyzing cultural and psychological factors, and relating them cross-culturally. This methodology refutes the positivistic insistence that comparison is only possible using variables, and that if one renounces them, one has renounced comparing cultural psychological phenomena. Positivistic variables are not the only, or even the best, means of drawing cross-cultural comparisons. In fact, they are a severely deficient procedure. They flatten and simplify phenomena in order to compare them. Cultural psychology has solved the riddle of preserving the concrete characteristics of factors while also comparing them. It does so by recognizing the dialectical truth that abstractions derive from and preserve concrete features, while concrete features embody abstract features that define them -- as expressed emotion or schizophrenia, for example (cf. Marx, 1973, pp. 100-108).

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Chapter VIII

A Concrete Analysis of Abstractions

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Figure two shows that cultural phenomena include abstract and concrete features. General cultural features have general psychological effects, which comprise the field of general psychology (cf. Burke and Ornstein, 1995). General features of schooling have general psychological effects that are different from the general features of apprenticeship teaching which is part of practical work. Both Piaget and Vygotsky emphasized that social interaction in general stimulates language, cognitive growth, logical reasoning, and consciousness in general (Ratner, 2006, pp. 73-74; Ratner, 2007a; Vygotsky, 1978, p. 56). Vygotsky's famous zone of proximal development is an abstract notion that states that questioning, encouraging, hinting, and teaching by others stimulates an individual to greater cognitive activity and problem solving than he could achieve individually. No content is included in the social interaction or the cognitive performance. Abstractions are thus important to cultural psychology.

Dialectical vs. Positivistic Abstractions There are several important differences between a dialectical conception of cultural abstractions and positivism's conception that is crystallized in the variable. The variable presents abstract features as the basic stuff of culture and psychology. Schooling, urbanization, traditionalism, and collectivism exemplify this tendency. They are not derived from nor do they preserve concrete characteristics. In contrast, dialectics emphasizes that cultural abstractions are only part of cultural and psychological phenomena. They are always embedded in concrete phenomena. In fact, people only construct concrete phenomena. We construct particular kinds of schools, not "schooling" in general; we construct particular kinds of cities, not "urbanization"; we construct particular traditions, not "traditionalism"; we construct particular kinds of collectives, not "collectivism;" we construct particular languages, not "language" in general. Abstractions spring from concreteness, not the other way around. Psychological and cultural abstractions coined by mainstream and cross-cultural psychologists are only rendered by deculturizing and depoliticizing cultural-psychological phenomena. This extensive conceptual reworking of these phenomena is prerequisite to

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ignoring/denying/forgetting their cultural nature, origins, characteristics, and function (sundered from the Lebenswelt, as Husserl said), and treating the phenomena as biologicallydriven psychological attributes, measurable by standardized, fragmentary questions about superficial behavior. Psychologists not only deny the cultural reality of psychological phenomena; they also deny their own cultural-political activity that renders cultural and psychological into acultural abstractions, privileges these, and researches them with particular methods. This is the same kind of reified inversion that religious leaders practice: they construct a particular conception of god, and then deny their own constructive, cultural, political activity, claiming that god made people, and god made religious leaders represent and explain "him" to their followers. Dialectics emphasizes that the co-existence of abstract and concrete features makes it difficult to identify the former. When we study Japanese elementary schools, it is difficult to parse abstract features of schooling from the concrete ones. When we observe Western mothers progressively adjusting their linguistic complexity to carefully match and anticipate the linguistic competencies of their babies (known as scaffolding), how can we know if this is a general social requirement of children's language development, or if it is a particular technique used by this group of mothers? Abstract features are only distilled from concrete features by an analytical process. J.S. Mill explained this in his System of Logic (1843) where he articulated the method of agreement and the method of difference (Ratner, 1997, p. 215 for discussion). An outstanding application of Mill’s methodology to cultural psychology is Mohanty's (1994, 2006) research on the cognitive effects of bilingualism. Bilingualism is abstract in the sense that it does not refer to particular languages, but simply the knowledge of two languages in general. Mohanty conducted a sophisticated natural experiment to identify the cognitive affects of bilingualism. He compared monolingual (Oriya-speaking) and bilingual (Oriya + Kui-speaking) children of the same educational level and the same local culture (religion, occupation, marriage and child-rearing customs) in Orissa, India. This method of agreement, as Mill called it, isolated monolingualism-bilingualism from shared cultural factors. Mohanty found a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive competencies such as intelligence, simultaneous coding processes, and metalinguisticmetacommunicative-metacognitive skills. Mohanty indicated the internal relationship between the macro cultural factor of bilingualism and cognition. In accordance with our discussion of mediational means, he states that learning two languages demands certain cognitive skills. These include cognitive flexibility, objective analytical orientation, sensitivity to alternative meanings and viewpoints. These cognitive requirements of bilingualism translate into the performance competencies Mohanty measured. Finally, Mohanty emphasized that bilingualism is not entirely abstract. Bilingualism is always embedded in a particular cultural context which affects its quality and its cognitive effects. Accordingly, "societal bilingualism can be as varied and unique as individual cases of bilingualism" (Mohanty, 1994, p. 16). Concrete features of bilingualism are a function of, marker of, and proxy for social class, educational policies, economic opportunities, immigration, and colonialism. In India, "Social, political, educational, and economic conditions conspire to strengthen the association of the

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minor and tribal languages with the powerlessness and insufficiency that springs from the stark reality that the speakers of these languages are invariably disadvantaged to begin with. As a group they are usually poorer, belong to mostly rural and economically underdeveloped areas, and share many features of the disadvantaged populations" (Mohanty, 2006, p. 266). Of the more than 400 languages in India, the government only designates 22 as constitutionally recognized. Consequently, "Most of the tribal and minority mother tongues have no place in the educational system of India. The children who enter schools with these mother tongues are forced into a dominant language `submersion' education with a subtractive effect on their mother tongues" (ibid., p.268). In contrast, bilingualism that includes Hindi and English accords the speaker high social status. (English is accorded the status of an official, Constitutional language and is widely taught in elementary schools.) There will be little subtractive effect on the mother tongue, Hindi. Embedded in and permeated by macro cultural factors, bilingualism becomes a macro cultural factor in its right that contributes to, represents, and reinforces political, educational, colonial, socioeconomic phenomenon such as occupational and educational status (Ratner, 2006). The character of bilingualism as a cultural factor is depicted in figure eight. .

Family language

Govt. recognition

Kui + Oriya

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Work rules & opportunities

Medium of instruction in school

Social status of languages Text books

Family

Family language language Medium of instruction in school

Govt. recognition

Hindi + English Work rules & opportunities

Social status of languages Text books

Figure 8. Bilingualism as Cultural Factor.

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The psycholinguistic properties, dynamics, and competencies of bilingualism vary with its macro cultural character. Bilingual speakers of tribal languages are more likely to feel an identity crisis and low self-esteem because of the low social position their mother language denotes; bilingual speakers of socially valued languages will feel high self-esteem, and not feel an identify crisis over this issue. "Understanding bilingualism among individuals is incomplete without an analysis of societal bilingualism -- the social, political, historical, and other processes involved in it" (Mohanty, 1994, p. 16). People recognize that language is a macro cultural factor when they engage in political struggle to win governmental recognition of their native language, or to decertify a language as unofficial and unusable in school or business. The Bodos won Constitutional recognition of their language in 2003, through a political struggle that altered the politics of language. This is an essential step in enhancing the psychological functioning of the Bodos that depends on their language.

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Chapter IX

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Political Implications of Cross-Cultural Psychology Positivistic cultural variables unify people in shared, universal, (or quasi-universal) intelligible, simple, familiar practices and understandings. They appear to mitigate cultural differences, conflicts, and misunderstandings. But this unity is superficial. It springs from abstract commonalities of culture that are contradicted by dissimilar concrete characteristics. The unity proposed by cross-cultural psychologists comes from overlooking cultural differences, not from considering and resolving them. Like many well-intentioned liberal formulations to improve social life, positivistic cultural variables are politically conservative and retard social change that is necessary to truly improve life. Abstract variables such as collectivism, commerce, urbanization, education, government, and work (which privilege abstract features of phenomena over concrete features), obfuscate who controls these systems and the manner in which their particular social organization serves these vested interests and stifles the fulfillment of people participating in them (Cf. Rodseth, 2005 for a related discussion of power and culture in the field of anthropology). "Collectivism" obfuscates the brutal political element of Chinese collectivism and renders it politically neutral. It is thereby exempted from critical analysis and change. "Democracy" similarly neutralizes the concrete practice of government in the U.S. which is thoroughly corrupted by corporate interests. "Globalization" neutralizes the capitalistic nature of international companies. Cultural variables naturalize the status quo because their features are singular and only vary quantitatively. At best, positivism allows us to see that "standard of living" positively correlates with quantitative level of cognitive competence and mental illness. It allows us to see that raising income level is necessary to enhance psychological competencies quantitatively. However, these quantitative manipulations, while helpful to some extent, never extend to qualitatively transforming the social organization of cultural factors. Positivistic variables render the discipline of psychology incapable of perceiving, critiquing, and transforming the qualitative social organization of society. (The conservative implications of the variable were mentioned in the previous section with regard to denying indigenous mathematical competencies of Saora students, and insisting that all legitimate mathematics is modern, Western mathematics).

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Positivistic cross-cultural psychology further reifies the status quo by denying human agency. Its mechanistic, "black box" causal model of independent cultural variables producing dependent psychological phenomena excludes agency. Absent human agency, there is no process by which societies can be transformed. Cultural variables clearly naturalize the status quo when they are false abstractions. A single social form is naturalized and universalized in general terminology (generality becomes one-dimensionalized as Marcuse, 1964 put it).11 In this view, as long as we engage in commerce, live in cities, and have schools, our social and psychological activities will have an individualistic character. We may be able to increase or reduce it incrementally, however, these cultural variables can never be qualitatively reorganized to be made cooperative instead of individualistic and competitive. The only way to mitigate individualism would be to renounce schooling, cities, and commerce altogether. Since this is impossible, we are doomed to a bourgeois life style in perpetuity.12 Treating psychological phenomena as variables complements and compounds the obfuscation of concrete social systems that is fostered by cultural variables. Treating psychological phenomena as general, abstract, singular, qualitatively fixed, simple features transparent in superficial, fragmentary behavior deprives psychology of concrete cultural and political features of macro cultural factors. Psychology is closed as a window into concrete society. The functional manner in which psychology maintains culture, and can figure into a critique of society (Ratner, 2006), is obliterated. In view of this ineluctable destiny built into cultural and psychological variables, the diversity and pluralism of cross-cultural psychology must be questioned. The conservative political assumptions and implications of positivistic cross-cultural psychology help to explain its scientific inadequacies. The scientific weaknesses crystallized in the variable are not simply an intellectual mistake. They have a political basis and function (cf. Amadae, 2003; Solovey, 2001; Solovey, 2004). Political assumptions about the nature of culture and human psychology carry over into social science theories and methodologies which deal with the same topics. We have seen that cross-cultural psychology assumes a unified human nature that transcends societies. This is a political assumption about the constituents of society (universal, abstract, singular cultural elements) and the harmony of cultures. This assumption figures prominently in cross-cultural psychology’s social scientific account of culture and psychology. If the political assumption is wrong, then the social science that rests on it must also be flawed. It is therefore essential to assess the political 11

12

This occurs in real life. For instance, what passes for general pedagogical techniques are usually culturally specific techniques that are used to inculcate psychological competencies necessary to succeed in cultural practices. Pedagogical techniques that inculcate rote memorization of facts, learning material quickly, recalling and reciting it quickly on timed tests, solving problems alone without social cooperation, sitting still, controlling bodily movements and functions, and concentrating on abstract concepts in a sterile classroom, devoid of emotions and social interaction are not intrinsic to teaching and learning in general. They are useful for fulfilling the social roles involved in a capitalist economic system. In fact, these cultural activities increase the difficulty of learning. Quite opposite competencies and contexts would make learning much more effective. This is the objective result of positivist variables. It is not the subjective intention of most cross-cultural psychologists who believe in social progress. Many logical positivists of the Vienna Circle were also progressive in their political sympathies (Uebel, 2005). However, the logic of methodological and theoretical constructs leads to legitimizing pro-capitalist ideology quite unwittingly.

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assumptions of social science theories and methodologies in order to understand and evaluate their scientific aspects.

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Chapter X

Indigenous Psychology

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The term indigenous psychology denotes three distinct phenomena: (1) The culturally organized emotions, perceptions, self, cognitive processes, developmental processes, sexuality, and mental illness of a particular group of people, e.g., lower caste Indian women in Orissa, India. This sense of indigenous psychology is designated IP1. (2) A people's self-understanding of their emotions, self, mental illness, personality, etc. For example, the Hindu belief that the good and bad fortune today reflect good and bad actions one made in previous lives; or the American belief that their behavior is a function of genetic mechanisms. This is IP2. (3) A meta theory that endorses studying indigenous self-understanding (IP2) as useful/accurate descriptions and explanations of their culturally organized psychology (IP1). This third sense of indigenous psychology (IP3) is the discipline of indigenous psychology, as in "the Taiwanese movement for indigenous psychology." It strives to be the theoretical and methodological discipline of cultural psychology that elucidates cultural origins, features, and functions of psychological phenomena.

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Chapter XI

Analysis of the Meanings of Indigenous Psychology Indigenous Psychology as the Actual Culturally Organized Psychology of a People (IP1)

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This includes the individualistic self of Western people; abstract, logical reasoning engendered by formal schooling; anorexia of middle class, Western, Caucasian, young women; traditional and modern forms of shame in Korea; American and Japanese childhood attachment; Hindu and Dutch young women's sexuality. IP1 is what IP2 and IP3 seek to describe and explain. It is the criterion for assessing the value of IP2,3. They are acceptable to the extent to which they accurately describe and explain the actual cultural psychology of people (IP1).

The Local Understanding of a People's Psychology (IP2) This is a people's description and explanation of their psychology. For example, ancient Greek IP2 understood Greek psychology in terms of humours such as bile; it understood women's psychological disturbances as due to a floating womb. Indigenous Hindu explanations of Indian behavior include "suffering is caused by ignorance," "aggressive behavior/personality is caused by eating onions and garlic." IP2 is revealed in official pronouncements, guide books, religious tenets, psychological theories, and peoples' reports in letters, diaries, interviews, and questionnaires concerning how they describe and explain their emotions, mental illness, intelligence, perception, motivation, psychological development, sexuality, and memory lapses.

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Indigenous Psychology as Cultural-Psychological Theory and Methodology (IP3) This is the metatheory, or academic discipline that counterposes itself to mainstream and cross-cultural psychology, and lays claim to being the science of cultural psychology that elucidates the cultural origins, characteristics, and function of a people's psychology. Assessing this claim is complicated by the fact that no cogent, definitive statement of principles has been articulated and widely adopted. IP3 is groping to define itself, and is beset with contradictory theoretical statements and methodological practices. Like any young, preparadigmatic field, IP3 cannot be identified by inductively summarizing definitions by individual practitioners. This will only yield incomplete, inconsistent statements. The edited book by Kim, et al. (2006) exemplifies this point. One stated principle is that indigenous psychology "reflects, describes, explains, or understands the psychological and behavioral activities in their native contexts in terms of culturally relevant frame of reference and culturally derived categories and theories" (p. 6). But this endorsing of culturally relative IP2s is contradicted by another principle that "it is erroneous to equate indigenous psychology with cultural relativism." The authors even reinterpret culturally relative psychological phenomena as transcultural: "Contrary to previous theories, amae is not a culturse specific phenomenon. Although it is an indigenous Japanese word, the psychological aspects of amae can be found in other cultures" (p. 9). The conclusion says that amae transcends native contexts and is not described, explained, or understood in terms of culturally specific categories that the earlier principle stipulated as defining indigenous psychology. Another contradiction in expositions of indigenous psychology concerns methodology. Pe-Pua insists that indigenous methods are, by definition not imported from outside a culture. She contradicts herself by saying "Some [Western research methods] are appropriate (which we should continue to use), and some are not (which we should give up)" (ibid., pp. 133-134, emphasis added). Her discriminating acceptance of certain imported methods, and her rejection of others is contradicted by Kim, et al.’s indiscriminate eclecticism that argues "indigenous psychology advocates the use of various methodologies," it "does not affirm or preclude the use of a particular method" (Kim, et al., 2006, pp. 7, 6). These contradictory statements -- many within the same article, page, or paragraph -- are characteristic of expositions of indigenous psychology. Consequently, describing and assessing indigenous psychology -- and cultural psychology and cross-cultural psychology as well – cannot rely on practitioners’ statements alone. We must instead take a more pro-active role and draw out its implicit logic and necessary premises. In this way we reconstruct indigenous psychology to make it more coherent and understandable (Besserverstehen, as Dilthey said) than what its practitioners say. This treatment of indigenous psychology construes it as an ideal type (Ratner, 1997, pp. 206-207; Ratner, 2006a, p.). As Simmel, Tonnies, and Weber employed this concept, an ideal type represents the essential character, principles, factors, processes, and dynamics of a phenomenon. These "underlie," so to speak, phenotypic appearances which are diverse and even inconsistent. "Christianity," "the Enlightenment," "romanticism," "capitalism," "globalization" are examples of ideal types. They are not identifiable by inductively

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collecting statements from practitioners and participants. For each individual may be viewing the phenomenon from a restricted vantage point, may focus upon a superficial feature, may be mystified about the essence of the phenomenon, or may have a vested interest in not identifying important aspects. An ideal type is an abstraction from phenotypical appearances that identifies their essential nature and unity. Although ideal types are abstractions, they are real (Christianity and capitalism are real). Although ideal types are artificial in the sense that they are more coherent than overt, diverse acts they are useful and true. They enable us to understand the significance and essence of overt appearances. They make "adjustments of reality that may be `untrue' but are at the same time more true than literal truth" as Vincent van Gough said about great art (New York Times, Oct. 14, 2005, p. B34). I shall treat indigenous psychology (IP3) as an ideal type. I will construct the essential thrust (implicit logic and necessary premises) behind the theory and research of practitioners, even when it is contradicted by certain of their statements. We similarly identify the essential thrust of capitalism, slavery, and globalization despite denials from their leaders. This ideal typical approach defines what indigenous psychology is in terms of what it must be in order to exist (cf. Marcuse, 1987). The fact that I am constructing and refining indigenous psychology does not mean I am creating a fictitious straw man. On the contrary, I am striving to facilitate the researcher's grasp upon and comprehension of an amorphous and ceaselessly flowing reality and assist the clear conceptualization of the particular case or development under investigation -- which is the value of ideal types as conceived by Weber. Approaching indigenous psychology as an objective ideal type allows us to identify indigenous psychologists who practice it despite the fact that they define themselves otherwise. For example, Shweder identifies himself as a cultural psychologist but he has recently espoused tenets of indigenous psychology (Shweder, 2006; Ratner, 2006a, p. 259). The ideal type enables us to discern that self-proclaimed indigenous psychologists sometimes actually practice cultural psychology (Mohanty, Hwang, R.C. Misra) or cross-cultural psychology (Yang).

Principles of Indigenous Psychology (1) Psychological phenomena are culturally formed (socially constructed) and variable. Western findings about psychological phenomena that have been obtained from samples of Western people, cannot be generalized to other cultures. I call this the principle of ontological relativism which claims that psychological phenomena are culturally relative. (2) Psychological theories and methodologies for investigating psychological phenomena must be tailored to reflect the culturally specific features of psychological phenomena. Psychological theories and methodology are not universally applicable. In particular, Western theories about psychological development, attachment, frustration-aggression, locus of control, conformity, mental illness, and emotional effects of guilt on self-concept are not

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applicable to Asian and African psychological phenomena. Positivist methodology may not be applicable for investigating culturally unfamiliar psychological phenomena. I call this principle epistemological relativism because it claims that people's ways of knowing are different. For example: Allwood and Berry (2006, p. 245) point out that "Each indigenous psychology provides a new and different perspective from which to gain understanding of the human being." Kim says that one of the main tenets of indigenous psychology is that "realities appear different because we have different assumptions about how to perceive and interpret out world" (in Allwood and Berry, 2006, p. 249). Indigenous psychologists disavow Western-based science as just another indigenous perspective -- a Western one -- that should not be imposed on a native people. For this negates their own indigenous view of themselves which must be respected (as part of their national identify and pride). Western science is simply a form of intellectual imperialism. This belief is endorsed by some philosophers of science such as Feyerabend who states that science has no epistemic advantage over other forms of knowledge. Science is nothing more than myths, fairy tales, and art. Epistemological relativism means that no general theory or methodology can exist for studying cultural psychology, for each group perceives things differently. Greenfield (2000) states that "the notion from indigenous psychology that concepts and theory should be developed within each culture deconstructs the illusionary methodological concept of objectivity and replaces it with the more valid and therefore more productive concept of perspective" (p. 232). (3) The way to generate indigenous theories and methodology is by eliciting and accepting IP2s. These are the cultural premises about a people's psychology. "The indigenous psychology approach can be characterized as attempts by researchers in mostly non-Western societies and cultures to develop a psychological science that more closely reflects their own social and cultural premises" (Allwood and Berry, 2006, p. 244). Enriquez called this indigenization from within. The way Confucian texts define emotions is an indigenous Asian theory of emotions; the way Taiwanese subjects define saving face in interviews or answers to questionnaires is an indigenous Taiwanese psychological theory of this unique cultural psychological phenomenon. Indigenous psychologists privilege IP2s because the latter are based on "the insider perspective." "The indigenous psychologies approach advocates the experience of a phenomenon as an insider" (Kim, 2000, p. 285). The insider perspective presumes that cultural insiders are more familiar with their cultural psychology than outsiders, and understand it more thoroughly (objectively). Therefore, insiders' understanding of their psychology (IP2s) should be accepted as the ultimate description and explanation of it. People's self-understanding is so profound that it should be the basis of psychologists' theories and methods. IP2s are not simply the data that theories and methods should describe

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and explain. IP2s are the theories and methods themselves. Indigenous psychologists strive to make their theories and methods compatible with indigenous theoretical formulations about psychology, and indigenous methods of deriving these formulations. The reason is that indigenous people are deemed to be most in touch with their own cultural psychology. Indigenous compatibility begins with the demand that researchers and their research participants must come from the same nation, society, and ethnic group so that, through a lifetime of experience within an identical (or at least similar) social, cultural, philosophical, and historical context, psychological theory and research methods will be congruent with those of the participants’ psychological and behavioral characteristics. Later, K. S. Yang suggested some severe limiting conditions under which a nonnative could perform adequate indigenous compatibility research. K. S. Yang suggests that holding indigenous compatibility as a fundamental criterion for adequate research will serve the goal of separating Taiwanese psychology from Western psychology (Gabrenya, Kung, Chen, 2006, p. 600).

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The indigenous psychologist accepts peoples' self-understanding to such an extent that he adopts it as his own scientific understanding of them. Indigenous methods are “not imported nor invented [by the researcher], but natural or existing patterns of behavior [are] discovered and developed as research methods.” “The culture-bearer provides the implied and articulated limits of the research enterprise” (Kim, et al., 2006, pp. 112, 125). Cultural insiders are more familiar with their culturally relative psychology, and they have the appropriate epistemology for knowing its distinct features. Outsiders are not only unfamiliar with the culturally organized psychology of insiders; they have a different (wrong) way of knowing such things from the way insiders know them. Not only must outsiders overcome their unfamiliarity with the psychological phenomenon, they must overcome their customary way of knowing it.

The Epistemologicalr Relativism of the Insider Perspective Is the Defining Feature, or Essence of Indigenous Psychology The insider perspective expressed in IP2s is what distinguishes indigenous psychology (IP3) from mainstream psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and cultural psychology. Principles 1, 2, and 3 of indigenous psychology distinguish it from cross-cultural psychology which seeks to discover psychological universals through universal psychological theories and methodologies. Cultural psychology also endorses principle # 1 – it emphasizes that psychological phenomena are relative to culture. Principles #2 and 3, epistemological relativism of the insider perspective, distinguishe indigenous psychology from cultural psychology (as we shall explain below) and makes it unique. Eckensberger is mistaken in his statement that indigenous psychology is "the very same model as cultural psychology" (in Kim, et al., 2006, pp. 232-233). Absent epistemological relativism of the insider perspective, indigenous psychology would be indistinguishable from cultural psychology. Consequently, IP3 must emphasize the

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insider perspective in order to be a distinct approach. Even if practitioners occasionally disavow the insider perspective, it remains the linchpin of the theory.

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Inadequacies of Indigenous Psychology as a Cultural Psychological Theory In order for indigenous psychology to serve as the theory and methodology of cultural psychology its tools -- which are people's indigenous self-understandings (IP2s) – must accurately identify the cultural roots, characteristics, and function of psychological phenomena (IP1). If they do not, then the metatheory (IP3) that endorses the use of IP2s as tools of the trade, fails as a discipline of cultural psychology. Of course, IP2s are not necessarily valid. They must be empirically and theoretically scrutinized before they can be accepted as valid descriptions of the origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena. For instance, the Hindu theory that cognitive growth only commences with schooling is not necessarily a valid theory of Indian intellectual growth. Empirical research will establish whether the intellectual growth of Indian children is influenced before schooling or not. We will then know whether this theory actually explains and describes the cognitive development of Indians or anyone else. The same is true for Hindu concepts about the self. The notion that the self consists of a real self, an empirical self, and a material self; or the Vedantic model of person as consisting of five concentric layers of food, vital breath, mental, cognitive, and joyous (Misra, 2003, pp. 59-65) must be empirically tested to determine whether they describe the actual self-concept of contemporary Indian people. The Hindu prescription for self-knowledge must similarly be empirically and logically assessed. Self-knowledge for Hinduism consists in suspending normal, analytical thought processes and even feelings such as pleasure and pain -- that separate us from the world -and allowing self to enter a state of bliss where it is one with the world. The question is: "is this really the best way to know self?" "Or does it overlook important features?" We cannot take it on faith that this is a useful or desirable way to know self. If the self embodies cultural characteristics derived from social institutions, then bliss overlooks important aspects of self and is not a thorough form of self knowledge. Indigenous belief systems about human behavior/psychology are tainted by political ideology, mystifying social practices, ignorance, and self interest that distort their views of human psychology. They cannot be accepted as valid simply because they are espoused by people from within their own culture. IP2s typically overlook cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena. The Greek view of hysteria as caused by a floating womb, or Western childrearing popular ideas (and manuals) about children's innate abilities, or the psychoanalytic theory of psychosexual development and dreams; genetic theories of mental illness, intelligence, and homosexuality are all indigenous explanations and descriptions of psychology – i.e., IP2s -which are wrong and obfuscate cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena.

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Asian indigenous religious and philosophical notions of psychology, such as karma, bliss, an imbalance between yin and yang, or amounts of qi in the body, similarly explain the basis, character, and function of psychological phenomena in terms of natural or mystical processes rather than in terms of cultural factors. The Hindu notion of bliss assumes that blissful unity of mind and world is the psyche's nature. Social life and social aspects of consciousness create temporary, artificial separations between mind and world. They mask its true integral nature with the world. This Hindu theory seeks the true, natural, unsocial mind beneath the social facades. It is not a cultural theory or methodology of mind. Most indigenous cultural beliefs obscure their own influence on psychology. Most present themselves as facts of life (to be believed as such), not as cultural concepts that influence people to believe in them. Individualism obscures itself as a cultural influence. It leads people to regard their individualistic sense of self and agency as natural, not as culturally formed by individualistic ideology. Individualism is thus a self-obscuring cultural influence. It influences peoples' psychology, but it prevents them from recognizing that their individualistic psychology is a function of individualistic ideology. Following such indigenous theories about psychology (IP2s), one would never realize that they, or other cultural factors, organize people's psychology. The vaunted cultural familiarity and epistemological superiority of IP2s is thus more fancy than fact. IP2s intuitively reflect cultural practices, concepts, and conditions. However, these typically mystify rather than elucidate the character, origins, and function of psychological phenomena. Since indigenous psychology (IP3) accepts culturally obscuring IP2s as descriptions and explanations of psychology (IP1), it cannot qualify as cultural psychology that elucidates the cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychology. In fact, indigenous psychology (IP3) generally impedes the study of cultural psychology. Of course, certain elements of indigenous belief systems may facilitate a cultural understanding of psychology. Hindu philosophy emphasizes the dependence of phenomena on a context of related phenomena. (Misra, 2003, p. 50). Elements such as this may be extended to elucidate the context of macro cultural factors that shape psychological phenomena. But as they stand, nebulous comments about context do not specify what it consists of. It could be genetic mechanisms, personal friends, or spirits. Identifying concrete macro cultural factors as the vital context to psychological phenomena requires additional knowledge that is not forthcoming from indigenous psychology. Indigenous psychology (IP3) is additionally inadequate as a discipline of cultural psychology because its epistemological relativism is subjectivistic and self-serving. Whatever the in-group says about itself is taken as fact that is only understandable by its own people. It cannot be comprehended, evaluated, or refuted by outsiders with different epistemologies. The insider perspective construes cultural-psychological phenomena in cult-like terms, accessible only to those with special experiences and forms of knowledge. It decries Western ethnocentrism but imposes its own ethnocentrism (cf. Ratner, 2006b). Having “culture bearers” define the limits of social science research programs would be fatal to science. Should American children define the kinds of research questions and theories directed towards themselves? Should religious fanatics be empowered to veto critical questions being asked about their beliefs? Should Chinese Communist Party bureaucrats

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dictate Chinese social science research programs and prevent critical inquiry? If Chinese people believe that mental illness is caused by too much qi in the body does that mean an outsider should not raise a research program to study cultural influences on mental illness in China? Clearly, restricting research to what culture bearers desire can be self-serving, ethnocentric, oppressive, and anti-scientific. Although indigenous psychology cannot qualify as a discipline of cultural psychology, the insider’s perspective does provide insights into culturally organized psychology that must be incorporated into macro cultural psychology.

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For instance, Filipinos’ predisposition to be indirect when they communicate was regarded as being dishonest and socially ingratiating and as reflecting a deceptive verbal description of reality. In reality, i.e., using a Filipino perspective, this indirectness serves a number of purposes, for example, reflecting concern for the feelings of others to avoid the other person losing face or getting embarrassed if directly confronted with negativity, conforming with the norm of humility and modesty by not directly recognizing one’s own ability and achievements, and so on (Kim, et al., 2006, p. 110).

The insider perspective also leads to approaching local people in socially acceptable ways, asking appropriate questions of appropriate people, dressing appropriately, etc. In some cultures it is appropriate to sleep in the subjects’ house and eat with them. In some cultures it is better to drop in on subjects in their everyday activities than make formal appointments. While these points are useful, indigenous psychology does not possess any theory or constructs to explain them. It certainly does not possess a cultural theory or cultural constructs that could be used to explain psychological attributes. It is not a theory of why and how culture is central to psychology, or how psychology reciprocally constructs and maintains culture. It has no theory of what culture is, what its central factors are that organize psychology and are embedded in psychological phenomena. It has no theory about the manner in which biological and cultural factors relate to psychology. In the words of one of its advocates, indigenous psychology is “a suppositionless approach to social scientific investigations… characterized by groping, searching, and probing into an unsystematized mass of social data to obtain order, meaning, and directions for research” (Kim, et al., 2006, p. 109). Nor does indigenous psychology propose a coherent methodology that elucidates the cultural basis, character, and function of psychological phenomena and overcomes the flaws of positivistic methodology. On the contrary, indigenous psychology tends to deny external, objective scientific inquiry in favor of valorizing people’s perspective, as Greenfield advocated earlier. The absence of culture theory and methodology deprives indigenous psychology of any coherent direction of where to look, and how to look, for influences on and in psychology. It allows researchers to overlook powerful cultural influences on psychology such as the class structure of a society, power relations, ownership and control of social institutions, principles governing social institutions (such as commodification of work and resources, or political coercion), and social relations that are objectified in institutions (such as alienation, privatizing of public resources and space). Unless these are built into a theory of culture, they remain easy for academic psychologists to overlook -- which they routinely do.

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For these reasons, indigenous psychology is unqualified to serve as the discipline of cultural psychology (as Hwang, 2005 notes).

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Eclectic Attempts to Correct Indigenous Psychology Certain indigenous psychologists recognize, and seek to correct, deficiencies in the insider's perspective expressed in IP2s. Their typical corrective is to add a number of supplementary provisos to the basic tenets. These supplements are not well thought out or articulated; they also contradict the basic tenets of indigenous psychology, leaving it incoherent. Yang (2000, pp. 244-245) claims that indigenous psychology is a mix/sum of crosscultural and cultural psychology. He says that indigenous psychology combines the natural science model of cross-cultural psychology and the human, or cultural, sciences model of cultural psychology; it combines the cross-cultural separation of culture and behavior as independent and dependent variables, with the cultural psychological view that culture and behavior are mutually constituting and indistinguishable from, each other; it combines the cross-cultural view that universal explanations are more important than local explanations, with the cultural psychological view that local explanations are more important than universal ones; it combines the cross-cultural view of the researcher as pure observer who does not affect the observed phenomena, with the cultural psychological view of the researcher as affecting the phenomena that are studied. Kim and Park (2006, pp. 289-290) adopt the same strategy. First they express the insider perspective by saying, "Epistemology, theories, concepts, and methods are developed to correspond with [indigenous] psychological phenomena." In other words, special forms of knowledge are necessary to comprehend indigenous phenomena. The authors contradict this sentence with: “The goal is to create a more rigorous, systematic universal science that can be theoretically and empirically verified." Kim, Yang, and Hwang (2006, p. 3) similarly state that "both indigenous and general psychology seeks (sic) to discover universal facts, principles, and laws of human behavior." Greenfield and Yang similarly supplement their insider, relativistic epistemology by advocating outsider insights, a general psychological theory, general objectivity, universal epistemology, and community of scientists. Greenfield asserts that "out of a multiplicity of insider perspectives, an overarching theoretical perspective can be developed that is broad enough to encompass all…Each indigenous psychology can be a building block of a truly universal theory of psychology" (Greenfield, 2000, pp. 233-234). Yang (2000, p. 246) similarly says: The primary goal of indigenous approaches is to construct a specific indigenous psychology for each society with a given population of a distinctive culture. After that, the specific knowledge system and its various research findings may be used to develop the indigenous psychologies of progressively larger populations defined in terms of regional, national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, or geographical considerations. Finally,

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Carl Ratner the highest indigenous psychology, a universal, or more properly global, psychology for all human beings on earth will be formed by integrating, lower-level indigenous psychologies.

These attempts to broaden indigenous psychology by incorporating a wide variety of theories and methodologies do not solve problems. Most often, the supplemental provisos contradict the basis tenets of indigenous psychology and leave it incoherent, ambiguous, and indistinguishable from other approaches. The pairs of propositions in Yang's list are contradictory. Either the researcher does affect phenomena or does not. It is impossible to affect and not affect them. To endorse both is nonsense. The natural science view of culture and psychology is also diametrically opposed to the human sciences model. Yang never explains how the two can and should be integrated.13 None of the authors who advocates integrating insider and outsider perspectives explains how to accomplish this. They do not explain how distorted, repressive views of sex that are espoused by indigenous religious institutions such as the Catholic Church, Islam, and Hinduism (and which are politically motivated to serve a particular social-religious system of domination, mystification, and property relations) could be integrated with other indigenous views of sex from hunters and gathers, or contemporary Dutch adolescents to form a general theory of sex. How can Kim and Park's (2006), and Kim's (2000, p. 284) conclusion that guilt plays a positive psychological role in Korean children -- promoting family harmony and academic achievement -- be reconciled with the Western view of guilt, as a negative emotion that leads to psychological problems, in a universal psychological theory? How can the

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13

Hwang (2006) attempted to use positivist methodology to add scientific legitimacy to indigenous psychology. He sought to empirically test whether Taiwanese subjects believed in the Confucian notion of saving face. This notion stipulates that close social others will share in one's own having or losing face more than others who are socially distant will. Hwang asked college students to read scenarios in which the agent committed a positive act. The subjects rated the emotional intensity of happiness that they would expect parents, friends, neighbors, and strangers to experience after hearing about a positive act that the student had committed. Hwang construed the agent's positive act as the operational definition of "having face." Moreover, he construed the subjects' hypothetical rating of happiness that others might feel as defining the extent to which they shared in the agent's having face. Both measures fail to achieve their objectives. Simply committing a positive act is not equivalent to having face. An act is far to simple and superficial to represent a complex cultural-psychological phenomenon. Furthermore, a hypothetical rating of others' happiness is also uninformative about whether they shared the agent's "face." The whole point of indigenous psychology is to elucidate the culturally specific quality of a psychological phenomenon. If having face is an indigenous psychological fact, then its subtle, complex, culturally specific quality must be investigated. We have to investigate the phenomenological experience of people who commit a positive act so it can be compared to the designation of "face" in Confucian texts. We also have to investigate the actual, not hypothetical, emotions, perceptions, self-concept of others to ascertain whether they shared the same, complex, subtle culturally specific psychology of having face that the agent had. Hwang abdicated these important tasks by employing facile, simplistic, superficial quantitative operational definitions of "face." These errors undermine all psychological research that employs positivistic measures, scaling, and analyses (cf., Ratner, 1997, 2002, 2006a, pp. 148-162; 2007a, c; Ratner & Hui, 2003). They undermine Kuo-Shu Yang’s (Yang, 2006; Kim, et al., 2006, chap. 13) championing of indigenous psychology. Instead of identifying theoretical and methodological weaknesses and abandoning them, eclecticism retains and blurs them in the naïve quest to be open minded, democratic, and inclusive.

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different views of intelligence in Korea and the West (acquired through study vs. innate) be integrated into a universal psychological theory? What perspective could be relied on to enact this integration? Moreover, what would a general psychological theory look like? And how could local observers from their different contexts agree on general validity? Wishful pluralistic statements that welcome contradictory positions do not advance the science of cultural psychology. Such advance requires developing logical concepts that can generate a coherent direction or paradigm. The failure of eclecticism is evident in Kim and Parker's vacillations between insider and outsider perspectives. The authors first state that most people do not possess the analytical skills to explain their intuitive beliefs (Kim, et al., 2006,., p. 34). Consequently, "The second step involves developing theories and concepts that could explain the observed regularities" (ibid., p. 43). The authors never articulate principles for accomplishing this. Even worse, the authors contradict the goal (or need) for professional theories by decrying that "experts and psychologists have imposed their views on the lay public" (ibid., p. 43). Well then who is to develop the universal, scientific theories that explain people's beliefs? The local people don't possess the skills, and the experts are biased. The authors propose to solve this conundrum by combining the insider and outsider perspective (Kim, et al., 2006, pp. 33-34). Subjects should be allowed to interpret and evaluate the results (ibid., p. 45). But these are the same subjects who lack the analytical skills to understand their own beliefs. So how can they be trusted to correct expert bias? Moreover, how can the two perspectives be integrated? What if the insider perspective is that intelligence is inherited, while a scientific analysis is that intelligence is socially stimulated and organized? What do we do with these two views? Since both the insider and outsider perspectives are flawed, combining them eclectically compounds the flaws in the resulting synthesis. They do not compensate or cancel each other's errors. Eclecticism is intellectually careless, lazy, timid, unprincipled, and irresponsible because it clings to flawed positions and refuses to develop a coherent new position. Kim, et al (2006, pp. 7, 6) are guilty of this in their statement about methodology: "indigenous psychology advocates the use of various methodologies," it "does not affirm or preclude the use of a particular method.." The authors thereby welcome the most defective elements of all methodologies into indigenous psychology (cf. Ratner, 1997, 2002, 2006a, Ratner and Hui, 2003). An eclectic combination is incoherent, illogical, unprincipled, useless, and unstable -like those artificially created subatomic combinations that decompose after a few nanoseconds. To utilize one of the incongruous elements is to contradict and invalidate the others. Eclecticism destroys IP3 as a viable, coherent, distinct theory and methodology. If indigenous psychology emphasizes the universality of psychological aspects, how does it differ from cross-cultural psychology? If it emphasizes socially constructed meanings, how does it differ from cultural psychology? After twisting and turning to accommodate everyone and everything, indigenous psychologists cannot justify their own existence. Eclectically combining existing approaches disqualifies indigenous psychology as a psychological approach or discipline. It impedes improving psychological theories and

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methodologies, because improvement is deemed to consist of merely combining existing approaches. No further advances are necessary.

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Chapter XII

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Scientific Cultural-Psychological Theory and Methodology The conundrums of indigenous psychology enable us to articulate the principles of a scientific cultural-psychological theory and methodology. The main task is to replace epistemological relativism and the insider perspective with a general, objective cultural psychological theory and methodology that systematically elucidate the macro cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychology. We do not achieve a proper theory and methodology by adding indigenous accounts together, or eclectically combining them with general theories. This false deference to indigenous peoples’ self-understanding cannot generate a useful, valid scientific theory and methodology – which is the real way to enhance their psychological and social lives. Say we wish to study the educational psychology of lower class, adolescent Romanian girls. We would use cultural psychological theory to frame the research topic as the culturally organized motives, emotions, perceptions, cognitive processes that these subjects utilize in their educational activities. This would be tentatively conceptualized as figure four, above – with the understanding that empirical evidence would lead to changes in the figure. The research would explore whether this IP1 (the educational psychology of lower class Romanian girls) was affected by cultural determinations such as the physical infrastructure of the school, the manner in which families support (or fail to support) education for girls, the marriage prospects and job prospects of educated girls, peer support for serious pursuit of education, anti-intellectual content of the media, distractions caused by consumerism. We would study the formation (acculturation) of the subjects’ educational psychology in this cultural context. We would conduct open ended interviews to ascertain unexpected cultural influences on this psychology. The cultural psychologist enters the research with a definite perspective and objective. Research is guided by the cultural theory of human psychology outlined in the first section. The point is to search for the macro cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena. This presupposes a sophisticated understanding of the cultural factors involved. The study may be an open ended investigation to explore cultural aspects of a psychological phenomenon. Or it may involve specific hypotheses concerning the role particular factors play in psychology. In either case, the research is informed by cultural psychological theory. It is not a suppositionless groping for a topic delimited by the subjects.

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Cultural psychology is a general scientific perspective that has been worked out over the past 150 years in numerous countries (notably Germany, Russia, and the United States). It is not an insider perspective. As we have discussed, most culture bearers are not aware of cultural origins, characteristics, or functions of their psychology. Consequently, studying these topics must be guided by a general psychological theory, not an indigenous perspective. We shall see that a general, external, cultural-psychological theory ironically leads to more clearly illuminating indigenous cultural aspects of a people’s psychology than their own indigenous concepts do! Of course, cultural psychological research may select a topic that is of interest to an ethnic group. However, we will study the topic from our theoretical perspective. We will not study it as local people would, using their concepts. We shift from elementary (lay) understanding to scientific, cultural-hermeneutical forms of understanding, and from Geschafte to Geschichte, as Dilthey argued. We may also research a topic for its potential to deepen our theory. We may wish to understand the cultural psychology of emotions to round out our cultural account of human psychology. This requires experimental research of the kind conducted by Schachter, Ekman, and others. The subjects’ psychological processes are independent of the researcher. The researcher did not create the educational psychology of Romanian girls, and has no significant affect on it -- certainly none compared to the systematic affect that Romanian cultural institutions, concepts, and artifacts have. The researcher's task is to comprehend what it is actually like. She seeks to approximate the subjects' psychological reality in her scientific descriptions and explanations. She seeks to form her understanding in a way that approximates or represents the girls' psychological reality. Of course, accomplishing this involves sensitive and reflective activity on her part. She must be aware of her values and how they guide her research. But her activity must be geared to eliciting and analyzing her subjects' real, definite, objective psychology. This is the highest form of respect for them and their culture. It is also the best way to help them enhance their psychological and social well-being. Any self-understanding the researcher gains about her own values is tangential to the primary task of respectfully comprehending her subjects. The investigation would employ objective methodology that elicits complete information from subjects, compares responses of many individuals, compares statements with observations. This research would look for natural experimental conditions -- where girls of the same background were randomly placed in a different condition that would isolate the effect of this condition on their educational psychology. It would additionally employ sophisticated qualitative procedures to identify properties of cultural factors in psychological phenomena. It would also assess the veracity of indigenous self-understanding of their psychology (IP2s) as revealed in interviews, novels, advice manuals written for educators and parents (Ratner, 2002). The cultural psychological approach to comprehending the Romanian girls' educational psychology is analogous to a doctor's scientific approach to disease. The doctor listens carefully to the patient's verbal complaints, and treats them as sources for his hypotheses about medical issues that he investigates based upon medical theory and methodology. The doctor does not simply accept the patient's self-diagnosis (self-understanding). Indeed, accepting it may prove fatal to the patient, whereas contradicting it may save the patient's life. The best way to validate the patient is by objectively diagnosing and treating her problem

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from an outsider, scientific perspective, not by endorsing her self-diagnosis. Similarly, the best way to validate poor Romanian girls is to objectively investigate and diagnose their educational psychology, and propose ways of enhancing it -- by altering the cultural factors that organize it. Validating their self-understanding is generally harmful because it typically endorses mystifications and ignorance that pervade IP2s. The points raised by this example are amplified and explained by the philosophy of science known a critical realism.

The Critical Realist Philosophy of Science of Cultural Psychology

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Critical realism has been articulated by Bhaskar, Bunge, David Campbell, and others. The specific principles of a critical realist scientific cultural psychology are the following (adapted from Niiniluoto, 1999, pp. 2, 10, 211; cf. also Ratner, 1997; Ratner, 2006a, Epilogue): 1. The cultural origins, characteristics, and function of a people's psychology comprise a real object (subject matter) of definite properties that exists at least partly independently of the researcher. This is known as ontological realism (cf. Searle, 2006). 2. The researcher's objective is to faithfully apprehend this cultural-psychological reality. The researcher's concepts must correspond to this independent reality. This is known as epistemological realism. The true nature (origins, characteristics, and function) of psychology's cultural organization is not easily accessible. Nevertheless, it is possible to approach the truth (approximate the exact state and description of reality), and to rationally assess such cognitive progress. Einstein expressed this point emphatically: In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system... Can we ever hope to find the right way? Nay, more, has this right way any existence outside our illusions? ... I answer without hesitation that there is, in my opinion, a right way and that we are capable of finding it (Einstein, 1954, pp. 226, 274, emphasis added).

3. Scientific descriptions and explanations must strive to apprehend reality as truthfully and completely as possible. This is known as semantic realism. 4. A true description of cultural psychological reality requires active discovery by the researcher. The researcher's activity/agency must be directed at discovering the objective cultural psychological reality of his subjects that is independent of him.

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Carl Ratner There is a gap between the observer and the observed, and that the observer must marshal active and creative effort to overcome the gap and comprehend the observed phenomenon. This is known as methodological realism. Critical realism is a novel synthesis of subjectivism/idealism and naïve realism. The former emphasizes the subjectivity of observer that can never comprehend a world beyond itself. Naïve realism argues that the observer automatically comprehends the observed because sense perception reflects the world. Critical realism denies the extreme forms of both. It synthesizes them by changing them into new forms: subjectivity can actively come to apprehend objectivity, through struggle, not automatically. Ontological, epistemological, semantic, and methodological realism require each other. Denying any one of them undermines all the others. For instance, denying semantic realism -- by severing discourse from knowledge about reality, and claiming that contradictory statements about psychology are equally true and useful - implies that there is no ontological (cultural-psychological) reality that needs to be reflected in discourse. If ontological reality exists and affects us, then it would be foolhardy and dangerous to ignore it in our discourse. 5. The single, definite nature of reality acts as a universalizing objective for all scientists. They are all geared toward explaining and describing the same target in the most accurate and complete terms. Attaining this common objective requires that scientists practice a common set of cognitive processes and methods. A given reality unifies the theory, epistemology, mentality, and methodology of all those who would comprehend it. It renders possible a true community of scientists. I call this: theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and semantic universalism. A plurality of contradictory theories, methodologies, and epistemologies cannot exist for an extended time, because they cannot all explain and describe the single reality or the cultural organization of psychology equally well. Freudian notions of the Oedipus complex cannot co-exist with macro cultural psychological notions to equally explain the cultural origins, characteristics, and function of lower class, Romanian girls' educational psychology. Whatever theory best explains a particular psychological phenomenon, or psychological phenomena in general, is the one that must be universally adopted at a given time until a superior theory is advanced. This means that objectivity and truthfulness should not be equated with diverse opinions. On the contrary, objectivity and truth are expressed in a single account that best reflects the definite reality. Multiple perspectives may produce an outpouring of novel ideas that are then culled to discover the best of the lot that best corresponds to the given reality. However, multiple perspectives in themselves do not constitute objectivity. One is not objective simply because one entertains a diversity of perspectives. On the contrary, a state of prolonged diversity and pluralism in theories, methodology, and conclusions represents uncertainty about the true nature of phenomena. It also precludes discovering the best representation/approximation of the single reality that confronts us. Historical objectivity, for example, is defined by knowing that white colonists exterminated most of the native Indian population. If one balances this idea with the belief that extermination did not occur, one has lost

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objectivity and truth. Similarly, objectivity is the fact that automobile manufacturers contribute to global warming by resisting ecological-friendly improvements in cars (e.g., mileage standards). If someone tries to balance this fact by claiming that automobile manufacturers do not contribute to global warming, their balance has destroyed objectivity. Diversity and pluralism in science need to be superceded, not perpetuated. Of course, they reappear whenever established theories, methodologies, and conclusions are falsified and need refinement. But no sooner do they reappear, then they are again superceded by more valid, agreed-upon constructs. 6. The ontological relativism (culturally variability) of cultural psychological phenomena is compatible with ontological, epistemological, semantic, and methodological realism. Particular cultural-psychological phenomena -- e.g, the educational psychology of lower class Romanian adolescent girls – are real, and they are amenable to realistic, objective, comprehension and description. The fact that something is culturally variable does not preclude it from being real and objectively knowable. Ontological relativism is also compatible with epistemological, semantic, and methodological universalism. The culturally organized (bound, relative) educational psychology of lower class Romanian girls is amenable to discovery by a common methodology, epistemology, and description by multiple researchers from a diversity of backgrounds. Of course, this common epistemology and methodology must be constructed. It must overcome the culturally variable/relative cognitions of researchers in diverse cultures. Universal epistemology, methodology, and description are the sine qua non of intersubjective agreement which is the criterion of objective scientific research. Any and all scientists must be able to produce congruent accounts of the given real subject matter that they all confront. Since all cognition and epistemology are culturally organized, a scientific culture must be created that transcends local cultures which obscure cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychology, and that fosters a culturally sensitive theory and methodology which objectively comprehends the local cultural originals, characteristics, and function of psychological phenomena. Just as any doctor from any country must describe the single nature of your disease – you would not happily accept different “perspectives” about your emphysema from a Libyrian physician diagnosing it as cancer, and a Malaysian physician diagnosing it as a cold – so any social scientist must describe and explain the given reality of your culturally-mediated emotional state after you fight with your spouse – you would not happily accept different perspectives about your disappointment from psychologists who diagnosed you as happy, hateful, or vindictive.

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Chapter XIII

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A Realistic, Universal, General CulturalPsychological Theory and Methodology A universal, realist, general cultural-psychology does not presume that the content of psychological phenomena is etic, or universal. Cultural psychology does not develop general theories or conclusions about particular emotions (e.g., romantic love), self-concept, reasoning (e.g., syllogistic reasoning), forms of memory (e.g., free recall), motivation, mental illness, or socialization -- which cross-cultural psychologists look for. It develops principles and methodology that explain why and how psychological phenomena have cultural origins, characteristics, and function.14 This general theory and methodology – that psychological phenomena have macro cultural origins, characteristics, and functions -- directs attention to the particular cultural origins, characteristics, and function that psychological phenomena have in particular societies. Paradoxically, the general theory and methodology encourage researchers to develop culturally specific/relative theories and methods about the culturally concrete form and content of psychology in their societies. The general theory and methodology elicit culturally indigenous meanings that are empirically collected according to general scientific criteria (for representativeness, and completeness) and are analyzed and synthesized according to scientific logic. 14

In contrast, natural science laws contain specific processes. There are general biological laws of cell mitosis, bone growth which include (enumerate) specific essential processes and phenomena that always occur. Consequently, general/universal natural laws are far more specific than cultural-psychological laws are. The reason is that specific properties and processes of natural phenomena are universal, and can be included in general laws. However, in cultural-psychological phenomena, specific properties and processes are culturally variable, so they cannot be included in general laws. General laws are necessarily abstract. We may say that cultural-psychological phenomena are more affected by their conditions so they vary qualitatively with changes in conditions and have no definite character apart from conditions. As we saw in the section on cultural psychology, mechanisms and content of psychological phenomena are culturally variable. Natural phenomena have more stable qualitative features that are less affected by conditions. Their variations are largely quantitative, not qualitative. Thus, bones grow faster or slower, thicker or thinner, depending upon nutrition. However, the processes and important factors remain the same under conditions of good and poor nutrition. Consequently, their qualitatively constant features transcend conditions and can be included in general laws.

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Scientific cultural psychology directs attention to indigenous cultural influences on psychology. It enables us to be sensitive to culturally specific meanings of actions and statements. It leads to developing specific methods in local situations to investigate culturally organized psychology. This external, scientific cultural psychology should not be confused with the external, etic standpoint of positivism. Positivism flattens and simplifies cultural and psychological phenomena. It reduces them to standardized quantitative data that obfuscates and denies concrete cultural and psychological activity. Positivism should be repudiated because of the misguided theory and methodology it imposes. It should not be rejected because it is an external, etic perspective. For an external, etic perspective can highlight concrete cultural and psychological activity, as scientific cultural psychology does. Rejecting all external perspectives mistakenly emphasizes their externality rather than their content. This recapitulates the error we pointed out earlier: it rejects outsider perspectives regardless of content, and it accepts insider perspectives regardless of content. This simplistic, pernicious approach rejects useful external perspectives (such as macro cultural psychology), and it accepts invalid, debilitating internal perspectives. Mohanty, a leading Indian psycho-linguist, decries the absence of indigenous theories to explore, explain, and integrate the culturally specific features of Indian languages and their psychological corollaries. One feature is the flexible word ordering of Indian languages and the developmental priorities for using particular word orders, as well as factors that affect preference for certain word orders. Another indigenous social factor in Indian linguistic development is the normative, positive value on multilingualism, which contrasts with stigmatized second languages in some Western countries. Another indigenous aspect of Indian psycholinguistic development is the absence of gender differences in language acquisition. This contrasts with Western findings of clear feminine advantage. Mohanty argues that these indigenous linguistic phenomena are best explained by cultural factors. However, indigenous Indian theories do not emphasize cultural explanations of psychology – as we have discussed earlier. Consequently Western scientific cultural psychology is needed to research indigenous cultural influences on indigenous Indian language development. Sociocultural factors such as the degree of acceptance of pluralistic norms, dominant monolingual or multilingual nature of society, linguistic policy and planning, sociolinguistic conditions and social norms of language use, and other social psychological considerations set the communicative goals and functional priorities in all forms of communicative interaction. These priorities, in turn, influence the process of acquisition, language socialization, nature of bilingual or multilingual functioning of the individual, linguistic identities and preferences, etc. (Mohanty, 2003, pp. 87, 93; Mohanty, 2007).

This is the language of etic, cultural theory, not the language of Indian people's selfunderstanding. When cross-cultural psychologists postulate that psychological phenomena are qualitatively invariant and only vary quantitatively, and that specific psychological features and processes are universal -- e.g., basic emotions, personality types -- they are adopting the natural science model of laws.

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Once the cultural origins, characteristics, and function of a phenomenon have been scientifically elucidated in various societies they can be compared cross-culturally, as we discussed in conjunction with Jenkins’s study of schizophrenia in the section on crosscultural psychology. This will reveal if there are similarities in such things as the socialization of language, psychological effects of parental control, the effect of frustration on aggression, the effect of group size on conformity, the effect of language on color perception, and the carpentered ecology on perception of optical illusions.

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Chapter XIV

Scientific Cultural Psychology and Indigenous Psychology

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Indigenous psychology (IP3) agrees with the first 4 points of critical realist cultural psychology. It agrees that ontologically relative (culturally variable) psychological phenomena (IP1s) are ontologically real, can be objectively apprehended (epistemological realism) and described (semantic realism) through an active, objective methodology (methodological realism). However, indigenous psychologists generally argue that these four points can only be achieved by an insider perspective that is relative to the culture at hand. They contend that a culturally relative epistemology (possessed by cultural insiders) is necessary to apprehend the objective reality of culturally relative and specific psychological phenomena. Outsiders possess a different epistemology that is incapable of apprehending the culture-bound IP1.15 15

A minority of indigenous psychologists contend that the ontological relativity of IP1s means they are unreal, indefinite, ineffable, inexplicable, random, spontaneous, idiosyncratic (i.e., beyond the pale of general cultural psychological principles) and open to numerous, impressionistic, interpretations, descriptions, and explanations from diverse methodologies. This is the argument that ontological (cultural) relativism entails ontological and epistemological nihilism. Misra, an Indian indigenous psychologist, claims: "there is no objective reality there which psychologists have to map, and examine the accuracy of that mapping with the objective reality" (Misra, 2003, p. 66). Most indigenous psychologists are not nihilists. They believe that culturally relative IP1s are real and can be objectively known with the appropriate epistemology. They discriminate among epistemologies and privilege one over others. In fact, they endorse an exclusionary, divisive relativism which only accepts one epistemology -- the indigenous one -- as appropriate in a given culture, and segregates other viewpoints in other cultures. It is not an inclusive relativism that welcomes diverse epistemologies into a culture on an equal footing. Nihilists say that no epistemology can objectively apprehend IP1s. They indiscriminately accept all epistemologies and methodologies in all situations because there is no objective reality that would make any more useful than any other. Theories and methodologies are purely a matter of personal preference -"whatever works best for me." Ontological and epistemological nihilism (anti-realism) would render indigenous psychology useless because it could not tell us anything real. There is really nothing to talk about if reality does not exist. Whatever we say is mere verbiage that does not denote anything real. (Plato developed this argument in his dialogue Gorgias.) But then the theory, methodology, and conclusions of indigenous psychology lose all claim to being a superior (more accurate, objective, valid) description/explanation of peoples' psychology than any other approach, because there is no objective cultural-psychological reality that can be described in better or worse terms. Searle (2006, p. 113) put it well when he said, "The denial of External Realism, typically in the form of

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Carl Ratner In contrast, scientific cultural psychology contends:

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(1) Ontological relativism is compatible with ontological, epistemological, semantic, and methodological realism: The fact that psychology is socially constructed is consistent with the fact that it is real, definite, objective, and powerful -- just as the powers accorded to a president, a judge, a policeman, a CEO, or a landlord are real, definite, objective, powerful ones although they are humanly constructed and accepted (Searle, 2006). The fact that lower class, Romanian girls' educational psychology is culturally constructed and specific does not mean it is unreal, indefinite, ineffable, inexplicable, random, spontaneous, idiosyncratic (i.e., beyond the pale of general cultural psychological principles) and open to numerous, impressionistic, interpretations, descriptions, and explanations from diverse methodologies. (2) Ontological relativism is consistent with epistemological, semantic, and methodological universalism: A culturally specific psychological phenomenon (IP1) does not require a epistemology or methodology that is only available inside the culture. The researcher must certainly acquire knowledge about the phenomenon's particular content through understanding the culture. But this is far different from claiming that a culture-bound epistemology and methodology are necessary for comprehending the phenomenon. This point may be illustrated by a comparative example from biology. An ornithologist who visits a new ecology has to learn about different anatomies of birds that are specific to particular ecologies. But her way of comprehending them does not change. She uses a general theory about the factors that form bird anatomy, and she uses established research procedures, to understand the anatomy of these particular birds. In other words, she applies general theories and procedures to elucidate the distinctive properties of specific species. The specific content of this species' anatomy does not require a distinctive epistemology and methodology for comprehending it. The same is true for cultural-psychological phenomena. Their content is culturally specific and variable, but general theoretical principles, epistemological principles, and methodological principles help to identify culturally specific content. Outsiders can understand the subtle, complex cultural-psychological meanings of a foreign people. As Searle (2006, p. 119) succinctly said, "I can understand the beliefs people have without sharing them." Anthropologists routinely understand the emotions, thoughts, perceptions, reasoning processes, self-concept, mental illness, and motivation of people very different from themselves. Moreover, they convey their understanding to readers of their works who are even further removed from the indigenous culture. These second and third order understandings (removed from the first order of indigenous people themselves), are made possible by the human capacity to represent particular events and experiences in general (cultural) symbols that are understandable by other people who have not participated in the event of experience (cf. Burke and Ornstein, 1995, pp. 39-45 for idealism, I regard as the ultimate bad faith of philosophy…because it makes the world responsible to Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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a brilliant explanation of the cultural origins of this capacity to symbolically reproduce events and experiences, and many other psychological capacities). Symbolic language developed to enable people in different positions to communicate information that was not directly experienced (Ratner, 2006a). A hunter in one location could communicate in general symbols (words) to a hunter in another location what he had seen (e.g., a band of deer heading toward the second hill), so that the second hunter could gear his action toward this event he did not experience. Denying that one person can understand the experience of another is to deny social existence and communication (cf. Merton, 1972 for a decisive refutation of insider epistemology).

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3) Culturally embedded scientists can produce and utilize universal science: A general, scientific cultural psychology (theory and methodology) can be produced by culturally circumscribed individuals. Just as European male scientists initiated the exponential development of modern natural science, so culturally bounded scientists can transcend their indigenous culturally formed elementary thinking that overlooks culture, and form a comprehensive cultural psychological theory and methodology. This is similar to the scientific training that natural scientists undergo. Regardless of their cultural backgrounds and indigenous beliefs about physical phenomena, they all learn the scientific vocabulary of their discipline (atoms, molecules, genes, germs, cells, gravity, thermodynamics, sound waves) that have proven to more accurately describe and explain their subject matter than their indigenous beliefs did. Since science is more objective and accurate than indigenous beliefs, scientists renounce the latter and adopt the universal conceptual system that best explains their subject matter. Exactly the same is true for cultural psychology. All cultural psychologists can and will come to agree on scientific cultural psychological concepts that explain the culturally organized psychology of people. Scientific cultural psychology transcends the culture (cultural psychology and relative epistemologies) of its practitioners just as natural science does. The social constructionist/indigenous psychology contention that all thought processes are restricted to the conditions of their birth is wrong. As Searle (2006, p. 115) says, "The mistake is to suppose that because all facts are stated from within a culture and a point of view, what Shweder calls 'an interpretive community,' that therefore the facts exists only relative to a culture, a point of view, an 'interpretive community'." But doesn't this account of scientific cultural psychology violate the very principles of cultural psychology? For it argues that the cultural psychologists develop universal, transcendent scientific concepts that are not formed by their indigenous cultures and are not relative to them. This critical question can be answered in the negative. Scientists form, and are influenced by, a culture of science with its proper conventions, social relations, data collection and analysis, replication, review, and publication norms, career trajectories. In this sense, they develop their own cultural psychology of scientific thinking (cf. Burke and Ornstein, 1995, pp. 160-161). This is compatible with the basic

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principle of cultural psychology that psychology is culturally formed. Scientific practice is thus not independent of culture. It is independent of indigenous cultures, but it is dependent upon a culture of science. 16

Scientific Cultural Psychology Incorporates Indigenous Concepts as Explanatory Constructs of Psychology

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Although indigenous psychological theories (IP2s) may falsify the actual character and origins of a people's psychology (because they attribute psychology to non-cultural factors), they nevertheless act as a social influence on people's psychology (IP1). Fallacious, mystifying beliefs such as reincarnation, damnation, voodoo, individualism, and natural cognitive inferiority truly organize perception, emotions, self-concept, mental illness, reasoning, motivation, memory, and needs. This can be seen in the case of needs in modern capitalist society. It is common to feel a need to buy consumer products in order to feel attractive, successful, and happy. Macro cultural psychology contends that this need has a complex cultural basis, character, and function. On the one hand, this need is culturally conditioned by the massive, ineluctable consumerism that pervades every nook and cranny of society. However, this need also has features and functions that are determined by the individualistic ideology of capitalism. This ideology portrays needs as personal constructs. Under this influence, people routinely proclaim "I wanted to do that," "It expresses me, my uniqueness." In addition, socialization agents such as marketers, television managers, and parents deny they have socialized this need. They insist that people develop their own needs. Socialization agents contend they 16

I would argue that being an independent culture is the sine qua non of science. To the extent that scientists succumb to religious, political, or economic pressure to tailor their theories, methods, and conclusions, they abdicate science. Of course, the topics that scientists choose to study are often proffered by social demands (for labor saving devices, medical care, defense). However, these demands must not intrude into scientific practice itself. We cannot have churches, corporate think tanks, government agencies, corporations, or political ideals directly dictating scientific theories, methodology, or conclusions. Otherwise, science would be the handmaiden of the strongest political current. (This notion of independent science was extended in early 19th century England, to the idea of an independent civil service that would be free of political pressure and left to draft governmental policies on the basis of scientific analyses of issues) Bourdieu worried that "The autonomy that science had gradually won against the religious, political, or even economic powers…has been greatly weakened…Submission to economic interests and to the seductions of the media threaten to combine with external critiques and internal denigration, most recently presented in 'postmodern' rantings, to undermine confidence in science and especially in social science" (Bourdieu, 2004, p. vii). The commercializing and politicizing of science goes hand in hand with the politicizing of civil service and the destruction of its objectivity. Any pressure from external sources to reconceptualize science itself -- e.g., to critique positivistic methodology, or nativistic or environmental psychological theories and conclusions -- must be considered from within the scientific culture in accordance with fundamental tenets of scientific thinking. Thus, political pressure to critique positivism on the grounds that it politically conservative or ethnocentric cannot directly lead to repudiating positivism. Rather, the political critique would be considered on scientific grounds to see whether positivism was scientifically deficient. Only then, would a new qualitative methodology be pursued that was scientifically superior in the sense of being more accurate and comprehensive than positivism (cf. Ratner, 1997).

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simply provide resources that can be accepted or rejected, but do not shape the needs or behavior. The macro cultural factor of individualist ideology works in tandem with consumerism to impart a complex social character to the need. Individualism is a macro cultural factor that overlays, obscures, and denies the cultural basis, character, and function of this need. Most people unwittingly use individualism as their mediational means for understanding their need to buy. People understand their need to be a personal expression – i.e., they want to purchase products because it makes them feel good, and expresses their uniqueness. Macro cultural psychology explains this need and people’s self-understanding (or IP2) of it in relation to capitalist macro cultural factors: •

•

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•

This IP2 misconstrues and mystifies the nature of the need to consume. The need arises from consumerist macro cultural factors, not personal, idiosyncratic desires. This self-understanding of needs does not accurately explain their origin, character, and function. Furthermore, this IP2 is not a cultural explanation of psychology. On the contrary, it precludes a cultural explanation of needs in terms of macro cultural factors. Both the need to consume and the IP2 of this need are products of capitalistic, individualistic ideology. People understand their need in personal terms, rather than as conditioned by consumerist macro cultural factors, because individualism represents psychology in personal terms. The false, individualistic understanding that people have about their need to consume nevertheless affects the content, socialization, and function of the need. o The socialization of the need (along with other psychological phenomena) by macro cultural factors is unconscious. Socialization takes place outside people's awareness because they have been led by their individualistic understanding of psychology (IP2) to overlook acculturation of psychological phenomena (cf. Ratner, 1994). Being unaware of the conditions means people are not in control of them. Their psychology/behavior is controlled by conditions outside of their awareness and direction. This means that their psychology is not rationally and voluntarily determined by the individuals. Yet Americans believe they are the most in control of their actions and are the freest to make decisions according to their own desires. Their IP2 is utterly invalid. In fact, it obviates freedom to control one’s social life because it obscures social life as an influence that can be controlled. The socialization of needs, and indeed all psychological phenomena, thus has a culturally specific character in capitalism that must be studied in depth. We must comprehend just how socialization occurs without people being aware of it. This is a different process from the socialization of needs, and all psychological phenomena, that is explicit in some societies. Different methodologies are necessary to investigate these two forms of psychological socialization. We cannot simply ask Americans how their psychology was socialized because they do not know. We could, however, ask this kind of direct question to people in other countries where psychological socialization is explicit.

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o The indigenous individualistic understanding of needs (IP2) leads to a distinctive mode of functioning. People resent social pressure to develop needs in a particular direction. Americans do not like to gear their needs toward community needs. We do not say, "The community needs me to do X, and I will develop my competency to achieve it." Instead, Americans place their needs ahead of the group's. They consider what they wish to do, and decide whether to join a group's project according to whether the latter is congruent with their needs. Of course, "their own needs" are culturally conditioned, reflect definite social pressure, and gear behavior to support certain norms. However, this is unconscious and involuntary. On the conscious level, Americans resist collective activities and adjusting their needs to social demands in the belief that they are acting as they choose and fulfilling their inner, personal needs. This is evident in the failure of most students to effectively work in groups on collective projects. Even when this instruction is given to students, they wind up dividing the project into separate parts that are completed by individuals on their own. The group project is really the sum of individual projects. Team sports have similarly been corrupted by the need for individual players to display their individual skills. Commentators routinely complain that teamwork in basketball has been superceded by individual displays of ability. The way to influence Americans' needs, therefore, is to do it surreptitiously by structuring conditions, images, infrastructure. Direct appeals will not work because they are interpreted as infringements on personal freedom. This comprehensive cultural analysis that goes beyond self-understanding, provides a comparative reference point that reveals the blindness of self-understanding. Confining cultural psychology to self-understanding (IP2) precludes a critical analysis of its shortcomings because no comparative point of reference is admitted that could impugn selfunderstanding. Consequently, glorifying IP2s does not really validate people. It consigns them to ignorance and oppression. An etic, scientific cultural psychological theory and methodology is necessary to truly understand indigenous psychology (IP1) and help people improve it.

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Chapter XV

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The Politics of Indigenous Psychology The hallmark of indigenous psychology is not simply emphasizing cultural differences in psychological phenomena (since cultural psychologists also emphasize this), but privileging cultural insiders as the only bearers of the epistemology that can describe and explain their psychological phenomena. This is what distinguishes indigenous psychology from cultural psychology. This glorifying of epistemological, semantic, and methodological relativism has political goals as well as scientific ones. These relativisms are deemed to be pivotal to national identity. They affirm a local people’s ownership of their culture; for they are the only ones who can understand it. There is a nationalistic pride to indigenous psychology (IP3). This emphasis on "national identity proposes that non-Western psychologists, aware of European and American domination in politics and science and the extent to which their work is ignored in the West, seek to establish an identity independent of Western ideas and dominance" (Gabrenya, Kung, Chen, 2006, p. 604). Indigenous psychology prides itself on giving an indigenous people a voice that foreign psychologies have suppressed. Indigenous psychology is "psychological knowledge that is native, that is not transplanted from another region, and that is designed for its people" (Kim, et al., 2006, p. 232, 112). Enriquez regarded indigenous psychology as "cultural revalidation" (ibid., p. 111). Indigenous psychology is essentially a nationalistic political critique of Western psychological theories and methodologies. It valorizes marginalized people's identity and agency by accepting their own psychological understanding. This political goal underlies many details of indigenous psychology. It underlies the acceptance of IP2s. It also underlies a tendency in indigenous psychology that eschews rigorous scientific theories and methodologies. This antipathy is glorified as avoiding ethnocentric imposition of preconceived theories on local people’s self understanding. Jettisoning theory and methodology is valuable because it enables “an exploration into cultural, social or psychological data without the chains of overriding theoretical frameworks borrowed from observations outside the focus of investigation” (Kim, et al., 2006, p. 111). This is why Greenfield and others embrace people’s “perspective” rather than an external, objective, scientific analysis. Reducing epistemology to perspective eliminates scientific authority that could override local self-understanding.

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Valorizing indigenous people also explains the reluctance to relate IP1 to broader issues that are not explicitly mentioned by the subjects themselves in IP2s. To do so would be an outsider perspective that transcends peoples' self-understanding. This implies that people are neither fully aware of, nor in control of, aspects of their psychology. A scientific analysis of psychology additionally reveals that subjectivity is not necessarily creative because it is stunted by oppression, exploitations, alienation, and commodification. To maintain the idealization that indigenous people are active agents who construct their society and psychology, indigenous psychologists minimize the idea that institutions, concepts, artifacts, politics, and power relations organize, or structure, psychology. Indigenous psychologists rarely mention the coercive power of social institutions, artifacts, concepts, and conditions. Equally foreign to indigenous psychology is an analysis of inequities in socioeconomic power and capital, and the way ruling classes control social life. Instead, macro factors are regarded as tools that ordinary people utilize for their own purposes. This is the sense of Kim and Park's statement that "culture represents the collective utilization of natural and human resources to achieve desired outcomes.” Social change is equally a matter of ordinary people simply deciding to set different goals and meanings: “Differences in culture can exist if people set different collective goals, utilize different methods and resources to realize the goal, and attach different meaning and values on them" (in Kim, et al., 2006, p. 34). No political movements are necessary to change social structures and vested interests that might resist the will of the people to make their own culture. Culture is construed as the voluntary and democratic product of people's freely chosen goals, meanings, and utilization of resources. Indigenous psychology "advocates a transactional model of human functioning that recognizes the importance of agency, meaning, intention, and goals. It recognizes that human psychology is complex, dynamic, and generative" (Kim, et al., 2006, p. 34). Social class, injustice, power, exploitation, politics, policies, conflict, and obdurate institutions, conditions, and administrations are minimized in this interpersonal view of culture. (Indigenous psychology shares much of the politics, subjectivism, and anti-science of postmodernism. Cf. Niiniluoto, 1999, pp. 209-212, 243; Ratner, 2002, chap. 2; Ratner, 2006a, Epilogue; Ratner 2006b; Ratner, 2008). The political agenda of indigenous psychology leads to depoliticizing and de-culturing culture and cultural psychological phenomena (Bourdieu, 2005, pp. 148-149,193-232). But this is only an appearance. Psychology and culture only appear to be free from politics; indigenous, marginalized people only appear to control their social and psychological activities. The cultural basis and organization of psychology is only obfuscated, it is not eliminated. In undemocratic societies that are controlled by ruling elites -- which most societies since Neolithic times have been (the professed democracy of contemporary governments notwithstanding) -- culture and the cultural organization of psychology do not express the people's interests or creativity. They reflect the ruling class's domination of society. The understanding which people have about their psychology is not their "own" understanding. It is not originated by them, it was shaped by social leaders to advance their self interests (cf. Amadae, 2004, Cook. 2004; Jacobson, 2004, Solovey, 2001, 2004 for institutional origins of individualism and other pervasive ideologies).

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American parents' understanding of their children’s psychological problems is not a quaint, collectively decided understanding. When parents explain their children's problems as "hyperactivity," they are parroting the language of pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists who invented this notion to serve their own commercial and professional interests. Similarly, Catholics' understanding of sex (sex education, birth control, sexual pleasure and practice) has been designed and administered by church leaders in order to mystify the people, and make them dependent on and subservient to the leaders. It is not the believers' own, spontaneous, self-understanding. To glorify indigenous views of psychology as a people's self-generated understanding, and to exempt it from criticism on the grounds that criticism would violate their "own" culture and impose a foreign, imperialistic mentality, ignores the fact that the indigenous understanding of psychology is an imposed, oppressive, mystified view promulgated by the ruling class. Accepting it as one’s own perpetuates these debilitating features of it. Oppressive, mystified views of psychology are not only caused by outsider unfamiliarity with a culture. They are also caused by mystifying indigenous influences. Because of these, indigenous people may be as, or more, unfamiliar with their culture and psychology than outsiders are.

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Identity Politics Freeing oneself from external definition, and claiming one’s right to self-definition is identity politics. It attempts to reverse imperialist denigration of a group by simply valorizing the group. “Black pride,” “sisterhood,” “gay pride” exemplify identity politics. Characteristic behaviors of the group that were denigrated are now glorified. The emotionality of women and homosexual men is glorified as enabling more intimate relationships. Valorizing the group’s self-definition includes exalting its self-knowledge. Outsiders are impugned for claiming to understand the group. Identity politics fails because it substitutes a patriotic identification with one's group for a critical political analysis of it (Marx's essay On The Jewish Question is an incisive critique of identity politics). The different political orientation of emphasizing identity versus emphasizing class is diagrammed in figure nine. It depicts three kinds of identity transected by three classes (just for the sake of illustration). Identity politics emphasizes the vertical axes. Each group identifies with its own members. Class is subsumed within identity. Being a woman, for example, is more salient than the class of the woman. All women have something in common, according to identity politics. As the saying goes, “Sisterhood is powerful.” Feminists such as Judith Butler claim that women as a group are oppressed, and that therefore women have insights into the workings of society that men do not. It does not matter if a woman is a queen or homeless. “Woman” is the identity that is salient for all of them in common. The same is true for sexual orientation and ethnicity.

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Ethnicity

Sexual Orientation

Gender

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Upper Class Upper Class

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Middle Class Middle Class

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Working Class Working Class

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Figure 9. Class vs. Identity.

A class analysis emphasizes the horizontal axes. Working class women, men, gays, and blacks are oppressed by upper class members. As a result they all have a common fate. Identity is subordinate to class. Working class women have a deeper unity with working class men than they do with upper class women. Of course ethnic differences transverse working class solidarity and must be resolved to enhance it. However, a class analysis unifies diverse identities within their common class (horizontal axes). It integrates blacks, gays, women, men, heterosexuals, Hispanics together in a working class movement, for example. All will become committed to opposing dominance from the upper class after realizing that their diverse oppressions are ultimately fomented by the dominance of the upper class. Identity politics, separates identities from each other. Each identities with members of its own identity in opposition to other identities (vertical axes). Women seek liberation from men, blacks from whites, gays from heterosexuals. Each explains its problems as springing from the characteristics of other groups – e.g., masculinity, homophobia, racism. Problems are not explained in terms of class because identity transcends class. From a class perspective, this is fatal because it prevents working class blacks from rejecting upper class black domination of themselves. It also prevents them from solidifying with lower class whites who could become their allies in a common struggle against class exploitation. Identity politics pits workers against workers. (This is why social leaders use it. White leaders appeal to white identity by stirring fears of illegal immigration and ethnic crime. Black leaders appeal to black “pride.” Women leaders appeal to sisterhood. This helps leaders get elected to office, and keep control of socio-economic institutions, while the working class members get nothing).

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Identity politics is reflected in indigenous psychology which glorifies an indigenous culture in opposition to a foreign culture (e.g., the West), and neglects mystification and exploitation within the local society. In one sense, IP3 is an apolitical, non-cultural view of psychology. However, in another sense, indigenous psychology is very political. It obscures the real political basis, character, and function of psychology; this exempts it from criticism and change. It enables it to persist unknown and unchallenged. Depoliticizing psychology prevents social reform and liberation. Indigenous psychology is thus a political ideology whose apolitical stance masks a conservative political function. The conservative, flawed political agenda of indigenous psychology generates the errors in conceptualizing culture as interpersonally negotiated, and in uncritically accepting selfunderstanding as the analytical tools of indigenous psychology. As we discussed in the section on cross-cultural psychology, flawed political concepts undermine social science theories that entail similar concepts about culture, the individual, and psychology. In contrast, scientific cultural psychology analyzes the cultural-political origins, characteristics, and function of psychological phenomena from an independent, scientific standpoint. This independent standpoint frees scientific cultural psychology from any obligation to legitimize (explicitly or implicitly) any particular social system or social group. It can identify the psychological problems of a people that result from debilitating cultural factors, it can critique their self-destructive, misguided, politically conservative behavior, and it can propose objective, realistic social reforms that require difficult but fulfilling changes in social behavior and psychological functioning. For instance, scientific cultural psychology exposes the political nature of the Hindu indigenous explanation of misfortune as due to ignorance or bad karma that was generated by bad deeds in a prior life. This IP2 obscures the real source of misfortune that is an exploitive, unequal social system that enriches the ruling class. Scientific cultural psychology also identifies the changes that must be made in macro cultural factors that will improve the educational psychology of Romanian lower class girls. These include reforms in the school infrastructure, employment opportunities, class structure, cultural concepts concerning the value of education for girls, peer and family support for education, as well as media programs and consumerism. Rather than the external, Western, scientific standpoint being an imperialistic, ethnocentric, oppressive etic, it is an indispensable aid to overthrowing oppressive, mystifying indigenous cultural conditions that restrict people's psychological functioning. Independent, objective, scientific cultural psychology validates people much more profoundly and effectively than indigenous psychology does through uncritically glorifying subjective self-understanding. Cultural psychological research is liberating through amassing scientific conclusions that lead to social reform beyond the research process. Liberation is not achieved within the research process itself by giving voice to a handful of individuals who participate in it. The notion that research should directly and immediately validate the subjectivity of subjects and researchers who participate in it distracts from reforming macro cultural factors which is the highest form of human validation.

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Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index

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A academics, 34, 35 access, 10, 27 acculturation, 75, 89 accuracy, 40, 85 achievement, 2, 72, 98 activation, 100 adaptation, 2, 3, 18 administrators, 3, 13, 30 adolescence, 23, 27, 41 adolescents, 23, 72 adulthood, 23 adults, 7, 29 advertisements, 14, 19 advertising, 18 Afghanistan, 37 agent, 21, 72 aggression, 28, 29, 65, 83 aggressive behavior, 63 Algeria, 38 alienation, 15, 70, 92 alternative(s), 4, 8, 54 American Indian, 15 American Psychological Association, 100 anatomy, 86 anger, 7, 47 animals, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 18 anorexia, 41, 63 anthropology, 9, 32, 57 anxiety, 7, 20, 48, 99 apathy, 28 argument, 2, 6, 7, 85 Aristotle, 18 arithmetic, 20

armed conflict, 13 arousal, 7 Asia, 37 assessment, 99 assimilation, 5 assumptions, viii, 32, 33, 43, 58, 66 athletes, 22 atoms, 87 attachment, 37, 63, 65 attacks, 8, 44 attention, 9, 27, 28, 38, 81, 82 attitudes, 23 authority, 8, 39, 91 autism, 35 autonomy, 29, 88 availability, 13, 27 awareness, 89

B banks, 4 bargaining, 38 basketball, 90 behavior, vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 29, 31, 33, 36, 40, 47, 48, 50, 54, 58, 61, 63, 67, 68, 71, 89, 90, 95, 102 behavioral manifestations, 33 Beijing, 100 Belgium, 33 belief systems, 68, 69 beliefs, 32, 37, 44, 69, 73, 86, 87, 88 benefits, 12, 13 bias, 44, 73 bile, 63 bilingualism, 54, 55, 56, 99

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index

104 biological systems, 5 birds, 86 birth, 87, 93 birth control, 93 black hole, 42 blindness, 90 blood pressure, 7, 20 body weight, 8 bonds, 33 bone growth, 81 boys, 3 brain, 5, 20, 100 brain development, 5 breathing, 7 Britain, 10 bureaucracy, 22

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C California, 50, 99 Canada, 39 cancer, 35, 79 capitalism, 11, 12, 14, 15, 32, 34, 38, 64, 65, 88, 89, 101 categorization, 40 category b, 20 Catholic Church, 72 Catholics, 93 cell, 5, 12, 81 Central Asia, 37 Chicago, 44, 97 childhood, 23, 63 childrearing, 68 children, 11, 19, 22, 23, 29, 30, 37, 54, 55, 68, 69, 72, 93 chimpanzee, 4, 5 China, 8, 33, 38, 70, 98, 100 Chinese, 8, 15, 33, 38, 39, 57, 69 Christianity, 37, 64, 65 citizenship, 24 civil service, 88 classes, 13, 92, 93 classroom, 30, 58 coattails, 101 codes, 3 coding, 54 coercion, 70 cognition, 1, 3, 7, 8, 30, 38, 41, 54, 79 cognitive activity, 53 cognitive development, 68

cognitive flexibility, 54 cognitive function, 5 cognitive performance, 53 cognitive process, 29, 61, 75, 78 cold war, 97 collectivism, 15, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 50, 51, 53, 57, 101 college students, 72 Columbia University, 98 commerce, 28, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 57, 58 commodity, 24, 32, 38, 41 communication, 4, 5, 9, 21, 32, 36, 43, 87 Communist Party, 15, 69 community, 15, 24, 71, 78, 87, 90 compatibility, 67 compensation, 2 competence, 6, 8, 13, 21, 57 competency, 90 competition, 15 complexity, 7, 8, 40, 54 components, 3, 39 compounds, 58, 73 comprehension, 65, 79 concentration, 19 conception, 8, 11, 21, 32, 41, 43, 53, 54 conceptualization, 22, 33, 35, 42, 65 concrete, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 69, 81, 82 concreteness, 36, 39, 43, 53 confidence, 18, 24, 88 conflict, 13, 39, 92 conformity, 31, 65, 83 Confucianism, 15 confusion, vii connectivity, 5 consciousness, 4, 5, 7, 18, 19, 53, 69 consensus, 38 conservation, 2, 22 construction, 4, 47 consumer goods, 24 consumers, 19 consumption, 24, 101 continuity, 7 control, 6, 12, 13, 18, 22, 24, 29, 31, 36, 37, 40, 65, 70, 83, 89, 92, 93, 94 corporations, 88 correlation(s), 25, 41, 42 corruption, 13 cortex, 20

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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Index cortical localization, 8 couples, 98 creative process, 4 creativity, 4, 92 crime, 31, 33, 94 critical analysis, 57, 90 criticism, 39, 47, 48, 93, 94 cross-cultural comparison, 52 cross-cultural psychology, iv, vii, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 58, 64, 65, 67, 71, 73, 83, 95, 98, 100, 101 Cuba, 31 cues, 7 cultural beliefs, 69 cultural character, vii, 10, 27, 29, 56, 68 cultural differences, 8, 57, 91 cultural factors, vii, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 54, 55, 57, 58, 69, 70, 75, 76, 77, 82, 88, 89, 95 cultural influence, 8, 69, 70, 75, 82 cultural norms, 36 cultural perspective, 30, 97 cultural practices, 2, 9, 13, 30, 58, 69 cultural psychology, vii, 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 34, 43, 44, 45, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 76, 77, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 98, 99 Cultural Revolution, 33 cultural values, 22 cultural-historical psychology, 6, 100 culture, vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 53, 54, 57, 58, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 customers, 13

D Darwinism, 6 data collection, 87 death, 22 decentralization, 37 decisions, 5, 89 deduction, 42 defects, 8 defense, 88 deficit, 2 definition, 1, 15, 32, 33, 51, 64, 72, 93

105

degradation, 34 delusion(s), 49, 51 demand, 6, 14, 67 democracy, 24, 28, 34, 92, 97 denial, 8, 85 dependent variable, 43, 71 deprivation, 2 desire(s), 14, 32, 33, 34, 70, 89 destruction, 88 developmental process, 1, 9, 61 developmental psychology, 97 devolution, 42 diffusion, 34 disappointment, 79 discipline, 1, 8, 9, 28, 29, 42, 57, 61, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 87 discontinuity, 100 discourse, 12, 78, 100 discreteness, 32 discrimination, 8 diversity, 44, 58, 78, 79 division of labor, 5 dominance, 91, 94 draft, 88 dream, 23

E earth, 72 eating, 2, 3, 50, 63 eating disorders, 2 ecology, 5, 38, 83, 86 economic institutions, 29, 94 economics, 12, 32, 98 education, 11, 12, 13, 27, 29, 33, 35, 55, 57, 75, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101 educational policies, 54 educational psychology, 27, 75, 76, 78, 79, 86, 95 educational system, 55 educators, 28, 76 Einstein, 77, 98 elaboration, 23 elementary school, 54, 55 emotion(s), 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 40, 47, 48, 49, 52, 58, 61, 63, 66, 72, 75, 76, 81, 82, 86, 88, 98 emotional state, 79 emotionality, 19, 21, 34, 49, 93 empathy, 5 emphysema, 79

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index

106 employees, 19 employment, 95 enculturation, 1, 19, 43 energy, 2 England, 24, 47, 51, 52, 88 Enlightenment, 64 environment, 3, 5, 6, 7, 23, 41 environmentalism, 6 epistemological relativism, 66, 67, 69, 75 epistemology, 11, 43, 67, 71, 78, 79, 85, 86, 87, 91, 98 equality, 8, 14, 30 equipment, 22 ethnic groups, 27 ethnicity, 93 ethnocentrism, 35, 69 etiquette, 13 Euro, 23 Europe, 37 evidence, 10, 35, 75 evolution, 6, 7, 8, 42 experimental condition, 76 exploitation, 92, 94 expressivity, 49

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F facial expression, 20 failure, 30, 73, 90 faith, 38, 68, 86 family, 11, 23, 30, 33, 36, 38, 48, 72, 95 family life, 33 family structure, 48 family support, 30, 95 family structure, 48 fatalism, 22, 23 fear(s), 7, 18, 29, 48, 94 feelings, 20, 68, 70 femininity, 14 Filipino, 70 flexibility, 54 floating, 63, 68 fMRI, 98 folklore, 5 food, 2, 48, 68 forgetting, 54 free recall, 9, 41, 81 freedom, 13, 14, 89, 90, 101 friendship, 18 frustration, 47, 65, 83

fulfillment, 4, 10, 13, 24, 57

G gender, 2, 30, 82 gender differences, 82 gender equality, 30 gene(s), 3, 5, 32, 38, 87 generalization, 51 generation, 8, 10 geography, 32 Germany, 31, 42, 76 gestures, 19 gift, 97 girls, 11, 27, 75, 76, 78, 79, 86, 95 global warming, 79 globalization, 34, 57, 64, 65 goals, 23, 44, 82, 91, 92 government, iv, 13, 28, 30, 55, 57, 88, 92 grass, 3 gravity, 44, 87, 99 group size, 83 groups, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 27, 90, 94 growth, 38, 53, 68, 81 guilt, 24, 37, 65, 72 guilty, 73

H happiness, 14, 72 harm, vii, 38, 44, 58, 72 harmony, vii, 38, 44, 58, 72 Harvard, 99, 102 health care system, 4 heart rate, 7, 20 hedonism, 15 helplessness, 18, 21 heterosexuals, 94 higher education, 101 Hispanics, 8, 94 holism, 101 homework, 29 homosexuality, 68 host, 9 hostility, 47 house, 99 households, 48 human activity, 4 human agency, 33, 58

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index human behavior, 68, 71 human brain, 5 human development, 97, 98, 101 human nature, 58 human psychology, 7, 58, 68, 75, 76, 92 human resources, 92 human sciences, 72, 101 humanism, 8 humanity, 31 humility, 18, 21, 24, 70 hunting, 15, 33 hydrogen, 3 hyperactivity, 93 hypothesis, 100

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I idealism, 78, 86 idealization, 92 identification, 35, 47, 93 identity, 56, 91, 93, 94, 101 identity politics, 93 ideology, 58, 68, 69, 88, 89, 94, 99 idiosyncratic, 14, 85, 86, 89 illusion(s), 13, 33, 77, 83, 99 imagery, 18 images, 9, 10, 18, 90 imitation, 5 immigration, 54, 94 imperialism, 66 impulsiveness, 48 incidence, 41 income, 48, 57 incompatibility, 44 independence, 7, 29, 36, 39 independent variable, 39, 43 India, 29, 36, 54, 55, 61, 99 Indians, 36, 39, 41, 68 indication, 13 indicators, 33 indigenous, iv, vii, 1, 49, 57, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102 indigenous peoples, 75 indigenous psychology, iv, vii, 1, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98 individualism, 15, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 51, 58, 88, 89, 92, 101 individuality, 3

107

industrial production, 37 industry, 24 infancy, 6 infants, 6, 7 inferiority, 88 infrastructure, 1, 3, 18, 75, 90, 95 injustice, 92 innovation, 37 insecurity, 14, 29 instability, 15 institutional change, 23 institutions, 1, 2, 3, 10, 13, 22, 23, 29, 39, 68, 70, 72, 76, 92, 94 instruction, 30, 90 insulation, 32 integration, 47, 73, 97 integrity, 24 intellectual skills, 22 intelligence, 5, 14, 37, 54, 63, 68, 73 intensity, 72 interaction(s), 4, 5, 9, 23, 32, 35, 47, 53, 58, 82 interdependence, 17 interdependent self-construal, 99 internationalization, 33 intimacy, 47 inversion, 54 investors, 18 IQ, 8 Iran, 37 Islam, 37, 72, 98 Islamic, 37 isolation, vii, 29

J Japan, 36, 52, 101 judgment, 42, 48 judiciary, 8

K killing, 3 Korea, 63, 73, 98

L labor, 5, 6, 14, 24, 28, 37, 38, 88 labor force, 14 land, 37

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index

108 language, 5, 9, 53, 54, 55, 56, 82, 83, 87, 93, 97, 99 language acquisition, 82, 99 language development, 54, 82 Latin America, 22, 23 laws, 8, 12, 37, 44, 71, 81, 82 lead, 75, 88, 95 learning, 5, 9, 29, 30, 54, 58, 98, 100 leisure, 24 liberalism, 97 liberation, 94, 99 life style, 8, 58 lifetime, 67 linguistic description, 10 linkage, 41 lobbyists, 12 localization, 8, 99 location, 87 locus, 65 logical reasoning, 8, 9, 53, 63 London, 101 loneliness, 28 love, 2, 7, 9, 21, 22, 36, 39, 51, 81, 98 loyalty, 36 lung, 2

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M machinery, 5 mainstream psychology, 67 management, 2 mandates, 8 manners, 24 mapping, 85 market, 22, 24, 38, 98 marketing, 18 marriage, 54, 75 Marx, 13, 18, 38, 52, 93, 99 masculinity, 11, 24, 27, 41, 94, 101 mathematics, 8, 22, 29, 30, 57 maturation, 6 meanings, 9, 10, 13, 14, 54, 73, 81, 82, 86, 92 measurement, 40, 42, 43 measures, 7, 20, 40, 42, 43, 50, 72 media, 27, 75, 88, 95 medical care, 88 medicine, 10 memory, 1, 5, 6, 18, 19, 21, 27, 63, 81, 88 memory lapses, 63 men, 13, 14, 20, 93, 94

mental illness, 1, 2, 9, 28, 29, 41, 57, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70, 81, 86, 88 mental processes, 20, 29 mercury, 42 Mesoamerica, 41, 97 metacognitive skills, 54 methodological procedures, 42 Mexico, 41, 51, 52, 97 middle class, 35, 41, 63, 101 military, 37 minimum wage, 28 minority, 55, 85 mitosis, 81 mixing, 29 modernism, 31 modernity, 14, 98 modernization, 29 molecules, 87 money, 37, 41 monopoly, 43 mother tongue, 55 motherhood, 11 mothers, 37, 54 motivation, 1, 3, 9, 17, 18, 19, 63, 81, 86, 88 motives, 3, 10, 75 movement, 14, 43, 44, 61, 94, 98 multiplicity, 71 music, 9, 11 Muslim, 8, 37

N narratives, 1, 40 nation, 67 national identity, 91 natural environment, 6 natural laws, 81 natural science, 37, 71, 72, 81, 82, 87 negativity, 70 negotiating, 22 negotiation, 39 Netherlands, 36 network, 11, 30 neurons, 5 neuroscience, 97 New York, 50, 65, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 newspapers, 13, 23 no voice, 36 normative behavior, 14 North America, 15

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index North Carolina, 101 nuclear family, 23 nutrition, 81

O obesity, 8 objectification, 14, 39, 40 objective reality, 85 objectivity, 66, 71, 78, 88 obligation, 95 observations, 47, 76, 91 Oedipus complex, 78 operating system, 19, 20, 29 oppression, 90, 92 optics, 8 organ, 2, 3, 10, 27 organism, 6, 12 organization, vii, 1, 9, 13, 18, 23, 57, 77, 78, 92 orientation, 34, 36, 39, 54, 93 ownership, 15, 70, 91 oxygen, 3

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P packaging, 18 pain, 68 parental control, 31, 36, 83 parental pressure, 37 parenting, 41 parents, 23, 28, 36, 37, 72, 76, 88, 93, 98 parroting, 93 passive, 18 pathways, 98 pedagogy, 11, 35 peer support, 75 peers, 23 perception(s), 1, 3, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 61, 63, 72, 75,78, 83, 86, 88 performance, 3, 24, 36, 53, 54 permit, 51 personal, 14, 21, 23, 24, 33, 36, 44, 69, 85, 88, 89, 90 personal communication, 36 personality, 23, 24, 27, 42, 47, 61, 63, 82 personality traits, 47 personality type, 24, 82 philosophers, 66 photographs, 8

109

physical environment, 41 physical properties, 10 physics, 8, 44, 77 physiological arousal, 7 physiology, 7 planning, 5, 82 Plato, 85 pleasure, 40, 50, 68, 93 pluralism, 43, 58, 78, 79 plurality, 78 police, 15 politics, 13, 28, 33, 34, 38, 56, 91, 92, 93, 94, 101 pools, 5 poor, 77, 81 population, 13, 23, 71, 78 positive relationship, 54 positivism, 42, 53, 57, 82, 88 postmodernism, 92 posture, 19 poverty, 33, 41 power, 1, 4, 6, 13, 34, 38, 57, 70, 92, 97, 100 power relations, 70, 92 praxis, 3 preference, 82, 85 president, 86 pressure, 7, 20, 37, 88, 90 prisons, 12 private ownership, 15 private property, 12, 37 problem solving, 32, 53 product design, 18 production, 4, 24, 34, 37, 38, 41 profit, 12, 14, 24, 29 program, 3, 70 promote, 13 prosperity, 23 protein, 5 prototype, 35 psychiatrists, 93 psychological development, 6, 8, 63, 65 psychological functions, 8, 20, 39 psychological phenomena, 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 27, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 89, 91, 92, 95 psychological problems, 72, 93, 95 psychological processes, 7, 28, 42, 76, 102 psychological variables, 40, 41, 58 psychologist, 22, 65, 67, 75, 85

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index

110 psychology, iv, vii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 public resources, 70 Puerto Rican, 37

Q quantum mechanics, 44 quantum theory, 44 questioning, 53 questionnaires, 63, 66

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R racism, 94 reading, 19 realism, 77, 78, 79, 85, 86, 100 reality, 4, 11, 25, 42, 51, 54, 55, 65, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 85 reasoning, 8, 9, 17, 19, 27, 41, 53, 63, 81, 86, 88 recall(ing), 9, 41, 58, 81 recognition, 56 reduction, 50 refining, 35, 65 reflection, 98 reflexivity, 97 reforms, 95 rejection, 64 relationship(s), vii, 5, 9, 11, 21, 23, 25, 35, 37, 39, 40, 52, 54, 93 relatives, 38, 47, 48 relativity, 44, 85 relaxation, 18 religion, 5, 13, 54 replication, 87 representativeness, 81 reputation, 13 resources, 23, 70, 89, 92 response time, 40 retardation, 9 retina, 20 rewards, 23 rice, 29 Rome, vii

room temperature, 3 Russia, 76

S sacrifice, 24, 37 sadness, 47 sanctions, 3 scaling, 40, 72 scarcity, 23 schema, 20 schizophrenia, 35, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 83, 98, 100 school, 2, 3, 4, 11, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 75, 95, 99 school achievement, 2 school activities, 38 school performance, 36 schooling, 34, 35, 38, 39, 53, 54, 58, 63, 68 science, vii, viii, 8, 25, 32, 34, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 58, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 81, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101 scientific knowledge, 37 scientific progress, 44 scientific theory, 75 scientific understanding, 67 scores, 42 search(ing), 22, 70, 75 Searle, John, 101 second language, 82 Second World, 10 security, 23, 29 self-concept, 19, 21, 41, 65, 68, 72, 81, 86, 88 self-confidence, 18 self-control, 24 self-definition, 93 self-efficacy, 98 self-esteem, 40, 56, 98 self-expression, 24 self-interest, 15, 29, 97 self-knowledge, 68, 93 self-understanding, 61, 66, 67, 68, 75, 76, 82, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95 sensation(s), 18, 20 sense organs, 5, 9 sensitivity, 39, 48, 54 sensory data, 9, 42 sensory experience, 10, 20 sensory perceptions, 10 separation, 71

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

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Index series, 39 settlements, 23 sex, 18, 72, 93 sexual orientation, 93 sexuality, 1, 11, 14, 21, 22, 27, 61, 63 shame, 63 shape(ing), viii, 2, 19, 43, 69, 89, 99 shares, 92 sharing, 14, 86 shelter, 2 sign(s), 6, 9, 42 signals, 5 skills, 6, 22, 23, 54, 73, 90 skin, 10 slavery, 9, 65 slaves, 9 smoke(ing), 2, 13, 14, 101 social activities, 21, 48 social anxiety, 7, 99 social behavior, 1, 31, 95 social change, 14, 57 social class, 1, 54 social comparison, 5 social construct, 7, 87 social development, 99 social factors, 8 social group, 14, 95 social indicator, 33 social influence, 88 social institutions, 1, 10, 13, 22, 23, 39, 68, 70, 92 social isolation, 29 social learning, 5 social life, 4, 6, 57, 89, 92 social norms, 13, 24, 29, 82 social order, 23, 24 social organization, 13, 57 social phenomena, 13, 33 social relations, 13, 29, 70, 87 social responsibility, 38 social roles, 58 social sciences, 98 social status, 55 social structure, 22, 23, 38, 92, 97 social support, 2 social units, 3 socialization, 39, 81, 82, 83, 88, 89 society, 8, 13, 15, 23, 24, 28, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 57, 58, 67, 70, 71, 82, 88, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 102 socioeconomic status, 48 solidarity, 15, 94

111

sounds, 9, 10 South America, 38 Soviet Union, 33, 38 Spain, 15, 37 spatial processing, 98 species, 2, 86 specific knowledge, 71 specificity, 33, 34 speech, 9, 19 speed, 34 sports, 11, 90 stages, 23 standard of living, 23, 57 standardization, 33 standards, 24, 79 state control, 39 statistics, 33, 42 sterile, 58 stigmatized, 82 stimulus, 20 strength, 44, 50 stress, 19, 48 strictures, 37 strikes, 12 structural changes, 2 structuring, 24, 25, 27, 90 students, 3, 19, 27, 28, 30, 57, 72, 90 subjectivity, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 18, 20, 21, 78, 92, 95 subsistence, 15, 38, 39 subsistence production, 38 substitutes, 93 suffering, 63 suicide, 48 superiority, 18, 44, 69 supply, 14 surplus, 13 survival, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 23 sustainability, 98 sweat, 20 symbols, 6, 9, 10, 29, 39, 86, 97 symptom(s), 35, 47, 48, 51 synapse, 5 syndrome, 23 synthesis, 3, 73, 78 systems, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 33, 43, 57, 58, 68, 69, 77, 98

T Taiwan, 98

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.

Index

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112 tanks, 88 teachers, 3 teaching, 53, 58 technology, 11, 22, 23, 33, 37, 99 teeth, 3 television, 23, 88 temperance, 24 temperature, 3, 42 terrorism, 31 textbooks, 30 theory, vii, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 19, 27, 32, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 44, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 99 thermodynamics, 87 thinking, 6, 8, 9, 10, 18, 19, 20, 22, 30, 37, 38, 41, 87, 88 threat, 39, 40 threatening behavior, 48 time, vii, 4, 18, 31, 33, 40, 65, 78 trade(ing), 13, 22, 37, 68 tradition, 5, 99, 101 traditionalism, 53 training, 39, 87 traits, 47 transactions, 38 transcendence, 32 transformation, 6, 24, 101 transition, 7, 23, 30 transmission, 20, 23 transmits, 5 transportation, 2, 37 tribes, 33

U uncertainty, 77, 78 unemployment, 48 United States, 24, 76, 98 universality, 47, 51, 73 universities, 37 urbanization, 29, 31, 33, 38, 39, 53, 57 users, 7

V validation, 44, 95 validity, 40, 73 values, 22, 23, 24, 36, 43, 76, 92 variability, 79 variable(s), 11, 15, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41,42, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 65, 71, 79, 81, 85, 86 variation, 8, 32, 33 video games, 22 violence, 48 vision, 24 visual acuity, 2 vocabulary, 19, 21, 87 voice, 36, 91, 95 voters, 34 Vygotsky, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 35, 53, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102

W war, 97 weakness, 34, 40 web, 27 well-being, 76 Western countries, 82 wholesale, vii wind, 90 windows, 11 women, 13, 14, 20, 22, 41, 61, 63, 93, 94 workers, 13, 22, 34, 94 working conditions, 36 workplace, 3 World War, 10, 14 World War I, 14 writing, 6

Y yang, 69 yield, 64 yin, 69 young women, 63

Cultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Psychology, and Indigenous Psychology, edited by Carl Ratner, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2008.