[Xmca-l] Re: Cultural Psychology (Stigler, Schweder, & Herdt, Eds.)

[Elizabeth Fein]

I'm glad you've brought up this volume, Peter, and also sort of delightedly
amused by the timing: I just received my own copy in the mail about a month
or so ago, after realizing that it was strange, steeped as I am in this
branch of Chicago tradition, that I didn't own it and hadn't read many of
the pieces in it. So I will be slogging with you!
Best,
Elizabeth

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 4:13 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> A bit of a change in subject.....I'm trying to do some reading this year,
> something that usually gets sacrificed to other obligations. I'm starting
> with books I've had for many years but have never opened. I just began what
> will be a long slog through a 600 pager, Cultural Psychology: Essays on
> Comparative Human Development (Stigler, Schweder, & Herdt, Eds.), Cambridge
> U. Press, 1990.
>
> Publisher's Blurb: This collection of essays from leading scholars in
> anthropology, psychology, and linguistics is an outgrowth of the
> internationally known "Chicago Symposia on Culture and Human Development."
> It raises the idea of a new discipline of cultural psychology through the
> study of the relationship between psyche and culture, subject and object,
> person and world, with special reference to core areas of human
> development: cognition, learning, self, personality dynamics, and gender.
> The essays critically examine such questions as: Is there an intrinsic
> psychic unity to humankind? Can cultural traditions transform the human
> psyche, resulting less in psychic unity than in ethnic divergences in mind,
> self, and emotion? Are psychological processes local or specific to the
> socio-cultural environments in which they are imbedded?
>
> First, note the date: 1990, collected from symposia conducted at the U. of
> Chicago in 1986 and 1987. So please keep that in mind when providing
> critiques. Interestingly, I was a doctoral student there at the time, but I
> came out of grad school in 1989 grounded in cognitive
> psychology/information processing. I had never heard of Vygotsky, thought
> cognition occurred between the ears, and was completely ignorant about this
> field, which has grounded my thinking since shortly after starting my first
> university position in 1990 and got acquainted with the Vygotskian world.
> In my defense, I was a fulltime high school English teacher for 5 of my 6
> years in doctoral studies, and also got married and had 2 kids during my
> program. So I was not on campus enough to be aware of such things; and
> there was no internet at the time to expose me to other ways of thinking
> (or, for me, email); and I was very busy teaching all day, grading papers
> for my 130 students, and rushing home to see my family at day's end.
>
> I mainly write with this little personal narrative to express some
> surprise at how little this collection from 1990 gets referenced in the
> cultural psychology I know through Mike Cole and others. Mike gets a little
> attention here, but surprisingly, as  "Platonist," that is, one who seeks
> an internal cognitive processor, I assume based on the Liberian studies
> where indigenous people responded to Western sorting tasks (to Shweder,
> this is cross-cultural psychology, not cultural psychology). Again, keep
> the year of the symposia in mind; Mike's own Cultural Psychology wasn't out
> till 1996. I have never understood Mike as a psychologist interested in
> peeling away layers to get to the fixed psyche, but one very much aligned
> with the conception laid out in this volume (or at least in the intro,
> which is as far as I've gotten today), which in nutshell form is expressed
> in Shweder's intro: "Cultural psychology presumes instead the principle of
> intentionality, that the life of psyche is the life of intentional persons,
> responding  to, and directing their action at, their own mental objects or
> representations, and undergoing transformation through participation in an
> evolving intentional world that is the product of the mental
> representations that make it up. According to cultural psychology,
> intentional persons change and are changed by the concrete particularly of
> their own mental constituted 'forms of life'." Actually I've always
> understood that to be Mike's position, that "mind" is fluid and relational,
> not a core thing available by peeling away layers (of an onion, in a common
> metaphor).
>
> Several of the contributors are familiar from my own reading of the field
> as I know it: D'Andrade, Ochs, Lave, Heath, Gergen; but many are new to me,
> even 3 decades later. So I assume that eventually, I'll be able to
> reconcile the introductory claims with the contents of the volume. Maybe.
>
> But what I'm really wondering is, how has a volume like this escaped
> attention in what I read in publications and on this forum? Or has it been
> there beneath my notice? It seems to be quite relevant to these
> conversations. It's quite surprising to me that it could be flying so far
> under the radar, while being published under Cambridge's auspices and while
> including some people often referenced in the work I read.
>
>
>


-- 
Elizabeth Fein, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Duquesne University