cultural difference/deficit

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Mon, 30 Oct 1995 10:18:41 -0800 (PST)

As a small contribution to the current discussion I am posting a passage
from the LCHC article, "Culture and intelligence" which appeared in the
Sternberg *Handbook of Intelligence* (Cambridge Press, 1981, p. 710). Although
Ian Moll references this chapter in his article, as I recall, this part of
the discussion gets short shrift. I believe it is relevant to the current
posting by Eugene concerning Moll/Smagorinsky.
mike
Dear Colleagues,

"In short, a cultural theory of intelligence must rest upon
cultural differences in the events out of which people can
create schemata.
A clear implication in this line of reasoning is
that intelligence will be different across cultures (and
across contexts within cultures) insofar as there are
differences in the kinds of problems that different cultural
milieus pose their initiates. In this sense, we must adopt
the position of cultural relativists, such as Berry (1971)
and Boas (1911), that no universal notion of a single,
general ability, called intelligence, can be abstracted
from the behavior of people whose experiences in the world
have systematically been different from birth in response to
different life predicaments handed down to them in their
ecocultural niche. In this sense, all cultures have to be
considered equally effective in producing ways of dealing
with the problems of survival of our species under unique
patterns of constraint. Unless and until it is demonstrated
that there is a common mechanism underlying all schemata
formation, so that it is possible to claim that some kinds
of experience positively influence that single process of
formation differentially, no other position is feasible.
However, this radical relativist conclusion does not
represent the full position of a context-specific
culture-cognition theory of the type we have outlined in
this chapter, because it fails to consider the fact that
cultures interact. Though it is a logical requirement to
adopt radical relativism in the ideal case, we are led to a
somewhat different position with respect to the treatment of
domain-specific achievements considered cross-culturally in
the nonideal case of the contemporary world. Throughout
human history, cultural groups in contact have been also in
competition for resources. That competition has sometimes
been in the form of friendly cooperation, but more often the
ability of one group to dominate the other politically (and
hence economically) has been crucial to the nature of
culturally organized experiences in both the dominated and
the dominating group. Key resources in such struggles have
been culturally elaborated tools (ranging from the bow and
arrow to the neutron bomb, from the rudiments of an alphabet
to modern computers) for operating on the environment (where
environment now stands for other peoples as well as one's
own people and physical setting). It has been very tempting
over the last 400 years to take the level of those
technologies associated with "the modern world" as an index
of the extent to which the peoples in the groups producing
those technologies have developed further than others in the
common problem of adapting to the planet earth.
This line of reasoning can be recognized as but a
subset of the general proposition that if one wishes to
abstract a particular kind of activity from its cultural
context and assert (a) that it is a universal kind of
achievement that differing peoples have mastered to greater
or lesser degree, and (b) that one has a true theory of
developmental stages in that domain, then it is possible to
do a kind of conditional comparison in which we can see how
different cultures have organized experience to deal with
that domain of activity. When this conditionality is
forgotten, the door is left open to severe abuses of the
scientific method in favor of ethnocentric claims about the
true nature of reality." (p. 710, Handbook of Human
Intelligence, edited by Robert J. Sternberg)

One of the problems afflicting our current discussions is that we are
not sharing texts as common points of reference. I have no idea how to
solve this problem, although we are planning to start putting papers on
our list server so people who want to can get them. However, that will
not solve the problem by a long shot.