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

[Peter Smagorinsky]

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.