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

[mike cole]

Hi Peter --

I fear I am not capable of engaging the topic of context and development via
Jon's article and discussion and engaging an exploration among different
streams
of cultural psychology at the same time. The same sort of question can be
usefully
asked about the work of Valsiner and his colleagues.

There is a preliminary discussion of these issues in *Cultural Psychology. *And
more of relevance in
later papers. But presumably the majority of xmca members have neither the
Stigler et al essays to hand nor any of my relevant writings. Conversing
through selected quotations is almost certain be
more-than-extra dicey.

Might it be possible to get some texts in front of us and perhaps you and
Elizabeth could lead the
discussion? There are a lot of Shweder text obtainable through google
scholar and probably of others
who are especially relevant.

If others want to jump topics, I'll try to follow along for the time being.

Meantime, I am struggling with Jon's article . More on that shortly.
Perhaps the question of
Bronfenbrenner's notions of context, activity, and development are not of
wide interest, in which
case room I'll have room for a next topic and happy to make it flavors of
cultural psychology. Who knows, perhaps we could get Rick to take it up.
mike






On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 1:13 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.
>
>
>