Nate
Toward an Integral Framework for Cultural Psychology
A viable approach to cultural psychology should synthesize the strengths
and avoid the weaknesses of the foregoing three theories. Synthesizing
their strengths yields four fundamental tenets of cultural psychology.
#1) Psychological phenomena are cultural in their essence. This tenet is
drawn from the symbolic and activity approaches to cultural psychology. It
means that psychological phenomena are formed as people participate in
social life, they embody characteristics of a particular social life, and
they generate behavior that perpetuates particular social relationships.
To say that psychological phenomena are cultural means that they are social
facts, formed and shared through social processes that transcend individual
processes.
Of course, nothing collective can be produced if individual consciousness
are not assumed; but this necessary condition is by itself insufficient.
These consciousnesses must be combined in a certain way; social life
results from this combination and is consequently explained by it.
Individual minds, forming groups by mingling and fusing, give birth to a
being, psychological if you will, but constituting a psychic individuality
of a new sort. It is, then, in the nature of the collective individuality,
not in that of the associated units, that we must seek the immediate and
determining causes of the facts appearing therein (Durkheim, 1895/1938, p.
103-104, my emphasis).
Cultural-psychological phenomena "are psychological in nature but they do
not have their source in individual psychology, since they infinitely
transcend the individual. They must, therefore, be the object of a special
science charged with their description and the investigation of their
preconditions" (Durkheim, 1888/1978, p. 63). This science is cultural
psychology.
Even emotions, which appear to be deeply personal, are cultural phenomena.
In the sociological tradition of Durkheim, Gordon stated, "Although each
person's experience of emotion has idiosyncratic features, culture shapes
the occasion, meaning, and expression of affective experience. Love, pity,
indignation, and other sentiments are socially shared patterns of feeling,
gesture, and meaning" (Gordon, 1981, p. 562). "Social life produces
emergent dimensions of emotion that resist reduction to properties inherent
in the human organism...Socially emergent dimensions of emotion transcend
psychological and physiological levels of analysis in terms of (1) origin,
(2) temporal framework, (3) structure, and (4) change" (ibid., p. 563; cf.
Zerubavel, 1997 for additional examples).
Vygotsky called the cultural formation of psychological phenomena "the
basic law of historical human development" (cited in Van der Veer &
Valsiner, 1994, p. 176). Vygotsky argued that "the social moment in
consciousness is primary in time as well as in fact. The individual aspect
is constructed as a derived and secondary aspect on the basis of the social
aspect and exactly according to its model" (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 77).
"Essential is not that the social role can be deduced from the character,
but that the social role creates a number of characterological connections"
(ibid., p. 106).
#2) The cultural essence of psychological phenomena consists in practical
social activities. This point is taken from activity theory which is the
only approach that emphasizes the centrality of practical activities for
culture and psychology. Other approaches ignore activity and fail to
comprehend the full nature of culture and psychological phenomena. As
Zinchenko (1984, p. 73) said, "The exclusion of the real process of the
subject's life, of the activity that relates him to objective reality, is
the underlying cause of all misinterpretations of the nature of
consciousness. This is the basis of both mechanistic and idealistic
misunderstandings of consciousness."
We have seen that much contemporary activity theory has a truncated
conception of activity which must be broadened. Activities are socially
organized behaviors which people devise to meet their practical needs.
Activities include working, educating, playing, governing, treating
disease, adjudicating disputes, arranging family life. Activities are
conducted according to particular behavioral norms; rewarded with different
levels of prestige, wealth, privileges, rights, and opportunities; alloted
to certain members (groups) of the population; controlled by certain
members (groups) of the population; and structured with other activities in
a division of labor. This social organization is built into activity and
constitutes its concrete character.
Activities are the ways human life is organized. As such, activities define
the kinds of things that people think about, perceive, imagine, remember,
speak, and feel; activities also structure how we think, perceive, imagine,
speak, feel, and remember.
The manner in which activities are organized also accounts for the
diversity of psychological phenomena within a society. Activities which are
specialized in a complex division of labor promote heterogeneous phenomena,
viewpoints, and voices. The psychological heterogeneity which
individualistic cultural psychologists identify (and exaggerate as
vitiating shared phenomena and understanding) is a function of the division
of labor of activities. Heterogeneity is not a natural manifestation of
individual idiosyncracies. Individual differences depend upon a particular
social order, they do not preclude social order.
#3) Psychological phenomena are organized by social concepts as symbolic
cultural psychologists, and certain activity theorists such as Vygotsky,
emphasize. However, contrary to the symbolic approach, people do not
collectively form symbolic concepts on a purely mental level. People's
conceptions about things, people, and events depend upon the activities
which they devise for dealing with them. (Concepts also depend upon
experience with the natural environment.)
Thus, psychological phenomena are fashioned from, and reflect, the
structure of social activities, the natural environment, and concepts which
are inspired by social activities and natural conditions. Bourdieu
expressed this idea in his notion of the habitus. The habitus is a
structure of understandings about the nature of things which structures
psychological phenomena and which is itself structured by social practices.
The habitus is a socially structured, structuring, structure: It is a
social product in that its dispositions are durably inculcated by the
possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities
and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions (Bourdieu, 1977,
chap. 2; 1990a, pp. 76-86, 91; 1990b, chap. 3).
We have noted earlier that Engestrom's (1993) work utilizes this
perspective in linking doctors' treatment of patients to corporatized
medical activity. Carol Tavris similarly argues that the different
activities associated with men's and women's roles in society generate
psychological differences in emotionality, cognitive processes, aggression,
kindness, sensitivity and empathy. Contradicting a feminist insistence on
the natural basis of psychological differences, Tavris says, "New studies
find that the behavior that we link to gender depends more on what an
individual is doing and needs to do than on his or her biological sex."
"Much of the stereotype of women's innate advantage in empathy derives from
the different jobs that women and men do and their different average levels
of power" (Tavris, 1992, pp. 63, 65; cf. Ratner, 1997a, chap. 3 for
additional examples).
#4) Social activities, concepts, and psychological phenomena are devised by
humans, as individualistic cultural psychologists insist. However, contrary
to their view, agency is not an individual attribute which spontaneously
and unpredictably spins out idiosyncratic meanings. Nor is it formed on a
purely interpersonal level through face-to-face co-regulations. Agency
develops through participating in broad, collective social activities.
Moreover, once agency is objectified in social activities it becomes
constrained by their objective form. Most agentive acts recapitulate
prevailing activities in one form or another. As Bourdieu, 1977, p. 95
said, "Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products -
thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions - whose limits are set by the
historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the
conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation
of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of
the initial conditionings." Bounded choice is a far more appropriate notion
for cultural psychology than Valsiner's notion of bounded indeterminacy is.
The complex social institutions and systems which objectify agency set the
parameters for forming concepts. Activities and concepts form the
parameters - the working material and driving force - for agency to form
psychological phenomena. In other words, the agency which forms
psychological phenomena is structured by the agency which has been
objectified in social activities and concepts.
Even most acts of resisting organized society unwittingly recapitulate
central values and practices of it. As Wertsch (1997, p. 14) observed,
"even when consumers of state-produced official histories resist or reject
these histories, their accounts of the past are heavily influenced by them"
(cf. Ratner, 1993a for examples). The consumption of culture is heavily
influenced by the production of culture, just as consumption of commodities
is greatly affected by what is produced and how it is marketed. Consumption
is not a free act as individualistic psychologists maintain.
Of course, individuals occasionally mount a serious challenge to the status
quo. They achieve a comprehensive analysis of prevailing views and
practices, devise radically alternative views and activities, and begin
acting them out. These steps may be initiated by a few individuals, however
they are sociocultural in that 1) the individuals who initiate these steps
generally occupy positions in society which facilitate their comprehending
and critiquing the status quo; 2) the steps are inspired by contradictions
in previous social activities, 3) they are intentionally directed at
existing social activities, 4) they are constrained by tendencies and
limits of the existing system, 5) they must gain acceptance by many
individuals, 6) they are refined through social interaction with other
individuals, 7) they must be coordinated in political, social, economic,
and military maneuvers to transform cultural activities.6
Grounding psychological phenomena in cultural activities, institutions, and
conditions does not reify them as individualistic cultural psychologists
imagine. Durkheim explained this point when he said that "sociology in no
way imposes upon man a passively conservative attitude." On the contrary,
"sociology which by discovering the laws of social reality will permit us
to direct historical evolution with greater reflection than in the past"
(Durkheim, 1909/1978, p. 75).
Unfortunately, space does not permit me to explore the manner in which
activity, concepts, psychological phenomena, and agency are constructed and
integrated. I have begun to articulate this in other writings (Ratner,
1997a, chap. 3; Ratner, 1998; Ratner forthcoming) and in work which will
appear in future publications.