Cultural Psychology And Social Construction Theory

About 2 pages (599 words)

Social constructionism Summary

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Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Cultural psychology and social construction theory

Neither have the problems inherent to psychological anthropology been solved by the creation of the new sub-disciplinary domain of ‘cultural psychology’. Here the intention is to acknowledge the validity of other people’s understandings of the world and themselves and to use these understandings as the basis for analysis. Even so, and despite a good deal of fascinating ethnography that suggests otherwize, Descartes’s emphasis on conscious thought as the existential ground of knowledge by and large continues to be taken for granted by cultural psychologists. In Stigler, Shweder and Herdt’s (1990) edited collection, this emphasis is evinced in the very titles of the papers, for example, ‘culture and moral development’ (Shweder, Mahapatra and Miller), ‘the socialization of cognition’ (Goodnow), and ‘the relations between culture and human cognition’ (D’Andrade). And this despite the fact that, in an introductory essay, Shweder claims ‘cultural psychology’ to be distinct from ‘psychological anthropology’:

Cultural psychology is the study of intentional worlds. It is the study of personal functioning in particular intentional worlds. It is the study of the interpersonal maintenance of any intentional world.

It is the investigation of those psychosomatic, sociocultural and, inevitably, divergent realities in which subject and object cannot possibly be separated and kept apart because they are so interdependent as to need each other to be.

(ibid: 3)

But if realities are ‘inevitably divergent’, then where exactly can the analyst locate any ‘particular intentional world’? Yet again, as the titles of the papers indicate, we find outselves willy nilly caught in the distinction between the ‘personal functioning’ of the consciousness of particular actors and an abstraction—that is, the ‘intentional world’ that is the artefact of the anthropologist’s analysis.

Any analysis of what is known inevitably requires an analysis of how it comes to be known and this implicates concepts of the *person. Shweder, elaborating his arguments for cultural psychology, suggests that we should view concepts of the person as ‘social constructions’:

The ‘constructive’ parts of a social construction theory are the idea that equally rational, competent, and informed observers are, in some sense, free…to constitute for themselves different realities; and…that there are as many realities as the way ‘it’ can be constituted or described…. The ‘social’ parts of a social construction theory are the idea that categories are vicariously received, not individually invented; and…that the way people divide the world into categories is, in some sense, tradition bound, and thus transmitted, communicated and ‘passed on’ through symbolic action.

(Shweder 1991:156)

But if, as studies of child language demonstrate, we do not passively acquire our native language, but have rather (each one of us) to constitute its very categories, then language as ‘structure’ cannot be separated from construction as ‘process’; rather structure and process have to be conceived of as aspects of one another—a point that is taken further below. In locating the constructive process in the person and what is social in an abstract space between persons (i.e. in language categories), social construction theory reproduces the very theoretical impasse it pretends to dismantle.

Even so, there have been attempts to arrive at genuinely synthetic theories able to grapple at once with the subjective experience and under standings of actors and the analytical description of the anthropologist observer as itself a form of subjectivity. But while the authors of such works may justly be said to be concerned with mind, they are unlikely to characterize themselves as psychological anthropologists or even as cultural psychologists. Rather, they are concerned to understand ‘embodied mind’ as an emergent, historically constituted and, at the same time, universal condition of human existence through an examination of its inevitable particularity.

This is the complete article, containing 599 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).