| Description |
1 online resource (xiii, 257 pages) |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Professional and disciplinary cultures -- Generational cultures -- Culture and social class -- Regional culture -- Frontier settlement and cultural change -- Political culture and democracy -- Gendered sexual cultures -- Religions as cultural solutions to social living -- Food cultures. |
| Summary |
"In the last 3 decades, cultural psychology has come of age, and this remarkable volume celebrates that fact. The transition from a culture-blind psychology to a culture-contingent psychology has been a rocky one and is far from complete. Yet hundreds of experiments, simulations, surveys, and analyses of cultural products and practices now provide increasingly robust support for Geertz's (1973) assertion that "there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture" (p. 49) as well as for Bruner's (1990) claim that "it is impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of the individual alone" (p. 12). People, the essays collected here explain, require the public and shared meanings and practices of their various communities and activities to become people. Moreover, there is an ongoing mutual constitution between people and their many cultures. People are culturally shaped shapers. This is their human nature. This volume, then, will go a long distance in completing the cultural turn in psychology. The emphasis here is on how cultures make psyches but also on how psyches make culture. The word is out. Culture is not just something that East Asians have. Here we find culture in many forms. These cultures derive from the many social distinctions that organize and animate our lives₇professions, social classes, gender, the frontier, politics, religion, generation, food. Each of us interacts with multiple cultures in a lifetime and in a single day. We are shaped by these cultures, and we shape them. Because of culture, people don't have to wait around for natural selection or genetic mutation to produce the biology to live in a different terrain or cope with a change in climate. Together we can invent new shelters and climate-appropriate clothing. Or we can save ourselves the trouble of innovating new technologies by copying our fellow humans (Markus & Conner, 2013). People's capacity to be shaped by the meanings that are pervasive in their environments, to make meaning, to share these meanings, and to build worlds according to these meanings is their great evolutionary advantage. This insightful and provocative collection offers the careful reader many gifts. It is an illuminating example of its own message: Cultures evolve. The knowledge culture of psychology is evolving and finally giving full expression to some of the field's most powerful foundational ideas. The book also illuminates why psychologists should focus their attention on the systematic collective antecedents and consequences of individual actions. Finally, Culture Reexamined invites us to think about ourselves and other people in a new way. No one has just one culture. We all have many different cultures₇of nation, region, race, gender, class, religion, profession, and so forth. We can embrace these cultures and use them as resources; we can resist them; and since they are products of human agency, we can also change them"--Foreword. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved). |
| Form |
Also issued in print. |
| Reproduction |
Electronic reproduction. Washington, D.C. : American Psychological Association, 2014. Available via World Wide Web. Access limited by licensing agreement. |
| Note |
GMD: electronic resource. |
| Subject |
Social psychology.
|
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Culture and psychology.
|
|
Psychology, Social.
|
| Other Form: |
Original (DLC) 2013021737 |
| ISBN |
9781433815874 (electronic bk.) |
|
1433815877 (electronic bk.) |
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