Reflections of a "Pre-Nominal" Cross-Cultural Psychologist

Abstract

The beginning of my story dates back almost half a century, and can be viewed in the light of chaos theory - you know, the beating of a butterfly wing in Brazil results in a storm across the Atlantic. In my case it was the invasion of the body of a colleague by a virus that resulted in me, rather than him, being asked to look after a visitor from New Zealand. I was much impressed when he told me that to become a good social scientist one ought to learn at first-hand about other cultures. So two years later I got a job in West Africa and started doing cross-cultural psychology. But like Mr. Jourdain, who only later discovered that he was speaking prose, I did not know then that I was doing cross-cultural psychology, since the term had, as far as I know, not yet been invented.