Review of The Psychological Foundations of Culture.

Abstract

MARKSCHALLER and CHRISTIAN S. CRANDAIX (Eds.) The Psychological Foundations of Culture Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004, 392 pages (ISBN 0-8058-3839-2, US$79.95, Cloth; 0-8058-3840-6, US$39.95, Paperback) For than a century, social scientists have struggled against this the tendency to explain one discipline by concepts and findings from a lower order, or more fundamental discipline. In psychology, this struggle has been against physiological, genetic, and biochemical explanations of psychological phenomena. Most psychologists would claim the right to explain psychological phenomena in their own terms, and at their own level. In anthropology, this struggle has been against the psychologising of phenomena, that to explain simply as the shared behaviour of individuals in a group. At first glance, this book appears to be one attempt to see phenomena in psychological terms, and to some extent this true. For example, the editors assert that can be sensibly and fruitfully deconstructed. Just as substances are comprised of atoms, genomes are composed of genes, and poems are composed of words, the complex things that we perceive as 'cultures' are, on closer inspection, comprised of some set of smaller units. But the volume portrays itself as a than such reductionism; it also seeks to balance the study of the relationship between and behavioural phenomena. The editors claim that ...this book is, in a sense, the complementary opposite to that underlying work in cross-cultural psychology (which) explores the influence of culture on individual-level psychological processes, and so brings an anthropological frame of enquiry to psychological questions. Their approach is intended to that psychological inquiry into the foundations of culture a useful - perhaps even necessary - complement to other forms of inquiry into culture. More concretely, the book intended to reveal how culture influenced by processes operating at the individual level (e.g., cognitions, goals, information processing strategies) as well as at the interpersonal level (e.g., communication, social influence). To accomplish this goal, the editors invited 33 authors from a number of cognate disciplines to address the issue of behaviour-culture relationships, with an emphasis on how the former might allow us to better understand the origin, development, and distribution of the latter. The 14 chapters in the volume are organized into three sections, with an introductory chapter and an epilogue. The first section, How cultures emerge at all, focuses on the role of some basic psychological phenomena that are unique to human beings (such as the awareness of mortality, social influence, the construction of shared meanings through communication, and the cognitive need for consensus and closure). The second section, How specific norms arise, deals with the question of why shared beliefs and norms arise in human groups. Here, biological, cognitive, and emotional factors are posited as essential bases for the development of rules of conduct that are at the core of culture and society. These chapters are reminiscent of (but fail to reference) the seminal early work of David Aberle on the functional prerequisites of a society, which posits requirements for orderly social living. The third section addresses the dual issues of persistence and change. Both aspects involve the use of serial reproduction (in the terms used by Bartlett), the use of stereotypes (as ways of categorizing, coding, and perpetuating shared beliefs), the existence of cultural lag to explain dysfunctional norms (such as interpersonal and intergroup violence), and the process of psychological acculturation, which follows contact between individuals from differing backgrounds. …