The paper sets out to offer social-psychological and phenomenological constructs of spirituality in the culture of dhikr in eastern Ethiopia at a micro-ethnography of faith based therapy (FBT). For analytical purpose, the paper draws on hermeneutics. This is the theory and method that places greater emphasis on the way humans deploy linguistic and cultural symbols to represent, organize and frame religion and other complex experiences. The paper focuses on how dhikr producers deploy various interpretive repertoires to construct the psychological, interactional, emotional, behavioural, imaginative and perceptual dimension of spirituality. The paper indicates that the Hararghe Oromo’s dhikr culture is a hermeneutic exercise that involves cognitive and analytical engagement with the exoteric meanings as well as the esoteric meanings of the world. One can thus take dhikr as a socio-cultural site for analysing the nature of hermeneutically conveyed social–psychological constructs of religion and spirituality. The paper offers also the epistemological and conceptual implications of the study.
This study is on the relationship between a dominant nominal Lithuanian majority and a Polish minority in regions with either a straight dominance of the majority or with a high proportion of minority members, who outnumber the national majority. Compared to ‘normal’ regions, the latter situation creates an inverted power differential that we expect to have an impact on how the two groups essentialize their own and the other group’s ethnic identity, how they stereotype the out-group and how they cope with the perceived change in power balance by more or less disparaging the others. We analysed the discourse in eight focus group discussions with members of both groups comprising a total of 66 participants. As expected, the nominal minority exhibited a tendency to self-essentialize more than the majority in general. Members of the Lithuanian majority that was locally outnumbered by the minority also self-essentialized but to a lesser degree and additionally used marked arguments of in-group favouritism at the Poles’ expense in their discourse. Members of the unambiguous majority were the most ‘politically correct’ participants by conspicuously favouring a non-generalising and anti-essentialist conversation. The findings are discussed in terms of inter-group relations and implications for politics.
Tagging is a category of graffiti defined as a stylized signature, monogram, word, or name marked on public and private physical spaces. It is an illegal action seen as a disfigurement to many communities, yet it remains a pre-occupation for adolescents worldwide. This theoretical article explores the hidden aspects of taggers and their subculture. We argue that tagging is a ritualistic act that is part of a psychological growth process suggestive of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s research on traditional rites of passage practices. We use the developmental theories of Winnicott and Erikson to investigate how these rites of passage experiences are integrated into the adolescent tagger’s psyche. Graffiti writing gives taggers the freedom to discover different aspects of the self; a dynamic interaction with unconscious processes that mirror traditional rites of passage rituals.
This article is an edited transcript of an interview with Prof Kenneth J Gergen, conducted by Dr Bo Wang. The discussion was initiated in September 2014 at Nanjing Grand Hotel, China and continued by exchanging ideas through e-mail. The focus of the interview was Prof Kenneth J Gergen’s engagement with social constructionism. It is primarily concerned with the historical context, recent trends, and prospects for the future of social constructionism and its possible impact on Chinese psychology and society.
We propose the use of the concept of perezhivanie, from Cultural Historical Activity Theory, in the analysis of analog role-playing games. In the first section, we present perezhivanie as phenomena and as a concept in Vygotsky’s theory, then we relate the concept of perezhivanie to the theory of the higher mental functions development, and end up articulating perezhivanie to the concept of performance. In the second section, we identify the phenomena of perezhivanie in Role-playing games and its relation to the phenomena of immersion and bleed, proposing the use of the concepts from the first section to better understand role-playing games.
In this paper, we investigate how young unemployed people make sense of their situation in the face of adversity. Drawing on Cultural Life Course Theory and a new line of research on imagination, this multiple-case study examines the role of imagination for young unemployed people. Based on three in-depth interviews with young academics, we find that the ability to imagine a better future is pivotal for these young people in dealing with unemployment. We integrate the theoretical concept of imagination with Bronfenbrenner’s theory of ecological system. The integrative framework provides a multi-leveled analysis that examines how imaginations work at various levels and how these interact. Imaginations originate from subjective ideas about the future, developed biographically and in dialogue with others as well as societal discourses. We utilize Stern’s concept of experience when investigating how the individual has to relate to what we term the "polyphonic choir of imaginations" consisting of various and sometimes contradictory voices about what it means to be unemployed. Neoliberal policies introduced in the Danish welfare state and neoliberal ideas are singled out as particularly influential. This paper highlights the importance of taking into account temporality in the sense that visions about the future greatly impact how people deal with unemployment here-and-now.
This paper seeks to explain the fact that particular cultural structures, artifacts, policies, and values often do not generate corresponding individual behavior/psychology that they are expected to produce. This discrepancy is troubling to the science of cultural psychology/sociocultural activity theory that seeks to understand the cultural organization of psychology; and it it is troubling to policy makers who strive to organize behavior (religious tolerance, diligent work habits, educational learning) through cultural structures and policies. I discuss two explanations for this discrepancy. One is that individual processes contradict cultural influences on psychology. The other explanation is that culture is multifaceted, and cultural factors other than an expected one, are influential in organizing a psychology. I illustrate the second explanation with a case study of moral behavior among Chinese elementary students. These youngsters disobeyed moral teaching in school because they were more influenced by outside influences, ranging from Chinese traditional relations called Guanxi, to modern commercial, privatizing practices. This paper uses individual variations and contradictions in cultural psychology to refine the epistemology and ontology of cultural theory.
Drawing from qualitative analyses of interviews, ethnographic data, and a review of interdisciplinary literature, this manuscript puts forth a theory of moral life course narratives among U.S. evangelical and mainline Protestants. This theory delineates the relationship between religious worldviews and conceptions of moral behaviors, and the manner in which these worldviews and attendant moral conceptions change across the life course for community members. Grounded theory analyses of 32 participants’ divinity-based moral discourses were interpreted in conjunction with their worldviews, as well as church, home, and school contexts. Analyses indicated that evangelical children highlighted their moral transgressions because they regarded themselves as still quite close to a sinful birth. Evangelical adults, who had been saved and were moving toward God, temporally and spiritually distanced themselves from the morally wrong deeds of their youth. Meanwhile, mainline children and adolescents rarely reasoned about their moral experiences in terms of divinity. This finding is understood in light of their church’s emphasis on developing an individualized relationship with God over time. The study and resultant theory elaborate cultural constructions and transmissions of moral life course narratives that, in turn, provide a framework for understanding when, why, and how divinity enters into moral meaning making for cultural community members. We conclude by advocating for theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches that expose the cultural nature of developmentally dynamic moral selves.
This article discusses how participants in a foreign language class negotiate instances of power and manage the constraints embedded in the discourse of a textbook. The aim is to analyse the manner in which teacher and students collaboratively set up a participation locus that is less dependent on institutional and social norms. Because the interactive space of the classroom is an environment in which power relationships become explicit, I am especially concerned with how the students (who are all Chinese beginner-level learners of Portuguese) deal with the limitations imposed by their textbook discourse and negotiate with their teacher new ways of participation that enable them to have a more decisive voice in the class. I take a microanalytical perspective to analyse the actions that participants (teacher and students) perform to contest for power and create a flexible order of local rank that contrasts with the more stable notion of institutional rank imposed by school norms. The results show that active participation by students, with the collaboration of their teacher, challenges the conventional image of passiveness that is often attributed to Chinese learners.
The article discusses the figure of the celebrity chef and explores what can be called the culinary metaphorics of the self. It is argued that this ubiquitous contemporary figure is represented in terms borrowed from Romanticism, something that allows it to function in a way analogous to the Lacanian ‘Name-of-the-Father’. Furthermore, the article probes into the culinary esthetics and its relation to the production of the self. It is argued that contemporary culinary culture can be understood as a rite of passage that corresponds to certain neoliberal transitional demands in relation to the self.
This article seeks to develop the concept of shadow trajectories through analyzing narratives of six sisters on the process of becoming mothers. Development implies a dynamic tension between literal and imagined domains, which has been called poetic motion. Psychological novelty emerges from the polarized connections between literal x imagined, possible x performed domains, and between past–present–future. The six sisters (interviewed when they were 65–82 years old, and referred along the text by numbers—Sister 1 to Sister 6, to emphasize that chronological order in time), and I discuss, through their diverse experiences, personal movements that can represent cultural novelty inside their social contexts. Novelty seems to emerge from the interplay of what is seen, dreamed of, or planned as possibilities and what is effectively performed along their trajectories. I call these directions "shadow trajectories," in opposition to other lines supposed to be "dominant," both lines present and dynamically tensioned within the dialogical self-territory. The article intends to explore how these two kinds of trajectories are actualized in the women’s current experience, focusing on how "shadow trajectories" can support, amplify, direct, undermine, and create developmental continuity concerning "dominant or main trajectories."
This article proposes approximations between Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and Serge Moscovici’s social representation theory. Both authors are interested in the relationship between agents/groups, social context, and culture, and both value the symbolic dimension in the construction of social reality. Bourdieu highlights the social world of struggles between the socialized agent and culture, while Moscovici privileges interactions involving the collective subject which, whether in conflict or consensus, produces a theory of social knowledge that is revealing of culture. In this broader context, the article highlights relations between "social positions" and "groups" which are present in both Bourdieu and Willem Doise, an important collaborator of Moscovici in the area of social representation theory. Such relations are founded on the principle of structural homology, a principle based on the correspondence between social structure and symbolic systems. This discussion leads to another: the need to understand "consensus" and "conflict" in groups, in both Moscovici and Doise, relating them to the action of forces in Bourdieu’s social field of struggles. The notion of "group," which is valued in our text, is little discussed by these authors. We emphasize the necessity to go deeper into group interactions in articulation with positions in the social field, and to value group representations and practices in meaning negotiation processes, as well to discuss the question of social change. We propose studying social representations—in groups with homogeneous practices—as a symbolic form of condensation and measurement of symbolic capital, adding to this approach the notion of social position and semiotic mediation.
In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education: "culture as pattern," "culture as boundary," "culture as authorship," and "culture as critical dialog." In the "culture as pattern," education aims at socializing people into a given cultural practice. Any decline from culturally valued patterns becomes a deficit for education to eliminate. In the "culture as boundary," encounter with other cultures highlights their arbitrariness and equality. Education focuses on celebration of diversity, tolerance, pluralism, social justice, and equal rights. The "culture as authorship" is about authorial transcendence of the given recognized by others. Education promotes dialogic creativity and authorship. Student/author is the final authority of his/her own education. "Culture as critical dialog" promotes testing ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. Critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, promoting never-ending search for truth. Education aims at the critical examination of the self, life, world, and society. Student is welcomed as an ultimate spoilsport, a devil’s advocate. In conclusion, we discuss complex relationships among the four gestalt approaches to culture and education and the ontology of these gestalt approaches. As a by-product of our analysis, we critically deconstruct the concept of meaning making as deeply dialogic process, separating it from its many masks that are mistakenly identified with it.
Happiness has become a new moral regime in neoliberal societies that defines what is right and wrong and stresses the insource of responsibility. More importantly, happiness stands out as a new model of selfhood that aligns with the neoliberal ideology of individualism and consumerism at the same time that legitimizes and rekindles this same ideology in seemingly nonideological terms through the discourse of science. The paper claims that this model of selfhood turns citizens into psytizens, that is, into psychological clients whose full functionality as individuals is largely tied to the pursuing, consuming, and development of their own happiness. The paper analyzes this notion of psytizen and its three main features, comments upon the happiness industry that simultaneously presupposes and targets this model of selfhood, and examines the role that happiness studies, in general, and positive psychology, in particular, play in shaping this emerging notion of citizenship.
Proceeding from the assumption that emotional competencies are vital components of identity work, this article focuses on emotion talk in interactions as conducive to the speaker's maintaining dignity and forming desired relatedness with their counterpart. We compare the same speaker's emotion-identity management in two different yet related encounter types: (1) an aggressive bargaining, where his dignified self is threatened and (2) his reflexive account of this event. Thereby we aim to identify alternating emotion-talk strategies as cultural resources in coping with specific encounters' constraints and tasks. Materials are drawn from a study on talk-in-interaction of young Israeli men. Extensive discourse analysis is conducted of the speaker's performance throughout the two encounters. Findings reveal two sets of emotional-discursive strategies in constructing the speaker's self-in-relations and in retrospectively positioning himself vis-à-vis his own past experience. The speaker's competence of maneuvering between two self-in-interaction models—aggressiveness and detachment—is demonstrated, using or avoiding emotion talk in accordance with his different encounters' tasks, eventually producing a coherent, morally justified image of himself throughout the sequence of events. Linking emotion talk to the construction of a dignified self, analysis points at the ambivalent status of emotion-discourse as a resource of identity-work, hinging on specific encounter rules.
This paper discusses the interface of dialogical self-theory and institutional context with reference to the schooling of ethnic minorities. It proposes a more nuanced approach to identifying cultural resources within institutions that contribute to dialogical movements and positioning, thereby advancing the application of dialogical self-theory within institutionalized spaces. Drawing on sociocultural concepts of identity construction, the discussion outlines how I-positions are tethered to social practices, relationships, power, and relations within institutions. These cultural resources are highlighted because they foreground how dialogical tensions occur and transcend opposing voices within an institution itself. In providing a textual analysis of Edward Said’s encounter with a school rule that tended to suppress his Arab identity, the integrated dialogical self-theory and sociocultural approach can highlight the contours of dialogical frictions as a result of negotiation with power across an institution to arrive at a desired I-position.
As a psychologist who has conducted research interviews in a foreign language setting, I have found that the methodological literature does not provide needed insights on how to tackle the issue of interpreters and the following article is an attempt to untangle some of the methodological and theoretical concerns this situation entails. The starting point of analysis is the qualitative research interview and discusses what the methodological challenges and theoretical opportunities data gathering through interviews with the help of interpreters might entail.
Starting from a narrative conception of identity, in this paper, we present a description of the process of construction of lesbian identity by applying Bruner's indicators of selfhood. Our main goal is to analyze the personal process of (re)construction of lesbian identity and its connection with socio-cultural context. The autobiographical narratives of eight (8) lesbian women were analyzed and categorized in accordance with a model that describes the construction of homosexual identity in three phases: before Self-definition, Self-definition, and after Self-definition. The analysis conducted allowed us to describe, in an integrated and coherent way, the process that led the participants to a dialogical and personal position in the flow of social discourses about homosexuality they are involved in.
Self-esteem research has been in "crisis" during the last decade, due to the lack of strong, consistent correlations between self-esteem and behavioral outcomes. Some researchers have interpreted this as indicating that self-esteem is inconsequential in many important areas of life. However, the model of direct causality used in correlational research, between a general self-esteem trait and specific behaviors, may be unrealistic. In contrast, this paper develops a model of self-esteem-motivated behaviour as originating from past, current or future (desired) self-concepts. This model shows how an interaction of catalytic factors determines how self-esteem influences behaviour. That is, what "self-esteem" actually "does." By clarifying the different ways in which self-esteem affects behavior, the model shows that construing self-esteem as a passive variable with direct causal influence on behavior is inadequate and misleading and that previous contradictory results are a consequence of this misconceptualization and subsequent reification of self-esteem. Because self-esteem and the self-concept are inseparable (one is an attitude towards the other) self-esteem-motivated behavior is always about self-construction, and thus performative. Future self-esteem research and theory should therefore focus on how people seek to enact, maintain, or defend a desired identity through performative actions.
Family secrets are commonly considered as a defense mechanism that conceals shameful content and evades guilt. As shame and guilt threaten narcissistic perfection, secrecy functions as a self-protective mechanism by evading acknowledgment of imperfection, thus conceptualizing imperfection as a psychological threat. However, the meaning of perfection and imperfection is culturally grounded, and, therefore, our understanding of family secrets may gain better understanding by examining different cultural perspectives of perfection/imperfection. In this context, we can gain insights to the process of family secrets through wabi sabi, a Japanese aesthetic ideal and philosophy that stresses imperfection as the basis for harmony. In this paper, I suggest an interpretation of family secrets that draws on wabi sabi aesthetics. The paper's main argument is illustrated through a careful reading of Murakami's Kafka on the shore, presenting wabi sabi of family secrets as distinguished aesthetics and a potential source for mental transformation and growth.
The qualitative research interview is arguably the most widespread method of inquiry across the human and social sciences today. In spite of its popularity, there is a significant lack of theoretical reflection concerning this qualitative method of inquiry. On the background of other scholars’ recent experiences with interviewing in different cultural settings, this article begins to develop a theoretical account of qualitative interviewing. First, intercultural interviews are considered as methodological breaching experiments that enable us to better understand the intricacies of a practice that is otherwise taken for granted. Next, I argue that this should lead to a denaturalization of the interview. Qualitative interviewing must be considered not simply as a neutral instrument, capable of representing a "natural" human relationship, but rather as a social practice with a history that provides a specific context for human interaction and knowledge production. Some significant elements of this context are finally spelled out.
When conducting open-ended qualitative interviews, it is important to remember that the method originates from the Western perspective. In China we encountered a number of problems when using this method, with little information on dealing with them in the literature, or if information does exist it has not attracted enough attention in the research community to be readily accessible. We therefore saw a need to uncover these difficulties, encouraging a broader discussion about these types of cross-cultural issues and how to handle them in research situations. The differences between the Chinese interview situation and the European interview situation will be presented in seven points. We will present examples and discuss potential sources for these problems and their implications for ecological validity.