APPENDIX 1

APPENDIX 1

(This material is intended as background reading for students reading the paper:
Cultural Psychology and the Centre-ground of Psychology)

Jerome Bruner's Position

With the exception of the work of Jerome Bruner, and possibly Michael Cole (Cole, 1990) and Richard Shweder (Shweder, 1991; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993), the notion of Cultural Psychology as having a central place in the discipline has been more or less overlooked. In the Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures in December 1989 (published the following year as Acts of Meaning) Bruner argues that a psychology which:

" . . . concerns itself centrally with meaning, . . . inevitably becomes a cultural psychology [which] must venture beyond the conventional areas of positivist science with its ideals of reductionism, causal explanation and prediction." (Bruner, 1990; p.xiii).

Bruner is clearly painting a modern vision of psychology as a cultural science first proposed more than a hundred years ago by Wundt and Dilthey. Bruner was involved with George Miller and others in the cognitive revolution in psychology of the late 1950's and the 1960's. It was a revolution that stressed:

" . . . an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology - not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behaviour, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. [. .] It was an altogether more profound revolution than that. Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated. It focused upon symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and in making sense not only of the world, but of themselves. Its aim was to prompt psychology to join forces with its sister interpretive disciplines in the humanities and in the social sciences." (p.2).

But this revolution was quickly sidetracked by the information processing approach, and the powerful ways that computers could be used to model artificial intelligence.

"Very early on, for example, emphasis began shifting from 'meaning' to 'information', from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters." (p.4).

Rather, it is in academic fields outside psychology that a cultural science approach to the human mind was being pursued. The anthropologist, Clifford Geertz suggests that "there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture" (Geertz, 1973). It is the constitutive role of culture as a platform for human mental functioning that is so important. The culture into which each child is born provides pre-determined structures for human thinking.

"The symbolic systems that individuals used in constructing meaning were systems that were already in place, already 'there', deeply entrenched in culture and language". (p.11).

"It is man's participation in culture, and the realisation of his mental powers through culture that make it impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of the individual alone. [. .] Given that psychology is so immersed in culture, it must be organised around those meaning-making and meaning using processes that connect man to culture. [. .] By virtue of participation in culture, meaning is rendered public and shared. Our culturally adapted way of life depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation." (p.12-13).

Cultural Psychology, however, goes much further than the assertion of the importance of culture to the study of human psychology. Examination of the cultural products of the mind reveals patterns of human thinking that challenge the pre-eminence given to rational thought. A view that at least in Western culture has prevailed since the Enlightenment. It is far from the case that all that is not rational is simply irrational, in the sense that it is absurd, illogical or unsound. The interpersonal exchange of meanings and the cultural transmission of knowledge uses another very powerful form of human thinking. It was in an earlier text, that Bruner argues for the recognition of:

" . . . two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another". (p.11)

These two modes are the paradigmatic and narrative mode. The first mode is logico-scientific, rational, formal, rigorous, and is concerned with abstracting generalities or universals. While the second mode is imaginative, addresses human concerns, organises events uniquely in space and time, emphasises meaning, and acknowledges the multi-determined nature of human action. Bruner's crucial recognition of this narrative mode as a fundamental feature of human cognitive processes is shared by Sarbin (1986), who proposes narrative as a root metaphor in psychology for the modelling of context, and Polkinghorne (1988), who recognises narrative as an important methodological tool for research.

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APPENDIX 2

Table 2: Some Key Features of a Cultural Psychology

Cultural Psychology is concerned with:

the relationship between culture and mind;

the joint functions of mind and culture in the meaning-making process;

the nature of the collective mentality that is formative both in our experience of ourselves and external reality;

how everything we do, say, indeed everything around us, has potential for meaning and significance, and is central to the understanding of human action and experience;

how present meanings are mediated by cultural processes for transmission historically both at a distance and over time;

Cultural Psychology emphasizes that:

higher mental processes are the accumulative product of socio-cultural interactions;

as human beings we react to meanings not stimulus events;

a complex inter-relationship that exists between communication, mental processes and behaviour;

communication is a central theme of cultural psychology;

the basic processes of communication and thinking are sign processes;

both empirical and interpretative (hermeneutic) methodologies are valid;

the constructivist together with the positivist approach both contribute understanding to methodology, human knowledge, truth, and objective reality;

Cultural Psychology encourages:

the recognition of a field of study to which psychologists, psychotherapists, philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, cultural and media theorists will all contribute;

a psychological discipline with a central focus on meaning which recognises the relevance of cognitive/behavioural, psychodynamic, humanistic and transpersonal approaches;

an inevitable confrontation with many of the critical and contentious issues raised by the scientific study of behaviour;

Cultural Psychology involves:

the close examination of the stimulus as a complex cultural product, ie. with a particular history of interaction with other human minds;

collaboration with research in the study of cultural structures, semiotics, narrative theory, and media studies;

recognising the primary role of the structure of language in structuring the human mind;

the study of intentional (or constituted worlds;

recognising that human identity and experience are constructed discursively in language, in myth, in narrative, in ritual;

recognising that meanings may or may not be obvious to persons themselves or the people around them; communication can be unconscious; human culture can be viewed as the accumulation of unconscious projections;

Cultural Psychology affirms:

that the mind can be studied by its cultural products;

that the study of popular culture, its texts and its influence and effects is crucial;

that the codes and conventions of the visual media are crucial to understanding the meaning making process;

that narrative is an important cognitive process, a pervasive form of human communication, integral to the production and shaping of cultural realities.

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