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THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF
PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY |
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| Main Page |
| Contents |
| Alphabetical Index |
| Hints for prints |
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| Impressum |
| Culture |
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| Kelly
cautions therapists to pay attention to a client's culture so as to be
able to assess
the effects of cultural controls on personal constructs. This advice is
based
on the definition of culture that Kelly adopted, and on the location of
the concept, culture, in the basic theory. In this entry, I will first
look at
some of the definitions of culture in the literature. Then I will cite
the
definition Kelly preferred and his recommendations about discovering
the impact
of culture on clients. Finally I will allude to a few of the later
developments
in the PCP orientation to culture. Over time, culture has been a highly fluid concept. Its Latin roots are connected with tilling the soil and facilitating growth. But it was also used to apply metaphorically to refinement in persons. A dualism attends the evolution of the concept to this very day. In classical German, the term Kultur was used to describe the innate spiritual brotherhood of people who belong to a defined community. Kultur was contrasted with Zivilisation from the French (civilisation), understood to refer to the artificiality, the contrived manners, and pretended aestheticism of the snobbish upper classes. In English, for a time, the term "culture" was also applied exclusively to "high" culture – the arts and manners of the educated elites. With the rise of anthropology, the term was adopted to describe groups holistically. As one anthropologist put it, "culture is to a population aggregate what personality is to the individual; and the ethos is the core of most probable behaviors" (Coutu, in Kroeber & Kluckhohn,1952, p. 119). Still, among anthropologists, there are many different conceptualizations of how to characterize an aggregate. In 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn assembled 156 definitions of culture and classified them under six headings, each presupposing a different reading of what a given population aggregate is likely to share. In descriptive definitions that attempt to enumerate the content of culture, the items are taken to be similar in the lives of members of a given group. Historical definitions emphasize an aggregate's joint social heritage or tradition. Rules and ways of behaving are the focus of normative definitions of culture. There are also genetic definitions that characterize culture in terms of products, ideas, or symbols. In structural definitions the emphasis is on statistical regularities. Still other definitions are psychological, attaching culture to the outcomes of how children are raised, and referring to processes such as "adjustment", "learning", and "development". During the latter half of the twentieth century, theoretical approaches to culture shifted to attempts to account for cultural change. Defining culture as a mode of practice, created and recreated through "actions infused with theory", Bauman (1973) asserts that because of their ability to theorize, human beings shape and break - even break out of - cultural patterns. De Certeau (1998) explains that culture is both actualized and changed in the representation of life events in art or even in ordinary conversation. People who talk or represent experiences in artistic creation build on already existing relational networks. In his view, opportunities for cultural change emerge because there is an inevitable breach between representation and interpretation, between intention (of the speaker/ performer-artist) and assimilation (by the listener / audience). Thus, culture is part and parcel of people's modes of dealing with the world. "Culture is what guides people in their thinking, feeling, and acting, and serves as an emotional road map or plan of action in their struggle for survival" (Arvizu, 1994). How individuals read the road map is spelled out in personal construct theory, the psychology of anticipations. Post-Kellyian research into how experience is constructed by different cultural practices has relied on both quantitative and qualitative research to elicit unexpected varieties of constructs (Ross, 1996). Rep grids have proven useful in ferreting out cross-cultural differences in the construals of clinical symptoms (see Leff, 1973; 1977; 1986; Tamaka-Matsumi & Marsella, 1976); and differences in attitudes to "others" (Neimeyer & Fukuyama, 1984). Oxley and Hort (1996), who choose a different path, argue that culture is about personal construct systems in interaction. Thus, they define culture in terms of "ecologies of meaning". Their qualitative reading accords with the view that culture is expressed in the meeting of communities of selves (Kalekin-Fishman, 1999; see also Mair, 1977). The encounters, interleaved with "plain talk", are part of the dynamics of cultural change (Kalekin-Fishman, 2000). Recognizing that the contemporary human condition is characterized by an active search for changes in culture, Scheer (2003) discusses the variegated challenges to construing presented by experiences of crossing from culture to culture. He points out that the traveler (Walker, 2000), the business person (Jankowicz, 2003), and the person involved in politics (Stojnov, 1999) are likely to misconstrue others' actions, just as their own actions will be misconstrued, when they are confronted by / confront cultural practices different from their own. To sum up his analysis, Scheer shows that transferring theoretical models from place to place may also be a precarious project. He shows that disseminating personal construct theory is problematic because of the difficulties that attend the translation of its terminology into languages other than English. There is a profound irony in the perception that because PCT is so deeply affiliated with Kelly's native language and with Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, the theory, like many clients, is enmeshed in the cultural controls of its sources. |
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| References |
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Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
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