CULTURE & CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

Cultural psychology is a field of psychology which assumes the idea that culture and mind are inseparable, and that psychological theories grounded in one culture are likely to be limited in applicability when applied to a different culture. As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion". Cultural psychology is that branch of psychology which deals with the study and impact of culture, tradition and social practices on psyche for the unity of humankind.

Cultural psychology is distinct from cross-cultural psychology in that the cross-cultural psychologists generally use culture as a means of testing the universality of psychological processes rather than determining how local cultural practices shape psychological processes. So whereas a cross-cultural psychologist might ask whether Piaget's stages of development are universal across a variety of cultures, a cultural psychologist would be interested in how the social practices of a particular set of cultures shape the development of cognitive processes in different ways.

SOCIAL DIVERSITY

Social diversity is the mixture of different types of people in a community. It is used to describe the uniqueness and individuality of the society. Sociology as a science is concerned with the study of people as a group. It examines human activities in all of its aspects, from political inclinations to religious believes. There are a number of groups that society is divided into according to interests, earnings, age, sex and other numerous factors. In general, one can split modern society into two groups: minority and dominant. A minority group is a so called subordinate group members of which possess less control and power over their own lives than members of the majority or the dominant groups. Minorities are not simply measured by numbers, but rather by the substance of the majority group against which they are evaluated. For instance, black people in South Africa are obviously not considered minority if simply counted, however in their political power and due to historical circumstances they are thought of as a minority group. Minorities can also be differentiated from the rest of the society as people experiencing social pressure and lessening of their opportunities for health, success and other virtues in comparison with the rest of the society.

Subordinate groups can easily be distinguished by physical qualities as well, such as skin color or language. These can be the most drastic differences setting people apart into a minority group. Also, high in-group marriages and friendships can be an indicator of a minority group. For instance Asian culture representatives are more likely to marry within their own ethnic group than to mix with other nationalities. Dominant groups are the exact opposite of the minority groups. Dominant or majority groups are those usually in control of the rest of the society. Members of the dominant group exercise more power have wider authority and privileges as compared to the minority group members.

Different groups in societies are always formed due to certain beliefs, ideological inclinations and prejudices of their members. Racism, for instance is to this day one of the strongest belief that leads to prejudged attitude toward people of different racial groups. It implies that based on the fact of belonging to a certain race, a person is more/less intelligent, educated, prone to crime, or any other prejudice that is convenient to a dominant group. Prejudice toward people of certain representative groups leads to discrimination either based on real fact, or more commonly on a mere assumption of that fact. One can notice that society suffers from many forms of racism and prejudices these days, although often it is hard to define and clearly see them. Ideological racism is one of those instances where it is not easy to perceive it, nevertheless it exists. Historically there were a lot of groups and clubs where people gathered according to their ideologies or beliefs they held and lived by those through discriminating others.

A bright example of one of those would be Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis whose idea of a perfect world would be extinction of all black and Jewish population in the world. There are still some traces of ideological racism in our institutions and political organizations where one is supposed to think and act in a certain way. The so called institutional racism is also widely present in all countries’ governments and big corporations although no one really likes to recognize it. Regardless of the problems societies all over the world are facing today it is clear that social diversity is a key driver to development, growth and making the world a better place for everyone. Societies with little diversity are rarely industrially, economically and educationally developed, while countries like America are in continuous development process and struggle for an improved future.

CULTURE AND IDENTITY CULTURAL DIVERSITY

STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL UNIVERSALS.

A structural universal refers to issues that must be addressed if a society is to survive and evolve. We have referred to these earlier as the basic problems of human existence. In effect, we are talking here about the kinds of social tasks that people must accomplish for their survival as a society. Structural universals are not particularly difficult to find, given that all human societies have, at one time or another, to solve certain problems if their are to survive. In general therefore, we can note the following examples of structural universals (features common to all human societies).

·        Communication: People have to develop ways of communicating their ideas to each other. This usually takes the form of language, although it may also involve the use of writing. Writing is not a universal feature of societies, however. Many societies, especially in the past, had no way of communicating their beliefs through writing and these are called pre-literate societies.

·        A Family system: This relates to the structural problems of regulating relationships between members of a society, the socialisation of children and the like.

·        Religion: All known societies have, at some point, developed religions. A reason for this may be that the belief in a god or gods is a very effective means of bringing people together (social integration). Not only do religions give people a sense of having things in common (values, for example), but the fact that they involve the belief in a supra-human force or forces (something superior to, and more powerful than, the individual) means that they represent very effective sources of social control.

·        Social control systems: These vary from informal controls (values, norms, etc.) through to the highly-developed control systems we find in modern societies (police, courts, prisons, armies and so forth).

·        A division of labour / role allocation system: Even in very small societies there exists a variety of tasks to be performed if people are to survive. Societies have, therefore, to devise ways of sharing-out these tasks amongst their members (hence the idea of “allocating different roles”, such as work and family roles).

·        Social stratification: This refers to the way different roles are ranked against each other in terms of social importance. During this course we will be looking at a variety of ways people are stratified in different societies on the basis of such things as:

·                                 Social class - stratification based on work role.

·                                 Gender and age - biological systems of stratification.

·                                 Ethnicity - stratification based around the cultural background of different groups.

A cultural universal refers to possible similarities in the particular way a society (or social group) chooses to solve structural problems of existence. For example:

·        A family system is a structural universal - it appears in all known human societies. However, in this example a cultural universal refers to the idea that a particular family type appears in all societies (for example, a family structure consisting of one or more children plus two adults of the opposite sex – the technical term for which is a nuclear family structure).

·        In this particular instance, it is debatable as to whether or not this type of cultural organisation does, strictly speaking, appear in all known societies. There is a wide range of cultural variation in family types not just between societies but also within the same society.

The problem we have, when looking at the idea of cultural universals is that of deciding how specific something has to be in order to count as a universal feature of human social organisation. In effect, how widely or narrowly we draw the definition of universal affects the conclusion we reach about cultural patterns.

·        As in the example above, it is probable that the nuclear type of family arrangement is a fairly common feature in most if not all societies at some point in their development. In modern Britain, for example, we can find clear examples of just this type of family structure. However, we can also find a wide range of cultural variations (single parent families, step families, homosexual families and so forth).

·        The point to consider here is that do we define universal as simply meaning:

·        “being present at some point in every society’s development”?

·        Or do we define it as

·        “the only or dominant cultural form in a society”?