Culture, Memory and Self-hood: an interdisciplinary field Cultural psychology – psychological anthropology "We realized that if we could go and study carefully the diverse ways of different groups of human beings, like us in body and brain, strangely unlike us in all of their learned behaviour, we could add enormously to our knowledge of human potentialities." (Margaret Mead 1956, pg. 11, The Culture and Personality School)

Culture and Personality School Social anthropologists today would have us view the life of an individual within a society as a series of social transactions, and many believe that a great part of that individual's self image is formed by the quality of thes transactions. (Benedict, 1934, Patterns of Culture 258).

CHAT `every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: First on the social level, and later on the psychological level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals` (Vygotsky 1978: 57).

Enduring questions and disputes  1. Where is culture – the level discussion (How is culture defined? Are we cultural dopes?)  2. How do we study culture? (Why is it so difficult to keep culture in mind? Cultural universality/specificity Cole 1996 )

Methodology Why is it so difficult to keep culture in mind? (Cole 1996) Where is culture in the scientific mind? Wundt's ethnopsychology or Volkerpsychologie: (The second psychology) Setting: Not the lab, but natural and sociocultural surroundings Method: Not experimental, but participant observational, in-debt-interviews, questionnaires etc. Answers: Not universal laws, but practical applications

 From cross-cultural psychology to the second psychology Thus, the topic becomes not reaction times and errors in the laboratory, but actions mediated by artifacts. The new, genetic method includes multiple time scales of history, ontogenesis, and microgenesis. The setting involves everyday activities and laws get replaced by practical applications. In this new science, mind emerges in joint mediated activity-social practices internalized by active agents. Michael Cole 1996 Cultural Psychology

Positioneret deltager-observation (C.Hasse 2000)

The levels – the researchers decisions Where is culture? What are the limits of what scientists call culture?  1. The individual/subject level  2. The culture level

Claude Levi-Strauss' (1963) definition: "What is called 'culture' is a fragment of humanity which, from the point of view of the research at hand... presents significant discontinuities in relation to the rest of humanity.” (p.295, Bruner/Cole op cit. 1972).

Can culture get under peoples skin?  Make implicit cultural organisations of knowledge, building on assumptions, tacit beliefs and connections explicit (D’Andrade & Strauss 1992).  The cultural models are formed in practices and “doings”, while they on their part give directive force to certain motivations, without making persons ‘cultural dopes’ (Holland & Quinn 1987, Strauss 1992).

 “ The Psyche cannot be separated from the historically changing and culturally different intentional worlds in which it plays a constitutive part ” R.A. Shweder Cultural Psychology (1990)

 “..often transparent to those who use it. Once learned, it becomes what one sees with, but seldom what one sees” (Hutchins, E (1980) Culture and Inference. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. P. 12)

Questions to the papers In proplongation Ole Michael Spaten's discussion of Bruner (children construct identity without stable core self, without continuity?) vs Mead (children construct their identity – as suggest – through social interaction)? 1. Is there a contradiction? Astrid Kleis, Lisa Schröder & Heidi Keller argue there is a cultural diversity in ‚autonomous vs. related‘ in mother- child reminiscing connected to different cultural models of the self 2. How can we find cultural diversity as researchers if our subject matter is itself without continuity?

Questions to the papers In Manuel L. De la Mata Benítez et al. it is argued that self and autobiographical memory construct each other through narratives and that we can evidence cultural as well as gender differences. 3. To what extent are the results scientific constructions of cultural diversity taking the nationstate as ‘culture’ and how are accounts of internal complexities within the groups of Mexicans, Spain and Denmark included (and the same for gender). Tia Hansen has explicitly taken up the problem of levels. 4. When we find diversity across generations can culture be defined by nation states ( ‘Danish’ culture vs. ‘North American’) or is culture connected to collective activity? How does history – as culture – get ‘under peoples skin’?