Introduction

pp. 1-11

in: Carl Ratner, Cultural psychology and qualitative methodology, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

World events have alerted social scientists to the fact that people in diverse cultures are psychologically different in many ways. Research, in cross-cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, history, and sociology has attempted to investigate the effect of culture on perception, emotions, personality, reasoning, memory, and psychological disturbances. This field of research is generally called cultural psychology. It has indicated that psychological phenomena have cultural origins, characteristics, and functions. "Cultural templates penetrate to the innermost of people's souls, so to speak, and mold emotional life and somato-psychic reactions in stereotyped and patterned ways' (Wikan, 1990, p. 17). Thus, "emotional meaning is fundamentally structured by particular cultural systems and particular social and material environments. Talk about emotions is simultaneously talk about society, about power and politics, about kinship and marriage, about normality and deviance" (Lutz, 1988, pp. 5–6). "Political and economic structures are embodied in experience" (Good, 1992, pp. 200–201).