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speakers of Tok Pisin, and most do not even understand Taiap (ibid., pp. 7071). The reason is that conversations with children are primarily in Tok Pisin,
especially about important topics that elders want a child to attend to (ibid.,
pp. 194-195).
The strong, systematic association of language shift with gender and age
groups proves that linguistic symbols rest upon social processes for their
formation and distribution. Gapuners did not individually create idiosyncratic
personal symbols in opposition to social processes; their language shift was
itself a social process that was motivated by social changes in work and
education. Nor did Gapuners negotiate semiotic constructs in a forum of
interpersonal bargaining. Nor did other villagers throughout Papua New
Guinea coincidentally decide to renounce their native vernaculars in purely
intellectual acts that were removed from social life. In fact, parents do not
even understand why they and their children have shifted from Taiap to Tok
Pisin. Parents are unaware of the fact that they have developed new forms of
linguistic interchange with their children (ibid., pp. 7, 223). Obviously, then,
they did not consciously decide to communicate differently. Rather, their use
of language unconsciously flows from the manner in which their social lives
are organized.
The language shift was also tied to collective significations that the two
languages had for the villagers. Taiap came to be devalued by Gapuners as
stubborn, backward, anti-social, anti-Christian, and not useful, while Tok
Pisin was admired because it came to be associated with men, wealth,
sophistication, and interesting foreign people (ibid., pp. 20, 252-253). These
changes in the signification of the languages were collectively shared among
the villagers. They were not individual constructions.
These new meanings clearly originated in the changed social activities of
migratory work, religion, and education. Since work brought new wealth and
experience, of course the language associated with it came to be valued (ibid.,
pp. 250-251). A complete formulation of the language shift would be that
changes in activities along with corresponding changes in the value of the two
languages led to the language shift.3
5) The emphasis on personal change overlooks the fact that psychology is
organized by cultural processes and that substantial psychological change
requires major alterations in these formative social relations, conditions, and
institutions. It is a mistake to believe that individuals can effect substantial
psychological change on their own. Individuals can only generate slight
psychological and behavioral changes as long as social influences on them
remain unchallenged. A good example is the recent attempt of parents in a
small suburban community in Minnesota to spend more time with their
children. Their children had been devoting most of their free time to extra-
curricular activities such as sports, plays, ballet, and music practice at school,
churches, and in youth groups. Parents requested that these organizations
reduce the time that kids were required to spend so that they could have more
time at home with family members. Although many children and team leaders
agreed with the ideal, they resisted the change because they feared that it
would lead to a decline in their performance and ultimately to losing in
competition with teams from other communities which would practice more
than they did. One parent said, "less competitive programs can hurt your
chance for a college scholarship" (New York Times, June 13, 2000, p. A14).
Thus, competitive pressures from the broader society constrained the behavior
of a local community despite the desire by many to change.
If community change is difficult to effect amidst broader social constraints,
individual change is more difficult to achieve in isolation.
6) Social institutions, conditions, systems, and ideologies do not change
through piecemeal changes in personal thinking and behavior. On the
contrary, they change via organized social groups -- from medical associations
to business councils to labor unions to feminist organizations to anti-abortion
groups -- engaging in systematic, massive campaigns to reorganize obdurate,
objectified social entities. Social change involves legal, political, social,
economic, and often military campaigns to overcome the enormous resistance
of the establishment to qualitative change (cf. Ratner, 1993a, 1997a, b, 1999
for further critiques of the individualistic approach to cultural psychology).
7) Individualistic cultural psychologists overlook social aspects of agency -the fact that agency is oriented toward, depends upon, and is constrained by
social activities, institutions, conditions, and movements. All of the insights
from sociohistorical psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and
political philosophy concerning the social formation of agency are simply
dismissed and replaced by the notion that agency is a personal capability.
Individualistic cultural psychologists commit what social psychologists call
"the fundamental attribution error" -- the tendency to attribute behavior to
personal dispositions rather than situational influences (Norenzayan &
Nisbett, 2000).
Believing that microscopic interpersonal processes are personal constructions,
individualistic cultural psychologists fail to comprehend that they actually
appropriate and recapitulate broader collective processes.4
recapitulate cultural activities and concepts (cf. Ratner, 1997a, pp. 141-142 for
an analysis that elucidates the cultural basis of such a case).
What defines experience is the social activities and concepts in which it
occurs. What is crucial in the experience of adolescents is the social position
of adolescence as a distinctive transition period from the social roles of
childhood to adulthood in a society of highly individualized activities and
self-concepts. This general social position (and its specific differentiation
across classes, genders, and ethnic groups) is far more important in
determining the experience of adolescence than the particular identities of
one's parents.
An individual will have a far greater awareness of his cultural experience if he
understands its social position than if he understands the personal identities
and actions of the participants. An adolescent will have a deeper
understanding of being an adolescent if he comprehends the social position of
adolescence than if he merely reflects on the individual actions of himself and
his parents. Of course, if he wants to understand his idiosyncratic personal
inclinations then he must understand his individual parents. If he wants to
understand why he dislikes playing the trombone in the school band, he needs
to understand the pressure his mother put on him, the condescending
personality of the conductor, etc. However, these details do not significantly
affect the overall experience of adolescence. They are minor variations in the
general pattern that is similar for teenagers who like to play trombone and
who don't.
The encompassing of personal experience within general social activities and
concepts can be seen in the act of forming a personal identity. "Although
individuals are highly active in the process of self-making, the materials
available for writing one's own story are a function of our public and shared
notions of personhood. American accounts of the self, for example, involve a
set of culture-confirming ideas and images of success, competence, ability,
and the need to `feel good'" (Oyserman & Markus, 1998, p. 123). "The public
representations of selfhood that characterize a given sociocultural niche
function as common denominators -- they provide the primary structure of the
selves of those who live within these contexts. These shared ideas produce
necessary, although often unseen, commonalities in the selves of people
within a given context" (ibid., p. 109). "Although making a self appears to be
an individual and individualizing pursuit, it is also a collective and
collectivizing one" (ibid., p. 107). Identify-formation must be a collective and
collectivizing process because, "From a societal perspective, self-construction
is too important to be left as a personal project. Social integration and the
social order require that individuals of a given group have reasonably similar
answers to the `who am I' and `where do I belong' questions" (ibid., p. 107).
The fact that individualistic agency is fostered by, adapts to, and functions to
perpetuate specific social relations demonstrates that it is socially intentional
like all agency is.
If agency has a social character that depends upon social relations, it is not
intrinsically creative, fulfilling, or empowering. It only becomes so by
creating social relations that will promote these characteristics. In this
sense,agency is a historical project. It needs to be realized and perfected
through historical processes. It is akin to justice, morality, intelligence,
sensitivity, and language in the sense that all of these need to be realized
historically through reforming their social bases. None of them exists in true
(fully developed) form as an a priori, intrinsic quality of the individual (cf.
Marcuse, 1964, 1987).
Language exemplifies this point. Everyone has the capacity for language and
everyone expresses some language to some degree. However, the specific
kind and level of language that a person expresses depends upon her position
in a particular society. In the same way, agency is merely a potential
(capacity) which must be developed through social intercourse into a specific
form. Throughout the world, individuals no more possess the same kind of
agency than they use the same language.
If social relations are the essence of agency, enhancing the creativity,
fulfillment, and power of agency requires implementing fulfilling,
empowering, democratic social relations. Agency is only enhanced by
enhancing social relations which constitute it. Ironically, improving agency
requires going beyond it to related things -- social relations. If one tries to
alter agency by focusing exclusively on it, one will fail because one has
neglected its constituent social relations. The more one narrowly focuses on
changing agency by itself, the more agency will conform to social relations
because these constituents of agency have remained intact. Barber (1984, p.
xv) eloquently expresses the point that creative, fulfilling agency requires
humane social relations:
Autonomy is not the condition of democracy, democracy is the
condition of autonomy. Without participating in the common life that
defines them and in the decision-making that shapes their social habitat,
women and men cannot become individuals. Freedom, justice, equality,
and autonomy are all products of common thinking and common living;
democracy creates themWe are born in chains -- slaves of
dependency and insufficiency -- and acquire autonomy only as we learn
the difficult art of governing ourselves in common;...we acquire
equality only in the context of socially sanctioned political
arrangements that spread across naturally unequal beings a civic mantle
of artificial [cultural] equality.
therefore seems free even under alienation. In reality, however, the agency of
most people under alienation adapts to it and internalizes it (internalizing
oppression). Alienated agency does not escape from alienated social relations.
It only contains the potential for liberation. It must realize this potential by
engaging in social action to humanize the social organization of activities and
concepts.
that agency acts on cultural phenomena and is influenced by them. Like most
naturalistic theories of psychology, individualistic cultural psychology fails to
recognize that the characteristics of agency which it touts as natural are
actually current cultural characteristics (cf. Cushman, 1991 for a related
analysis of ideological bias in individualistic psychological theory).
The individualistic view is so fascinated by the personal decision-making of
contemporary agency that it overlooks the alienation inherent in this form of
agency. It fails to see that the personal, mundane acts which it glorifies as
freedom and creativity are stultified, conformist, alienated, isolated, selfcentered acts. It fails to see that, "our great modern world is all too often a
world in which men and women do not exist for others; in which, although
there are no public censors, there can also be no public goods; in which
monolithic social ends are prudently outlawed by imprudently proscribing all
social ends; in which altruistic behavior is discouraged in the name of
bargaining efficiency and utility accounting" (Barber, 1984, p. 71). Most of
the choices which people today make are clouded and prompted by massive
social influences such as advertising and the media.
Defining agency as constructing personal meanings further mystifies social
reality because it creates a false sense of equality, democracy, and fulfillment.
All people appear to be equally fulfilled and active because they construct and
negotiate personal meanings. A loader of milk bottles is as agentive in this
sense as a President. Personal agency erases social differences. Society also
appears to be democratic and fulfilling because its citizens are construed as
agents. Bruner believes that since people negotiate meanings, society is a
democratic forum. Social problems and inequalities in wealth and power are
erased by the notion of personal agency.
The individualistic notion of agency exempts society from critique because it
presumes that each individual is responsible for his own problems. Since each
individual can deal with social events any way he wishes, any difficulties he
may suffer are due to his style of dealing with events, not to the events
themselves. People who suffer under poverty, war, discrimination, and
autocratic leadership could disabuse themselves of any problems by simply
learning to ignore, circumvent, or negate them. If they don't, it's their fault.
There is no need to criticize or alter the social system.
Lacking a cultural analysis and unwittingly endorsing alienated agency as
normal and natural precludes the possibility that agency and society could
have different forms. Peoples' agency could be much more meaningful,
insightful, creative, and fulfilling if it directed social activities as well as
individual acts. However, individualistic cultural psychologists never entertain
this possibility because they mistakenly believe that agency is already realized
in making personal choices in the existing society. Utilizing an alienated,
Since individualistic social scientists are unaware of the social conditions that
foster their ignorance, social life must foster cultural concepts that obfuscate
it. Mystifying ideology is a hidden effect of certain social activities (Bourdieu,
p. 14; cf. Ratner, 1994 for a cultural psychological analysis of the
unconscious).
In contrast to the individualistic approach, a truly cultural psychological view
of agency emphasizes the dependence which agency has on social relations. It
emphasizes the fact that agency forms social relations and has a social form
that is rooted in the way activities are socially organized. A cultural
psychological view elucidates the concrete social character of agency,
critiques it, and suggests improvements. It critiques the particular historical
organization of social life that fosters the social character of agency. And it
encourages collective movements to humanize social activities as the key to
humanizing psychological well-being.
A cultural psychological view of agency applies a cultural analysis to its own
standpoint. It recognizes that its conception of agency rests upon cultural
values and has cultural implications. The notion that agency is socially
intentional rests on the value that humans depend upon each other and need to
establish harmonious social relationships. The critique of existing forms of
agency rests upon the value that existing social life (i.e., social activities) has
deleterious features which can be made more humane and democratic. The
cultural implications of this position are that social change is necessary and
possible. Cultural psychology maintains that the cultural values which
underlie its analysis of agency strengthen its analysis and make it more
accurate and useful. Contrary to popular opinion which regards cultural values
as biasing objectivity and utility, cultural psychology argues that certain
cultural values aid the understanding of particular issues. The spectacular
progress of the natural sciences was certainly abetted by cultural values of
capitalism -- which is why the natural sciences are so much more advanced in
capitalist countries. In the same way, the cultural perspective that I have
utilized in this paper helps to deepen an understanding of agency and other
psychological phenomena. 7
A truly cultural psychology links individual psychological understanding and
improvement to social understanding and improvement. It directs people
toward understanding the social bases and characteristics of their individual
psychology, circumventing deleterious social activities and concepts where
possible, and collectively uniting with other people to transform deleterious
social activities and concepts into humane ones. In these ways cultural
psychology can use its scientific analysis to help people develop their agency.
People's potential will become actual when the existing social actual is
recognized to be the potential for a better, new social actuality.
Notes
1. Harre (1984) incisively explains the individualistic nature of interpersonal
formulations such as Bruner's. Harre points out that the idea of social plurality
can take several forms. It can be a distributive plurality (or an "aggregate
group," or "taxonomic group") in which a group is the sum of individual traits.
Or it can be a collective plurality (a "structured group") which emerges from a
social process that transcends particular individuals. Bruner's collectivity, like
Moscovici's and Tajfel's, is a distributive one that is in the last analysis a
version of individualism. Only structured or collective groups are real social
entities. There the properties of individuals are a function of the group
organization into roles and relationships. Only collective groups grant a
decisive role to social processes. In aggregate groups social processes are
purely the result of (derived from) individual acts.
2. These findings did not alter Valsiner's notion of a primordial non-social
person who circumvents society. Valsiner focused on the minute divergences
and convergences of personal goals during the interactions and he disregarded
the social relations that were embedded in them.
3. However, Kulick claims that changes in cosmology, or meaning, were the
most significant cause of linguistic shift. He goes so far as to state that,
"Gapun might be held up as a case in which the macrosociological changes
that are occurring can be said not to have caused language shift, but rather, to
have been caused by shift: in attitudes, perceptions of self, and ideas about
language" (p. 260). This is an odd and unwarranted conclusion considering
that Kulick extensively documented changes in social activities that were
instrumental in the shift of meanings and language.
4. This individualistic viewpoint also exists in sociology espoused by
Goffman and his followers (cf. Giddens, 1987, pp. 109-139) and in
philosophy espoused by Winch and Wittgenstein (cf. King, 2000).
5. Cooley's "looking glass self," Mead's "taking the role of the generalized
other," plus social referencing, attachment, joint attention, and imitation all
express this human social intentionality. Social intentionality (rather than
egocentrism) seems to be a basic characteristic of humans. At 8 months,
babies follow the pointing of other people and observe whether others have
followed their pointing (cf. Bruner, 2000; Ratner, 1991, chap. 4; Tomasello,
1999).
References