Agency, Cultural Consonance and Depressive Symptoms: A Brazilian Example

Abstract

Cultural consonance, or individual enactment of cultural models, is associated with lower depressive symptoms. This article incorporates individual agency into the cultural consonance model. Data were collected using mixed methods in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. Brazil is a unique setting for this research, given that personal agency is institutionalized in the practice of o jeitinho (a distinctively Brazilian way of circumventing rules). Cultural consonance was measured relative to cultural models of life goals. A measure of a sense of personal agency combined scales of locus of control and frustration tolerance. Cultural consonance had a stronger association with depressive symptoms than individual agency. These results are also consistent with cultural consonance as a mediator of the association of agency and depressive symptoms. The implications for the conceptualization of culture and its role in mental health, and for the influence of psychological factors on culture, are discussed. [Brazil, agency, cultural consonance, depression] Culture is generally regarded as an important influence on mental health, but specifying the details of the process has proven difficult. A theory linking culture to the individual, along with a measurement model for its operationalization, have proven elusive. Dressler and colleagues (Dressler 2018a; Dressler, Balieiro, and dos Santos 2017) developed a theory of cultural consonance to describe with operational precision how culture as a property of social aggregates gets translated into individual belief and behavior, which in turn can influence health outcomes. Higher cultural consonance is associated with lower depressive symptoms, lower blood pressure, better immune function, and other health outcomes (Dressler 2018b). The measurement of cultural consonance provides an opportunity to gauge the influence of culture relative to other factors, offering the potential to test complex hypotheses regarding how these factors intersect. A central question in psychological anthropology involves the exercise of personal agency in the context of the directive influence of culture (Holland, Price, and Westermeyer 2018). Since cultural consonance identifies persons who more completely adopt cultural models, how might individual agency affect the association of cultural consonance and health? Can we specify a model of the combined influences of cultural consonance and agency on mental health? The aim of this article is to examine this question with data collected in a mixed-methods study of depressive symptoms in an urban center in the south of Brazil. In this study, along ETHOS, Vol. 47, Issue 2, pp. 148–167, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. C © 2019 by the American Anthropological Association All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12238 AGENCY AND CULTURAL CONSONANCE 149 with measures of cultural consonance, we developed an individual difference measure of one’s “sense of personal agency;” that is, to what extent does an individual see himor herself as able to effect change in the world, in keeping with his or her own personal aims? How is this associated with cultural consonance, and how do these factors combine to influence depressive symptoms? Culture, Agency, and Health Agency, or an individual’s socioculturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn 1999), has come to be an important focus in anthropology (Holland et al. 1998; Holland et al. 2018; Ortner 2005). Agency is sometimes opposed to structure, whether structure be thought of as social structure or as the cultural structuring of goals and sentiments. Somehow individuals, as active agents, are still able to pursue their own goals in the presence of these constraining influences (Sewell 1992). While agency is often thought of solely in these terms, there is no reason that individuals could not harness their own sense of self-efficacy and control in the world to pursue culturally constructed goals (Ahearn 1999; Campbell 2009; Ortner 1984). For Ortner (2006, 134–37), agency is defined by the following elements. First, agency describes the subject acting intentionally. There is a goal, and the subject seeks to achieve it. Second, our capacity for agency is a human universal, although, like most things human, agency itself is culturally constructed. Third, agency cannot be divorced from power. Put simply, everyone has agency, but some people have more of it than others as a function of the differential distribution of power. Holland and her colleagues (2018; see also Holland et al. 1998) have expanded upon this understanding of agency by showing how individual agents draw extensively on cultural resources to position themselves relative to a novel set of goals. For Holland and associates, this especially involves a shift in identity as individuals incorporate new conceptions of the self to facilitate their action in a particular social field (Holland et al. 2018). In the anthropological literature, a sense of one’s self as agent tends not to be conceptualized as a psychological disposition. Ortner (1984, 2006), for example, resists such thinking for reasons that are not entirely clear, except that she is uncomfortable with having to deal with too much “psychological plumbing” (her words) in her subjects. The psychologist Albert Bandura (2001), on the other hand, devoted his career to precisely this issue, arguing that there are four core components to agency in humans. The first is intentionality: to have agency is to intend to do something. The second is forethought. The active agent has a set of expectations for what action is intended and likely to produce. The third is selfreactiveness; we actively engage in strategies intended to achieve the ends sought, and we monitor ourselves and our success along the way. The fourth core component of agency is self-reflection; the agent is aware of his or her negotiating potential constraints. To measure agency from this perspective, scales of perceived self-efficacy and internal locus of control have been relied upon (Bandura 2001).