Paul Voestermans

Culture, Emotion and the Normative Structure of Reality

A central concern for a psychology of culture is the question of how people come to commit themselves to ‘shared’ forms of understanding. Although the ‘shared’ or social nature of human understanding has received ample attention in different forms of cultural psychology, what is lacking is an account of the normative ‘force’ or compellingness of cultural forms. We argue that both phenomenology and social constructionism have failed to acknowledge the inherently normative dimension of social and cultural life. For an alternative grounding of cultural psychology we turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty. We show that at the end of his life Merleau-Ponty was working on a theory of meaning that acknowledges the normative dimension of our affective engagements in the world as well as the affective dimension of our normative engagements. We argue that this theory may be a powerful alternative for a social constructionist approach to culture.

Psychological practice as a cultural phenomenon

Abstract Psychological practice is the dimension of psychology that has had a strong influence on the modernization of practices in the field of mental health, education, family life, and so on. As a practical science psychology is quite vulnerable to ideological influences. To clarify the received view of psychologys ideological impact, a distinction is made between a negative and a positive concept of ideology. In order to meet some of the objections against the received view it is proposed to subsume the positive concept under the concept of culture, which stresses non-propositional and non-argumentative aspects of behavior-organization. From this perspective much of psychology, particularly its practical side, has become an integral part of our culture and, therefore, cannot be ideologically criticized any more. Its impact can only be studied within the framework of culture theory. The advantages of a culture theory approach are detailed and a few interesting issues of further research are presented. Finally, it is pointed out that a culture theory approach has historigraphic consequences. Two sketchy examples are given of how to proceed with writing a history of psychological practice within the framework of culture theory.

Human Experience and the Enigma of Culture: Toward an Enactive Account of Cultural Practice

This paper deals with the way cultural psychology should deal with human experience. The common view about the relation between culture and experience holds that experience becomes “cultural” when people internalize or appropriate ready made cultural meanings. We contend that cultural forms themselves need to be dealt with in experiential terms. To this end we propose an “enactive” approach to cultural psychology. A central claim of enactivism is that experience is rooted within the organizational and operational autonomy of an acting system. Enactivism considers human experience to be constitutive for social and cultural phenomena. The main question of an enactive cultural psychology relates to the way human action becomes consensually coordinated. Both social psychologists who stress “sharedness” as the distinct mark of the social, and evolutionary psychologists who consider culture to derive from a uniform human mind, are criticized for overlooking the ongoing mutual tuning processes that give rise to socially and culturally patterned conduct.

Cultural Psychology Meets Evolutionary Psychology: Toward a New Role for Biology in the Study of Culture and Experience

In this article we argue that evolutionary psychology’s study of culture in the framework of memetics and in terms of modules in the brain, supposedly designed in response to adaptive problems in the stone age, suffers from a few shortcomings. Therefore, the central issue of cultural psychology, that is understanding in psychological terms the patterning of behavior, remains untouched. First, the notion of causality, which is central to the Integrated Causal Model approach as an alternative to the Standard Social Science Model, is too narrowly defined. Second, the animal nature of the human species is presented in insufficient detail. The brain is cut loose from its embodied existence and treated as an isolated entity. Brains exist in the plural and develop in the intrinsically social group, as we argue. A more viable brain-approach to culture is called for. Enactivism, as the central tenet of this new approach, emphasizes the brain as an embodied control structure which operates in a community of experiencers.