Culture & Psychology

Inuit have experienced significant lifestyle changes in the past 50 years. Most recently, urbanization has resulted in greater numbers of Inuit living in urban centres in southern Canada. Little is known about Inuit parenting, and nothing has been published on Inuit parenting in an urban context. The present study sought to address this gap by describing the parenting of Inuit living in a large Canadian city and examining emergent themes for evidence of autonomy and relatedness. In partnership with the Tungasuvvingat Inuit Family Resource Centre, 39 Inuit parents completed an interview about their parenting experiences. Based on interviews, major parenting themes included: child characteristics; parenting behaviours and beliefs; affection and love; stressors; and responsive and respectful parenting. The majority of parenting themes linked to relatedness, although there was evidence of autonomy in both parenting behaviours and child characteristics. Results are interpreted in light of the autonomy—relatedness framework and theoretical implications of findings are discussed.

Many studies have shown widely varying human child-rearing practices; no child is ever a tabula rasa in the eyes of the culture. The article by McShane et al. (2009) on parenting themes of autonomy and relatedness among Inuit migrants from the northern countryside to Ottawa, a medium-sized city and the capital of Canada, offers important findings on previously less-studied child-rearing among Inuit in that southern urban setting. More broadly, the article contributes insights into how child-rearing practices and beliefs reflect local conceptions of the person and the world, and how the child should be prepared to live in it. Issues raised here include the challenges of distinguishing among cultural, psychological, and political economic influences of migration, urbanization, and globalization, and delineating the ways in which intimate personal concepts interweave with wider forces in child-rearing. Also at issue are definitions of relatedness and autonomy, concepts which are widely deployed in cross-cultural studies of child-rearing, but which are based upon Western philosophical formulations, and which McShane et al. analyze in the Inuit urban case. These concepts are difficult to formulate in culture-’neutral’ or ‘etic’ terms. The article shows both the uses and the limitations of retaining analytical ‘odd-job’ concepts for heuristic purposes. The present commentary argues that it is necessary to deconstruct critically such concepts as relatedness and autonomy, and to approach them as tendencies contingent upon context, rather than as universal polarized basic needs.

Psychology has long struggled with defining constructs while preserving their meaning within a cultural context. Autonomy and relatedness have been construed as a dichotomy, which does not contribute to the understanding of how humans can act autonomously while being attached to one another. It is more fruitful to discuss the constructs in the context of an inclusive relationship in which autonomy and relatedness are proposed to be compatible as they are located on different dimensions: agency and interpersonal distance, respectively. The nuances of the constructs and the dialogical process, which includes the middle ground between the two extremes, are crucial for a complete understanding. The presence of autonomy does not imply or negate the presence of relatedness. Autonomy and relatedness not only can but do synthesize in a variety of forms.

Recollection of child sexual abuse involves complex issues of agency—both in the past and in the present. Adult women survivors face the further obstacle of ingrained cultural tendencies to question women’s testimony. Ambiguity and ambivalence are found in adult women’s accounts of their past abuse and present particular dilemmas. Drawing on social remembering approaches developed in memory studies, it is argued that recollections have to negotiate issues of incidence and intentionality in the past as well as the potential contribution made by non-human participants (e.g. objects, spaces, bodies). Using examples from interviews with survivors of child sexual abuse, we illustrate how objects (largely domestic objects and spaces) emerge in the memories as a way of posing and subsequently disposing ambiguity. Objects, as well as humans, ‘modify the state of affairs’ (Latour, 2005) and serve as the means to punctualize recollected episodes. An analytic approach sensitive to the role of objects in recollection, which is grounded in material-semiotics, is offered.

Reavey and Brown (2009), in their article ‘The Mediating Role of Objects in Recollections of Adult Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse’, make an interesting review of recollections of child abuse episodes in four women. They intend to give an account, in terms of agency, responsibility and integrity, of reports of past traumatic experiences in which particular objects are considered. The mediation of objects in recollection of past memories is discussed as a relevant contribution, positioning objects as semiotic resources for the apprehension of idiosyncratic experiences and personal sense-making. It is stated that objects also allow exchange with an external interlocutor mediating assessment and psychological elaboration being carried out with survivors. Also, as parts of a holistic phenomenon of memory, objects attached to emotion and meaning contribute to the robust aspect of the way in which past experiences can be apprehended. This last issue helps to orient the discussion of accuracy and validity in traumatic memory. Agency and ambivalence as parts of human experiencing are considered relevant, highlighting two aspects: theoretical and clinical implications.

Remembering is driven by discrepancies (interdependencies) resulting from contradiction and develops toward resolution (stabilization) of them. Reavey and Brown (2009) depict female survivors of child sexual abuse who struggle to stabilize their recollections. By using a mediating network including physical objects, they reduce the indeterminacy of meanings of actions and events and attempt to properly construct identity and agency of participants of abuse including them. The present study of Reavey and Brown has the potential to explore the particularity of an individual. The author and colleagues have concerned themselves with particularity since they were interested in the veracity of an experience through the examination of confession and testimony in criminal cases. The particularity of a certain individual appears in his/her actions, embedded in socio-cultural situations. To explore the personal particularity irreducible to culture will lead us toward further development of cultural psychology. The present study can develop the same interests as the authors.

This paper examines ethnographic data collected over six months from Xiamen, China, on children as active agents in their relationships with their parents and grandparents. It explicates the usefulness of the conceptual tools of ‘agency’ and ‘interdependent power’ derived from social relational theory in demonstrating the bilateral influences between children, grandparents and parents. Ways in which children’s agency is enhanced in their interactions with the adult caregivers are explicated. It provides a reinterpretation of the ‘little emperor’ syndrome in contemporary urban China.

The work by Goh and Kuczynski (2009) is important beyond the specific context of China. Using social relational theory, the authors examine family dynamics in the contemporary nursing practices of five families in Xiamen, China. While they succeed in identifying relations and patterns of interaction, they do not explain the mechanism that enables the emergence of these patterns. In this article, I suggest a complementary way, which does not exclude theirs, to show how developments and concepts derived from general systems theory and from the general perspective of dynamic systems could contribute to understanding the relations that are built in these families.

This paper identifies and critically assesses various research approaches to subjective and cultural-historical notions of life stages through the lens of comparative-cultural, psychometric, discursive psychological and ethnographic perspectives. Included is an overview of 48 studies of subjective attributions of life stages (1984—2007) covering 14 national settings, with a discussion of their limitations. Possibilities for cross-fertilizing critical gender theory with life stage theory are briefly discussed. It is suggested that analytic notions of citationality and hegemony, both pioneered in the context of gender studies, may be productively appropriated in cultural psychology.

Janssen (2009) raises the criticism that life stages and related concepts are not clearly defined and that even within the same study or data pool different conceptualizations can be found. A lack of clear definitions and the resulting difficulties are, nevertheless, not exclusive to life stage research. The general need for unambiguous definitions of the terminology used, even if these limit broader concepts to a certain scope of meaning, is stressed in order to avoid misunderstandings and to foster— especially interdisciplinary— communication.

What is knowledge construction for? Mesopotamian rituals were practiced in order to grasp the future and guide war strategies. Nowadays, scientific rules are developed to avoid mysticism—constructing more accurate laws to explain the reality. Both rituals and science were, and usually are, grounded in a conception that to know is to decipher the correct meaning behind the expressive relief of the world. Contemporary studies on anthropology have shown that the opposition between nature and culture is the basis of a number of problems in human sciences aiming to comprehend the intricate relation between body and violence and overcome ethical dilemmas.