Culture and self

The sections on “culture and self ” in the row of social and cultural psychology textbooks on my shelf all present the consensus that Westerners live in individualist cultures and develop “independent” or “egocentric” selves, whereas non-Westerners live in collectivist cultures and develop “interdependent” or “sociocentric selves” (see Cross and Gore 2003 for a review). This research was spurred by Hofstede’s (1980) multinational survey of IBM employees, by Shweder and Bourne’s (1984) contrast of “sociocentric” Indian versus “egocentric” American selves, and by Geertz’s discussion of the Moroccan “mosaic” self, in which he made the often-cited observation that “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe … [is] a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures” (1984: 126). Many of the textbooks illustrate the basic contrast with a diagram showing selves with “solid” versus “fluid” boundaries based on Markus and Kitayama’s “Culture and the Self ” (1991), and several illustrate it with photos contrasting idiosyncratically clothed American students in informal settings with Asian students at festivals in uniform. None, however, reports the well-established criticisms of the “we’re egocentric/they’re sociocentric” view, such as Spiro’s (1993) observation that William James, G.H. Mead, and Erik Erikson all proposed sociocentric theories of the self, or the ample evidence that individualism (hereafter “I”) and collectivism (hereafter “C”) co-exist in most societies, as Triandis (1994) argued. In fact, Markus and Kitayama originally presented both a boundary permeability model (sociocentrics have less solidly bounded selves), and a repertoire of schemata model (people have both I and C self-schemas but sociocentrics more frequently activate C). The latter model points to the co-existence of I and C, but the textbooks continue to feature the boundary permeability view. Takano and Osaka’s (1999) literature review and Matsumoto’s (1999) meta-analysis

cast doubt on whether the I versus C contrast holds for Japan and America, and Oyserman et al.’s (2002) meta-analysis found only limited support for I versus C as a core dimension of global cultural variation. A series of comments on this study called for abandoning or significantly modifying the I versus C construct. These developments bring cultural psychology-and especially the study of “culture and self ”—to a point of

crisis. The repertoire of schemata model may offer researchers a nuanced model for studying the “bicultural” or “hybrid” selves that often develop among ethnic minorities, immigrants, and others who live in multiple cultures. But the trouble with I versus C may run deeper, stemming from the project of identifying global dimensions of “self ” on which cultures vary. If I versus C does not provide a robust model of “culture and self,” how should

researchers proceed? One quandary that immediately arises concerns the many definitions of “self.” As Spiro pointed out, researchers have used the term imprecisely to refer to (1) a culture’s explicit “concept of personhood,” (2) a culture’s implicit “concept of personhood” as inferred from public rituals or etiquettes of daily interaction, (3) an individual’s “persona” in key social roles, (4) an individual’s “repertoire of self schemata,” (5) an individual’s fluid, constructed-by-discourse-in-the-moment “subject positions,” (6) an individual’s relatively stable “identity,” or (7) the whole of an individual’s personality. Other studies have described “self ” as the ontological or existential core of subjective experience. Leary and Tangney (2003: 7) conclude that conflicting uses of “self ” yield a “conceptual morass.” A second quandary concerns the definition of “culture.” Most researchers adopt the commonsense notion that culture consists of values and meanings that its members share (e.g. Lehman et al. 2004). In contrast, Wallace (1961) and Schwartz (1972) argue for a distributed notion of culture: that culture’s elements are distributed unequally, with some individuals and groups internalizing features that others know only cursorily. Many “post-modern” ethnographers view culture as comprised of intersecting discourses, that some draw on Gramsci to describe as “hegemonic” and “counter-hegemonic,” and others on Bakhtin to describe as a “polyphony” or “heteroglossia” of voices.