ABSTRACT
Culture as a fi eld of representations Since the inception of work on social representations nearly half a century ago, there has been a persistent interest in the articulation between these representations and the broader fi eld of culture, as Anne Parsons’ (1969) pioneering studies indicate. In part, her investigations explored the forms of systematic misunderstanding that arise when expressions of mental states grounded in one specifi c culture are projected into a different cultural context. In one of her studies, she examines the reasons for the failure of her attempted treatment of a South Italian immigrant to the United States through a psychoanalytically based psychotherapy. In her refl ections she focuses on her failures in grasping Mr Calabrese’s communicative actions, both in the sense of understanding what he was saying in relation to his own cultural context (including the specifi c context of being an immigrant to the United States), and in the sense of understanding how his cultural resources were being employed to make sense of what she said and did. Such forms of misunderstanding are now familiar, but they can be no less instructive for that. Parsons herself explores the ways in which different meanings are constructed or connoted in the course of such exchanges, and as she demonstrates, the meanings of utterances always refer back to a very specifi c context. While she herself does not elaborate a semiotic analysis of the context, we could extend her analysis by noting that utterances are always particular instances of forms of semiotic mediation, and that the context which is so important for their comprehension is always the broader network of mediational forms which enable the signifi ers of particular signs to be related to their signifi eds. As we have argued before (Lloyd & Duveen, 1990), one of the functions of representations is precisely to provide the framework through which signifi ers and signifi eds can be associated in a meaningful way, to reduce what Saussure called the arbitrariness of the sign. Such a perspective also allows us
to comprehend how misunderstanding arises when signifi ers are associated with signifi eds through a different representational context. Anne Parsons, for instance, records the confl ict that arose around Mr Calabrese’s hostile feelings towards his wife. From her permissive and professional perspective, such feelings should have been a focus of therapeutic concern, while from his perspective the norms were different, “even if a marriage is diffi cult you keep quiet about it in order to preserve the institution of marriage as such” (Parsons, 1969, pp. 327-8).
