ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an explanation on how to perform cultural consonance analysis, a theoretical and methodological extension of cultural consensus. Here, researchers examine the extent to which individuals embody in their own beliefs and practices a given cultural model, and how such embodiment might predict outcomes such as individual mental and physical health. Or, as Bill Dressler, the originator of this perspective, puts it, cultural consonance is “the degree to which individuals, in their own beliefs and behaviors, approximate the prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in cultural models.” This technique has been particularly influential in anthropological health research, e.g., to show how greater individual consonance with local ideals or cultural models related to high status and the good life might be associated with improved cardiovascular and other health outcomes. But the implications are much broader than that, in the way consonance analysis allows researchers to examine how conformity to social norms relates to any variety of mental and behavioral outcomes. This chapter, more than the others, provides a deeper background into the theory behind cultural consonance. We reason that while this approach is not technically complex, the theory behind it, and therefore, the meaning of the results, requires a careful understanding of psychological anthropological theory and concerns.
