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MARKSCHALLER and CHRISTIAN S. CRANDAIX (Eds.) The Psychological Foundations of Culture Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004, 392 pages (ISBN 0-8058-3839-2, US$79.95, Cloth; 0-8058-3840-6, US$39.95, Paperback)
For more than a century, social scientists have struggled against "reductionism"; this is the tendency to explain one discipline by concepts and findings from a "lower order," or "more fundamental" discipline. In psychology, this struggle has been against physiological, genetic, and biochemical explanations of psychological phenomena. Most psychologists would claim the right to explain psychological phenomena in their own terms, and at their own level. In anthropology, this struggle has been against the "psychologising" of cultural phenomena, that is to explain "culture" simply as the shared behaviour of individuals in a group. At first glance, this book appears to be one more attempt to see cultural phenomena in psychological terms, and to some extent this is true. For example, the editors assert that "culture can be sensibly and fruitfully deconstructed. Just as substances are comprised of atoms, genomes are composed of genes, and poems are composed of words, the complex things that we perceive as 'cultures' are, on closer inspection, comprised of some set of smaller units."
But the volume portrays itself as a more than such reductionism; it also seeks to balance the study of the relationship between cultural and behavioural phenomena. The editors claim that "...this book is, in a sense, the complementary opposite to that underlying work in cross-cultural psychology (which) explores the influence of culture on individual-level psychological processes, and so brings an anthropological frame of enquiry to psychological questions." Their approach "is intended to reveal that psychological inquiry into...