ABSTRACT

What types of cross-cultural variations in “feelings and emotions” are we able to imagine, given our understanding of what it means to be a person (that is, a mentally endowed human being)? And what types of evidence on mental functioning in other cultures would we want to collect to convince us that those imaginable (and hence logically conceivable) variations in feelings and emotions are actually real? What predictions, if any, follow from the idea of having an “emotional” life?

Friedrich Nietzsche is not an acknowledged founding father of cultural anthropology, yet, far more than is realized, his way of thinking propagated and took over in modern anthropology. Some time in the 1880s Nietzsche thought he had the answer to the central question I shall address, which concerns the experience of felt obligation.

That central question is this: how are we to represent the directive content of a culture and how are we to explain and/or justify its directive or motivational force? That is, what are the directives of a culture and why in the world do people feel bound or compelled to obey their commands? Nietzsche's answer to the question is given in one of his famous aphorisms: “being moral means being highly accessible to fear.” Most contemporary anthropologists seem to think he was right, at least in one crucial respect.

Nietzsche's aphorism neatly and radically divides into two isolated or independent parts our central question. On the one hand there is the question: how are we to represent the directive content of a culture? That directive content, the “moral” order, includes, for Nietzsche, not only the specific obligations of a tradition – bury the dead – but also the various demand-generating principles – God, sin, justice, rights, duty – that support them. On the other hand there is the question: how are we to explain and/or justify its directive or motivational force.

A discipline is emerging called “cultural psychology.” It is not general psychology. It is not cross-cultural psychology. It is not psychological anthropology. It is not ethnopsychology. It is cultural psychology. And its time may have arrived, once again.

While the authors in this volume were never asked to define or explicitly address the idea of a cultural psychology, several of the chapters turned out to be examples of it. They inspired this essay – which is a preliminary attempt to say, taxonomically and narratively, and briefly – what the discipline of cultural psychology was, is, and ought to be about. Ultimately it is a story of cyclical return.

In the short run, however, the essay is a story of one of the pitfalls of the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s, the failure of the cognitive revolution to develop an adequate theory of the “person,” because of the prevailing Platonism implicit in its scientific agenda. The essay is also a scouting expedition across the boundaries of some very treacherous disciplinary territories in the search to recover an important interdisciplinary identity.

Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion. Cultural psychology is the study of the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and ground, practitioner and practice live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up.

This essay reports the results of a cross-cultural development study of ideas about the moral (its form) and ideas about what is moral (its content). The informants for the study are children, five to thirteen years of age, and adults, male and female, from Brahman and “Untouchable” families in the orthodox Hindu temple town of Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India; and from Judeo-Christian families in the secular university neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago, Illinois.

One aim of the essay is to assess the strengths and limitations of two prominent and important theories about the origins and development of moral understandings: Kohlberg's “cognitive developmental” theory (Kohlberg 1969, 1981; Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer 1983) and Turiel's “social interactional” theory (Turiel 1979, 1983; Nucci and Turiel 1978; Turiel and Smetana 1984). A second aim is to highlight the role of social communication processes in the ontogeny of moral understandings by outlining a “social communication” theory of moral development and using it to interpret the similarities and differences in the moral understandings of children and adults in the two cultures.

Three theories of moral development

The three theories to be discussed present different portraits and accounts of the ontogenetic origins of the idea of a moral obligation. Kohlberg's “cognitive developmental” theory hypothesizes that a genuine understanding of the idea of a moral obligation (stages five and six) has its origins in the idea of a conventional, or consensusbased, obligation (stages three and four).