4.1.3 “Javanese” Psychologies 6
5.2 Moving Cultural Approaches Beyond Mainstream Psychological Approaches
Mainstream psychological approaches and their corresponding quantitative studies are limited when the research question is “how does culture shape the experience of disaster stress?” (for example, see Norris2006). Research methods that capture culture-specific ways of coping with disasters need to transcend an individualistic, Western focus by expanding the unit of research to include family and other relations, and critically address power issues in order to avoid culturalizing inherently political-economic phenomena (Pemberton1994).
5.2.1 Allowing for Cultural Specificities
Recently, an important shift in disaster risk reduction research has led to the recogni-tion of the potential of indigenous knowledge1to reduce vulnerability (Jigyasu2002;
Dekens2007; Mercer et al.2007, Mercer2012). Indigenous knowledge is defined as a body of knowledge existing within or acquired by people over a period of time
1Indigenous knowledge is often referred to in different ways, including local knowledge, tradi-tional knowledge, indigenous technical knowledge, peasants’ knowledge, traditradi-tional environmental knowledge, and folk knowledge (Sillitoe2010).
through the accumulation of experience, society–nature relationships, community practices and institutions, and generational transfer (for example, Brokensha et al.
1980; Sillitoe2010).
Accounting for cultural specificities related to coping with adversity requires broadening common psychosocial-theoretical frameworks as we argued in Chap. 3.
Instead of looking for universal ways of handling disasters, a cultural psychology of coping with disasters needs to grasp locally specific meanings of events, experiences, and actions after a disaster. It is essential to develop a grounded understanding of how meanings are formed in social interaction and broader discourses, as well as how they change and are modified by interpretation.
Cultural-psychological approaches in disaster-coping research sometimes exam-ine conditions leading to mental health or illness. More often, however, they focus on a situated understanding of human agency, human experience, and meaning-making after a disaster at a given place and in a given sociocultural context (Priya2004). In contrast, mainstream approaches usually follow a quantitative logic. They investigate trajectories of psychological impairment after a stressful event and hypotheses about causal relations are developed and tested, in order to make more accurate predictions and interventions (Norris2006). Research tools are usually standardized instruments considered to be universally valid regardless of the cultural context. In cross-cultural psychology, for example, researchers test the generality of existing psychological theories in diverse cultural contexts to develop universal models to predict behavior.
Quantitative approaches to cross-cultural psychology usually operationalize culture as an antecedent or an independent variable. The sociocultural context is consid-ered separately from psychological phenomena and studied as an index rather than a process (see Berry et al.2011).
Our goal is not to develop theories of mechanisms and conditions that generalize across cultures and contexts. Instead, our aim is to discover a specific way of under-standing and representing the culturally, socially, and materially embedded situation after a disaster and the constraints and possibilities of human agency. We theorize this situation and the related horizon of agency in sociocultural terms (see Chap. 3).
5.2.2 Rethinking Research Units
Mainstream psychological approaches to disaster mainly focus on variations in hu-man ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling with the individual as the unit of analysis. Analysis refers to how situations and contexts influence the person’s be-havior, thought, and feeling (for example, Berry et al. 2011). Most research on meaning-making and benefit-finding focuses on individual experiences of bereave-ment and illness (Pakenham2011; Folkman1997). As a result, human knowledge and experience are confined to individual mental processes.
In order to grasp individual as well as communal coping processes, we need to use larger units of analysis, such as households and communities. The investigation of inner conflict may be expanded to explore social conflicts and burdensome forms
of interaction. Incorporating the analysis of discursive arenas, communal actions and collective emotions must be reflected in the formulation and implementation of research questions throughout the research process.
Another aspect refers to the understanding of persons and contexts. In cross-cultural psychology, for example, eco-cross-cultural and sociocross-cultural contexts are examined in terms of antecedent conditions that influence psychological variables such as values, attitudes, and behavior, which are, in turn, treated as outcome vari-ables (see Berry et al.2011). A further example is provided by the Pargament et al.
(2000) study which used questionnaires to measure religious coping. Pargament et al. (2000) tried to identify universally applicable elements of religiosity and reli-giously inspired coping styles and determine how these factors are then correlated to measurements of health, illness, and well-being across world religions (Pargament 2011).
However, cultural-psychological approaches assume a co-constitution of individ-uals and their contexts. Intra-psychic dynamics are permeated by cultural forces and vice versa (Berry et al. 2011). As we have shown in our theoretical chapters, our aim is to transcend an individualistic focus and understand persons as contextualized social beings. The question is at which level does the mutual constitution of the psy-chological and sociocultural take place. Kleinman and Erin (2007) have developed a suitable concept of experience for this purpose:
Experience, then, has as much to do with collective realities as it does with individual translations and transformations of those realities. It is always simultaneously social and subjective, collective and individual. (p. 53)
5.2.3 Including Analyses of Resource and Power Differentials
Situating the experience of a disaster in communal power structures further deep-ens a multidimdeep-ensional understanding of coping with adversity. This approach is not inherently cultural-psychological, but rather follows a critical line of thinking (Markard2010) that we consider a necessary addition to any cultural psychology of coping with disasters.
A review of the literature of mainstream psychological work in this area, however, reveals a lack of critical research that includes an analysis of power in the subjective perspectives of those who undergo and experience catastrophic events along with their corresponding relief efforts (for example, studies based on Lazarus’s approach, which was introduced in Chap. 2). Hobfoll’s approach to stress provides a basis for psychological coping theories that is aware of power differentials. Specifically those people with power, status, and privilege encounter developmental conditions that Hobfoll (2011) calls caravan passageways, and these effectively exclude those who lack power, status, and privilege. Considering the material and structural di-mensions of coping processes allows researchers to contextualize research data within political-economic practices instead of conforming with dominant cultural interpretative biases (see Antlöv2005).
In addition, we consider it crucial to reflect upon the process of producing knowl-edge and related power dynamics. A fruitful approach has been developed in the field of feminist research (see Acker et al.1991; Behnke and Meusser1999; Wohlrab-Sahr 1993; Clarke2005). Attempting to critically relativize universal claims, we follow Kenneth Gergen’s line of questioning: “Who benefits and who loses in such efforts?
What are these predictions used for? Who is the knowledge empowering, and who is eliminated from view?” (Cisneros-Puebla2008, p. 41). The research team’s position within current power structures and the ethical implications of that position need to be disclosed and critically reflected upon. Reflexivity and analysis of power con-stellations relate to one’s own situation and to the way in which one’s own work is embedded and enmeshed within institutional requirements and restrictions; critical reflection on this positioning also has implications for the situation in the research area.2It should include an analysis of the research project history in order to create awareness of one’s own (and the research team’s) involvement in the requirements of institutional frameworks and power structures.
In sum, we consider the dialogic process of mutual exchange between researcher and research participant as well as between the research team and research field to be a crucial ingredient of a thorough, robust, and reflexive cultural-psychological research approach. Emerging ethical challenges mirror this co-constituting process.
The (self-) positioning of researchers in the field can never be neutral. Researchers depend on local authorities to gain access to the field and they need to gain trust and access to the various groups of actors within the field. For example, the researchers need to position themselves in relation to expectations of help from them and the status as locals or international researchers that they bring to a rural setting. Research participants may ask about social assessments and evaluations as well as push the researchers to present ways of reducing risk or ways for a community to achieve certain social or health-related goals.