A Cultural Psychological Framework for Coping with Disasters
3.3 Reconceptualizing Coping Processes in Person–Context Relations
[I]ndividuals or persons or subjects are always embedded in webs of relations, whether of affection and solidarity, or of power and rivalry, or frequently of some mixture of the two.
Whatever “agency” they seem to “have” as individuals is in reality something that is always in fact interactively negotiated. (p. 151)
In the following sections, we apply these insights to a reconceptualization of coping processes, where these are traditionally understood in cognitive terms.
3.3 Reconceptualizing Coping Processes in Person–Context
do not separate and correlate the variables of central characteristics of the various coping models (i.e., the antecedents, mediating processes, and effects of stressful and overwhelming experiences). We are far more interested in examining behavior in the given context from an emic perspective and determining what it means, for example, when research participants explain that their relationship to Allah allows them to accept the death of someone close to them, when they tell us about their methods and attitudes that were positive with regard to reconstruction work, or how they deal with the pain of the betrayal they experienced due to the way in which aid was distributed. This way we can deduce specific forms of coping imbedded in particular contexts.
3.3.2 Appraisal and Meaning-Making in Social Context
Within its individual, idiosyncratic framework, Lazarus’ (1999) appraisal-oriented model can be called constructivist. The point of departure for this model from our social constructionist perspective is the subject’s personal, subjective appraisal and reappraisal of the dynamic, mutually reciprocal, person–environment relationship.
For our purposes, we need to contextualize and expand the individual in a construc-tivist manner because “individual” processes of evaluation and perception are not self-referential, but in fact are permeated by complex sociocultural processes. To a certain extent, Hobfoll’s (1998,2011) work has already developed in this direction with his attempt to proceed from self-regulation in stress contexts to self-in-social-setting regulation by placing the dynamics of resource loss and gain in a social context at the center of his model.
Another approach, which is more cognitivist than the appraisal in the Lazarus model, is the understanding of meaning-making processes proposed by Park (2005, 2010). In Park’s model, subjective appraisals of the situation are related to subjective general orientations (global meanings). This understanding has an arbitrary, or ran-dom, component and subjective orientations are not linked to discourses and social meanings. In terms of its functional purpose in the process of coping, meaning is only relevant insofar as it is a by-product of the mind of the individual doing the coping. Instead of adopting such a reductionist view of mind (cf. Bruner1990), we promote an interpretive approach which relates personal meanings to different local, global, and imported meanings of the intentional world. In order to construct mean-ing, people use (various) symbolic systems, which are deeply embedded in culture as well as in language and material artifacts.
The perspective we adopt is consistent with Markus and Kitayama’s (2010) view that “meanings, beliefs and values are externalized and materialized in the world (D’Andrade 1995) and, thus, no longer need to be packed in the head of each in-dividual member of the cultural group” (p. 287). Meanings are negotiated in the social fields in which the person is embedded and cannot therefore be reduced to their functional role in the coping process. Thus, meaning-making processes can only be analyzed using interpretative research strategies that situate meanings within multiple person–context constellations.
3.3.3 Incorporating Practice Theory
In appraisal-oriented coping models, the subject is an active, goal-striving individual with idiosyncratic values and beliefs that reflect her or his appraisal of the situation and her or his personal resources. Thus, these models emphasize the cognitions, motives, and goals of the person in question. Here, a double division is drawn be-tween the individual and her or his social context as well as bebe-tween the mind and the body. This double division is rooted in a particular conception of the subject, the self, and emotions which is prevalent in Western thinking; this conception separates inner experience and outside expression and implies a culture of individuality and interiority (Taylor1989). The mind–body division results in cognition being val-ued more highly than emotion. Body and emotion are removed from the arena of socialization and placed within the sphere of universal physiology, biology, and evo-lution. Lazarus’ (1991,1993,1999) view also derives emotions and their orienting functions (relational emotional themes) from biology and evolution. On this view, culture only directs the specific orientation of the emotions. However, the body is more than biology; it is a “mindful body” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock1987) con-stituted in interaction with the social context. Thus, we choose to supplement the cognitive orientation with another understanding grounded in practice theory.
Here, the body, or emotions, are viewed as context-specific forms of socialization (Scheer2012). Based on this understanding, emotions emerge from acquired bodily knowledge. As emotional practices, emotions are generated within their social con-texts and power relations. Throughout history, emotions have been formed in a wide variety of social ways: by being mobilized, named, communicated, and regulated (Scheer2012). Scheer provides a compelling account of the emotional socialization that led to the different forms of Protestant inwardness. Thus, in coping situations, emotions are not physically created and managed (controlled) by the mind; they are embedded in—and perpetuate—these histories of social shaping. However, in rela-tion to other aspects also, practice theory helps to counteract the cognitivist bias, for example, with respect to religious coping. Although the predominant approaches to religious coping view religiosity as a cognitive process that can be examined by ask-ing questions about an individual’s conscious convictions, the cultural psychologist Belzen (2010) argues that religion should be understood as one of a number of differ-ent, practical, shared activities. Religion then regulates conduct, though this cannot be viewed as the conscious following of rules; it is more a habitus (in the sense of Bourdieu, see Chap. 2) than a goal-directed behavior. The “doing” of religion would thus need to be considered an inseparable aspect of religious coping; individual or collective forms of prayer, then, have to be analyzed as an embodied experience and not “just” in terms of expressive or communicative aspects.
3.3.4 Accounting for Power Differentials
Because Lazarus’ individualist coping model neglects the social element of coping processes, it also ignores all questions of power. In his resource-oriented approach, Hobfoll situated the coping subject in social contexts and addressed the question
of power. His metaphor of resource caravan passageways (see Sect. 2.3.1; Hobfoll 2011) therefore serves as a helpful reference point to grasp the conceptual implica-tions of the possibilities and limits of agency. Social structures of discrimination and privilege have a significant influence on individual resource dynamics, and power differentials are potentially reproduced in coping processes: People who lack sta-tus and power experience continuous social discrimination almost independently of their own behavior, whereas privileged access to resources reproduces beneficial conditions for personal developments and leads to further status enhancements. The mastery and/or self-efficacy attributed to individuals in coping processes needs to be interpreted against this background: These aspects indicate the function of a priv-ileged position, or a privpriv-ileged passageway of resource caravans (Hobfoll2011), rather than individual functioning itself.
Moreover, if we go one step further and think of coping as a social process (see Sect. 2.4), these processes need to be situated in productive constellations of power in an even more profound way. Critical community psychologists have pointed to the fact that histories of colonialism and the ongoing dynamics of oppression and liber-ation in different (post)colonial contexts shape adaptliber-ation processes (see Nelson and Prilleltensky2010; Kagan et al.2011). Because the “culture” of cultural psychology
“is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes intertwined within the globalized history of power” (Reyes and Sonn2011, p. 203), coping is em-bedded in larger power structures and dynamics. Thus, different patterns of coping cannot be attributed to an essential characteristic of that social group (e.g., “women”
as vulnerable or emotional) but have to be addressed in conjunction with institu-tional frameworks and societal routines. This line of argument has been pursued, for example, by feminist psychologists such as Mejia (2005). Such a power-critical per-spective requires theorists to link macrostructures of coping to the microprocesses of coping: national or global politics influence the way people cope, as they structure available resources in a significant way—in material, infrastructure, and discursive terms. To stay with the two structural categories already mentioned above, colonial orders and gender norms are internalized and embodied experiences, again vary-ing accordvary-ing to specific contextual constellations. As such, they are continuously (re)produced—and challenged—throughout coping processes.
3.3.5 Abandoning Universalism for the (“Cultural”) Particular
All of the points mentioned above reflect the most basic implication associated with a cultural psychology of coping: a farewell to all forms of universalism. In Sect. 2.4.1.2 we elaborated on the universalist claims of coping models and their implicit Eurocen-trism. Universalist theories of psychological coping mechanisms treat psychological functions as if they were independent of the context and function solely as character-istics of the individual. Some approaches address cultural diversity using an additive strategy in which they take the forms of coping that appear in a particular cultural context and add one or two forms that presumably appear in members of other cul-tures (e.g., harmony control, see Morling and Fiske1999, or indirect control, see
Hobfoll1998). It was using this type of strategy that psychiatric classifications were expanded to include culture-bound syndromes—a kind of exotic psychopathology of
“folk illnesses”—which, regardless of the context, were ascribed to the individual as a cultural particularity within the framework of a universal model of psychological functioning (or dysfunctioning). In this way, cultural plurality is incorporated into psychological models only in a superficial way; their claims to universalism, on the other hand, remain unquestioned.
Religious coping is subject to equally superficial treatment within the framework of cross-cultural psychology. In these models, religion is viewed as monolithic Chris-tianity or monolithic Islam (see Sect. 2.2.3); it is artificially separated from the local sociocultural context and broken down into abstract mathematicized relations be-tween variables as part of the drive to quantification in psychology (see Machado and Silva2007). A cultural psychological understanding of religion, on the contrary, assumes that religiosity cannot be defined in general terms and that researchers can only approach religion through its cultural, contextual, and historical components.
This type of understanding requires us to take a hermeneutic-constructivist approach to religion and religious coping:
[A]s there exists no religion in general, but only specific forms of life that fall under the label of "being religious," and as psychology should not strive to identify supposedly basic elements of psychic functioning valid for all subjects, regardless of time and place, a psy-chology of religion should aim to determine how a specific religious form of life generates, incorporates and regulates the psychic functioning of the persons involved. (Belzen2010, 344f.)
In Java, for example, we find a variety of Islamic forms of life that integrate older Javanese cosmologies and practices to a greater or lesser degree (see Sect. 4.1). How-ever, even those who claim to live according to “pure” Islamic principles articulate their identities in a global, national, but also very communal context in which reli-gious plurality is negotiated against a privileged position of Islam, with Islam being a contested field of interpretation itself. Religious meanings and public expressions of religiousness are thus always embedded in religiopolitical discourses, which are deployed and negotiated by actors sometimes without explicit intentions. This ap-plies to both religion in everyday life and to religious coping in a crisis. Religion is only one example and it is important to add that secular worldviews are just as grounded in their respective contexts and oriented toward a particular way of seeing the world.
Within his universalist frame of conservation of resources (COR) theory, Hobfoll offers several reference points for conceptualizing coping as situated in context(s).
Not only does he account for status and power differences (see earlier discussion), he also allows for a cultural relativist perspective on coping resources: he considers these resources to be dependent upon their relative value in a specific cultural context.
This type of understanding may help to develop a material social constructionist understanding of material resources: because while food supply and/or physical security are not purely discursive matters, nevertheless, they are still imbued with contextual meaning and social value.
Example 1: Alternative Perspectives on (Disaster) Mental Health Disaster men-tal health is largely separate from stress-coping research. It has developed as a specialized field with its own terminology and as a universal approach to extreme suf-fering. This approach is largely driven by a medical logic and posits that universally recognized psychological disorders appear in disaster survivors when a traumatic event occurs within a person’s local environment (external), causing a vulnerable psyche (internal) to be “weakened”. The diagnosed disorder is a function of the individual, meaning that it is separate from the context and must be treated in the individual and in the community using medical discourses and practices. This un-derstanding is associated with a decontextualization, which is particularly prevalent in the international disaster aid scene. This renders it extremely difficult to attempt a sociocultural recontextualization of psychological suffering in the wake of disasters (Breslau2004). In contrast to this understanding, we recommend viewing suffering as “inherently subjective, local and pluralistic in nature” (Priya2012, p. 214). In the case of persistent and extreme psychological impairments in the aftermath of a disaster, the question presents itself: how have the affected parties arrived at this assessment and how should their assessment be handled in the local sociocultural context. Furthermore, expressions of embodied experiences and emotions (local) as idioms of distress3 can also point to emic interpretations of fright as well as emic models for overcoming it. However, as with “local” knowledge, there may also be numerous interactions between local idioms or practices and imported Western con-cepts (see Abramowitz2010in particular). This can be seen in the use of the imported term “trauma,” in numerous languages and its connection to local meanings.