A Cultural Psychological Framework for Coping with Disasters
3.2 Rethinking the Person–Context Relationship
As we have highlighted above, the co-constitutive relationship of persons and con-texts is central to our cultural psychological approach. We deliberately chose to develop our theoretical approach around the notion of context as a broad category.
Culture—as the obvious concern of cultural psychology—is located conceptually in and in-between context(s) and person(s). In the following section, we further define our understanding of context.
3.2.1 Meaning and the Material
The contextual aspects of experience and action receive differing degrees of cultural psychological emphasis depending on whether the focus is placed on the intentional world of meanings, interactions, and the semiotic subject (Mead1934; Bruner1990;
Shweder1993) or on tool use, everyday practical action, artifacts, and material and institutional structures (Cole1996). We combine these two main perspectives as both refer to the complex connections between humans and their man-made ma-terial or immama-terial contexts and structures, which are continuously renewed and changed through human practice and shared experience. In a similar vein, Mar-cus and Hamedani (2007) developed a broad understanding of the sociocultural context, which entails meanings, interactions, and cultural products. Defining the
“sociocultural,” they wrote:
Thus, it includes both meanings—ideas, images representations, attitudes, values, proto-types and stereoproto-types—and what is often termed the sociostructural—cultural products, interpersonal interactions, institutional practices and systems—and person–situation con-tingencies, all of which embody, as well as render material and operable normative patterns prevalent in a given context. (p. 5, italics in original)
Different metaphors are employed to describe the ways in which the personal and the material context relate to one another. In his ecological model, Bronfenbrenner
(1981) used the image of concentric circles2. These circles encompass personal development and represent a series of nested systems. This metaphor is useful to illustrate how the micro and macro contexts are permeated by one another. However, this reduces context to the mere surroundings, to environment and proximate causes.
Cole (1996) offered another metaphoric understanding of “context as that which weaves together” (p. 135). Contexts are not immutable, and systems or threads of contexts can recombine in new patterns. Context is both inherent and constructed. It is—to employ Cole’s perspective again—constructed by the actions of the subjects and held together through the use of tools, or mediating artifacts.
3.2.2 Communities as Social Context
Marcus and Hamedani’s (2007) definition of context as including meanings and so-cial structures recognizes the additional important soso-cial element of context. While meaning always refers to shared, though potentially contested, interpretations, a focus on sociostructural features includes, among other things, interpersonal rela-tions and institurela-tions. On this view, there are multiple social contexts and these are connected to the practice of social interaction.
The community provides a perspective on social context, one which is frequently used and which has found its application in the field of community psychology.
Building on Campbell (2001), who suggested an understanding of community based on the three dimensions of sentiment, space, and social structure, Kagan et al. (2011) specified a meaningful notion of community. In their account, sentiment “operates in a psychological, cultural and symbolic sense” (Kagan et al. 2011, p. 74) and resembles the construct of a sense of community (Sarason1974) with a focus on shared symbols and understandings as well as a shared emotional attachment to a group and location or place.
On an analytical level, community can be understood as a social actor or a social field (in the sense of Bourdieu1986). In the latter example, social actors and individ-ual persons act in more or less conflicting ways based on their membership in social groups and their interests. In contrast, the understanding of community as an actor normally relies on an ideal type model in which the community functions as a social unit of agency (e.g., in the sense of community resilience): social support, sense of belonging, and social bonds of affection and cooperation are emphasized while coercion and the potential conflicting interests of community members tend to be neglected. However, both the harsh reality of exclusion and the concurrent processes of internal solidarity need to be accounted for.
2The microsystem (e.g., family and neighborhood), the mesosystem (the interaction of two mi-crosystem environments), the exosystem, the mami-crosystem (the larger cultural context), and the chronosystem (the context of passing time). These events may have an impact on a particular birth cohort.
Furthermore, inequalities in power and resources permeate communities and social contexts in general. In order to establish a comprehensive view of the socio-cultural aspects, it is important also to adopt the approaches of critical (community) psychology, which draw attention to disadvantage, oppression, marginalization, racism, poverty, and colonization (Nelson and Prilleltensky2010; Kagan et al.2011;
Markard2010).
3.2.3 Subjectivity and Agency
In order to account for the mutual constitution of person and context, concepts of agency address the human capacity to shape social and material worlds. However, approaches differ with regard to the question where they locate the sources of agency.
For cultural psychologists Markus and Kitayama (2010), the sense of agency is a central component of the self:
A self is the “me” at the center of experience—a continually developing sense of aware-ness and agency that guides actions and takes shape as the individual, both brain and body, becomes attuned to various environments. Selves incorporate the patterning of their vari-ous environments and thus confer particular and culture-specific form and function to the psychological processes they organize (e.g., attention, perception, cognition, emotion, mo-tivation, interpersonal relationship, group). In turn, as selves engage with their sociocultural contexts, they reinforce and sometimes change the ideas, practices, and institutions of these environments. (p. 420)
To view the “me” as the center of experience and the sense of agency as individualistic is one particular way of understanding the self. The way in which people associate and experience agency is context bound in and of itself (Markus and Hamedani2007). The sense of agency is not a characteristic of the individual; it is created dynamically in the mutual constitution of person and context (Markus and Hamedani2007). In Western psychology, however, this notion of self has been (re)produced as a universalistic fallacy of the independent self (Markus and Hamedani2007). It leads to a normative understanding of the self as autonomous, intrinsically motivated, and engaged in control, influence, and self-expression, rather than as socially interdependent and adjusting to others’ expectations. However, for many people, the binary of individual self and social context may seem strange. They may associate “experience” more closely with collectively shared realities and not assume that the “me” aspect is central, because experience can be simultaneously social and subjective, collective and individual (Kleinman and Fitz-Henry2007). The psychological (emotions and actions) is inherently social and does not emerge from the inner, individual self.
To develop an understanding of the relationship between the sociocultural and the psychological, bridging terms such as practice and (a non-cognitively-simplified understanding of) meaning can be particularly useful.
If we understand people as products of the social context which they in turn are able to shape, we see being social and “having” agency as basic to the human condition. Yet, the agency people have is also socially embedded, as Ortner (2006) pointed out:
[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.