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DOI: 10.1177/1354067X14527841

2014 20: 147Culture Psychology Jaan Valsiner

What cultural psychologies need: Generalizing theories!

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Culture & Psychology2014, Vol. 20(2) 147159

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Article

What cultural

psychologies need:Generalizing theories! Jaan Valsiner University of Aalborg, Denmark

AbstractCulture and Psychology has by now been around for two decades. As its Editor, I like tolook forward, rather than backward, to consider what might be necessary for furtheradvancement of the area. While the discourses in the different subdomains of culturalpsychologies1 have stabilized over the two decades, elaborations of relevant culturalphenomena have been well established, and the field continues in its deeply internationaland transdisciplinary waysthere are still serious obstacles on its way of furtheradvancement. I would outline twothe need of theory construction, and developmentof new methodology that honors the qualitative, dynamic, and holistic nature of culturalphenomena.

KeywordsTheory, generalization, cultural phenomena, methodology

The articles in this issue of our Journal are interesting both in what they bring forthto the readers, and what they fail to elaborate. I am most impressed to see the issue

of CLEAN DIRTY opposition getting an elaborate coverage here (Rochira,2014, p. 220; Speltini & Passini, 2014, p. 203)in that meaning complex we arecovering a ground that is truly universal while beingat the same time, completelycontext- and time-specic. This meaning complex is part-and-parcel of our lives,from issues of feeling that my hands are dirty (and rushing to wash them) toaccusations by my social others that my ideas are dirty (calling for confession,and/or public repentanceBrinkmann, 2010), and on to the policy making bymunicipalities of how to keep up the cleanliness standards in the urban

Corresponding author: Jaan Valsiner, Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg Universitet, Kroghstraede 3-4219, DK-9220 Aalborg est, Denmark.Email: [email protected]

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environments. The issue of is this clean or is it dirty ? is encountered at everymoment, at every level of social life. Speltini and Passini (2014, p. 203) are of coursevery clear in their conclusion:

. . . the issue of cleanliness has a specic complexity in which the different levels of thepsychosocial functioning of individuals and the various mechanisms for the protectionof the society from foreignness intertwine and overlap. At the core of the representa-tions of the concepts of clean/dirty and pure/impure it exists a complex intersection of psychological and psychosocial factors linked to perceptual (smell, sight, taste), emo-tional (especially disgust, but also fear), moral (purity), social (the social categoriza-tions with their bias), and economic (cleaning has a cost and divides social classes)aspects. (pp. 215216)

This very adequate description of the complexity involved is, however, a good repre-sentative of psychologys limitsunpacking the system of such complexity into asystemic account is needed. But psychologists habitually stop at listing all the pre-sumed elements that are parts of the whole, while not addressing the issue of how toreconstruct the abstract generalized whole. Cultural psychologies have not manage-dso farto provide a remedy here either. The efforts are visible in the presentissueaside from Speltinis and Passinis efforts (which smell with the freshness of good social sciences where interdisciplinary focus is primary), Rochira (2014, p. 220)

proposes the use of the general theory of social representation to apply to the cleanli-ness and purity issuesthe notion of themata as creating bases for potential emer-gence of new applications of the CLEAN DIRTY tension. It is precisely thatfocus on what could emergebut has not yet done sothat would turn the theoryof social representation from an explanatory into a generative framework. Otherwise,the scientic discourse remains similar to the claims of evolutionary psychologytobe overcome by the notion of semiotic coevolution (Cousins, 2014, p. 160).

These are the words. We invent many nice words in cultural psychologies, butwhen it comes to elaboration of the process mechanisms involved, we remain mute.

Somehow, the history of psychology over the last century has discouraged thereconstruction of possible processes that might generate relevant outcomesbothvalued positively and negativelyin the future. Instead, psychologists almost auto-matically proceed to list presumed causal entitiesvariablesthat are expectedto participate in the generation of new phenomena. Thus, the variable of socialstraticationhigher social classcan be claimed to apply a particular xedstate of the duality DIRTY clean to the lower classes and to foreigners.The pauper is easily seen as dirty, the king or CEO of a multinational compa-nynever so. What happens in this claim is that the tension (DIRTY non-

DIRTY) is lost. The dirty pauper who comes to the house and asks to wash hishands might not be granted that opportunity, while the clean celebrity whocomes and asks for the same can be accepted. And the possibility that in ourcleaning activities we may use substances that make the cleaned object dirty ina different way is overlooked. My hands covered by soap are also dirtyonly the

148 Culture & Psychology 20(2)



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the opposite states. The qualitative unity of the opposites is guaranteed, but theemergence of anything new is not. Hence, the process depicted in Figure 2 can caterfor only the transitions between the opposite states (clean and dirty) but doesnot produce anything new. For instance, it fails to capture the moment of general-ization from newly cleaned body to the purity of ones thoughtsthe goal

that many religious cleaning practices have attempted, and achieved, in humanhistory. Somehow, by forcing human beings to do something to their bodiesnoteat (fast), force them into a xed position (kneeling down in prayer or marching,singing hymns), hit oneself (agellation), undertake long and strenuous journeys(pilgrimage), or short-term physical exercises on the treadmill (for health),

Figure 1. The contrast of the clean and the dirty: a tension of authenticity (Nancy,France).




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the bodily goals-directed efforts feed forward into the psychological domains.Viewed among the myriad of such body-focused activities, acts of cleaning areperhaps the rst and most exible grounds for emergence of meaning linkedwith alteration of the status quo. My ngers were not sticky before, but aftertouching that object they suddenly feel so. I wash them in the water nearby andthey do not feel sticky again.

But how can one break the loop of the CLEAN DIRTY cycle? How can onegeneralize from the bodily negotiation of the opposition into the overcoming of that opposition at a different qualitative level of organization? How can the spot-

less white clothing of a bride in an occidental wedding context begin to symbolizeher moral purity? Why is it important to spend much time on cleaning clothes? Thecultural history of laundry is not that of technologies of washing, drying, andironing of clothes, but of the social meaning and personal sense of feelingclean in washed clothes.

Figure 2. The closed dynamic cycle of CLEAN and DIRTY.

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Such escape from the cycle can happen through generalization and recontex-tualization of the generalized form in a different setting. It is here that the use of metaphoric processeslinking different areas of knowledge through similes andmetaphorsacquire relevance. Such extension of the meanings beyond theimmediate setting is paralleled by action regulations. Interestingly, we can observesocial demands of delay in the imperative of restoring the non-CLEAN actor to thestate of cleanliness and, with it, purity. The delay, interestingly, is the Biblicalimperative for after the act of washing has taken place:

If a man has an emission of semen, he will bathe his whole body in water, and beimpure until the evening. Everything made of cloth or of skin on which the semen fallswill be washed with water, and be impure until the evening. (Leviticus 15.1618)

Such cleanliness instructions were meant for mild states of impuritylinked withgetting dirty by real liquids, yet with those of symbolic importancewherewashing and waiting for a period of time were considered to suffice (Kugler,1997). These were no major delements which would require elaborate puricationrituals for restoring the desired purity.

This small feature of the Biblical imperatives may be of psychological relevan-ceas it creates a mandated pause. The demand for waiting introduces a pauseinto the ongoing ow of activity. Why is a pause mandated? The pause is the

temporal arena for transfer of the meaning from the physical cleaning act (washinghands) to marking of the symbolic importance of that physical act. The pause is aguidance for internalization of the meaning of the act of transgression. From here,we could have leads into the cultural psychology of other mandated nonactions inthe social life: demands for silence while being in a symbolic place, honoring theglorious dead by a minute of silence, and so on. The topic of silences is some-thing that our contemporary cultural psychologies need to deal with.Psychologyever since the interventions in it by the behaviorist creed around acentury agohas been focusing on phenomena that can be detected and observed

as there is some external productbehavior, talk, drawing, manifest solution to aproblem, or a mark on a rating scale. What it has overlooked is the opposite nonaction, event that could have happened at a certain moment (but did notseeOhnuki-Tierney, 1994 on zero signiers). Since most of human conduct involvesthe hidden, nonmanifest side of action plans that are not accomplished, ideationsthat are abandoned the moment they emerge, etc.that are inevitable under con-ditions of future-oriented preadaptationinclusion of such anti-action (com-pare with anti-matter 3 ) phenomena in the conceptual scheme of the disciplineis necessary. The empirical proof of such theoretical necessity is evident from the

history of the research on Aktualgenese (microgenesissee Valsiner and van derVeer, 2000, chapter 7 for a review) where the emergence and dissipation of theintermediate Gestalts in the arrival to the nal percept indicates the functionalrelevance of nonsurviving inventions of the psyche . What is psychologically relevant for survival is ephemeral in the process of survival this general principle leads us to




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the difficulties of using evolutionary theory in psychology at large and in culturalpsychologies in particular.

In the present issue of our Journal , Cousins (2014, pp. 186187) outlines thedifficulties of the use of evolutionary theory, struggling with nding an alternative:

When a gene is transmitted through reproduction its structure remains largely intact,but when cultural content is transmitted through learning it gets interpreted in termsof the prior understandings and beliefs of the person who learns it. Such interpretationoften leads to change: people not only learn ideas, but use imagination and foresightto transform them into something new. This process is quite unlike the randommutation and natural selection of genetic material, and for many theorists the inter-pretive dimension of culture poses a major obstacle to a Darwinian model of culturalchange. (pp. 186187)

The focus on imagination and foresight is central for understanding the functioningof cultural tools within the human psyche. It follows from the inevitability of allpsychological phenomena emerging and self-maintaining in irreversible time. HenriBergson pointed that out a century ago (Bergson, 1907), and James Mark Baldwintriedunsuccessfullyto construct a developmental logic that would t thatrigorous constraint upon human functioning (Baldwin, 1906, 1908, 1911, 1915).Under such conditions, human beings create their cultural meansranging from

signs to spaceshipswith constant anticipation of the unknown future. Instead of feed back mechanismsknown from cyberneticswe have to think of feed forward processes. These processes are catalyzed (Cabell and Valsiner, 2014) rather thancaused, and their ways of constructing the present state out of future possibilities isopen to personal will. And as such, the focus of any theoretical generalization inpsychology is that of a single case andeven more dramaticallyof a single epi-sode in the ow of experience of the person who is treated as single case(Salvatore and Valsiner, 2010). How is any generalization possible under suchsevere constraints of reality?

Whom we (seem to) study is not what we studyPsychology at large has lived under the inuence of one way of generalizationfromsamples to populations (and from there to generic or average case). Yet this pertainsto the sources of our informationhuman beings, but not necessarily to the topics of our study. The latter are much wider than that of the sources. When medicalresearcher perform human trials on new drugs, they use people to be able tosay something about the drugs (as these operate in human bodies), not about the

human bodies as such. The bodiesthe sourcecome into focus only in extremecasesof high lethality, or of no impact.Thus, our object of investigation and our target phenomena used in that inves-

tigation need not coincide. Lev Vygotskyback in 1927 when trying to overcomethe crisis in psychology that has plagued the discipline since its beginning

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(Valsiner, 2012) explained that separation of the object and the target by way of alook at the classic studies of Ivan P. Pavlov in physiology:

I.P. Pavlov practically studies the activity of the salivary gland of the dog . What giveshim the right to call his study that of the higher nervous activity of animals ? Maybe heshould test his experiments on a horse, a crow, etc.on all, or at least on the majorityof animal species, so as to make his conclusions? Or, maybe he should label his studylike this: investigation of salivation in the dog? But Pavlov did not study actually thesalivation of a dog as such . His research does not add anything to our knowledge of the dog as such or salivation as such. In his studies of the dog he studied not the dog,but the animal in general , in salivation the reex in general , i.e. in the study of thisanimal and in that phenomenon he emphasized that what was common with allsimilar phenomena. That is why his conclusions not only relate to all animals butto all biology: the fact of salivation in the case of Pavlovian dogs to Pavlovs signalsbecome directly into a general biological principletransformation of the inheritedexperience into that of the animal. (Vygotsky, 1927/1982, p. 404)

Vygotsky pointed to Pavlovs maximum abstraction of the principles. Pavlov dis-covered a general biological law while studying (very few) dogs. That was sufficientas he was eager to investigate a general principle through the ways in which thedog behaved. Likewise, falling apples are good to studyby Newtonnot in order

to learn about apples (which are better eaten)but to nd out about general lawsof falling of objects. In science, the particular materials we investigate are not theactual objects of study, but means for creating knowledge that transcend theimmediate materials. We study phenomena we call cultural in human psychol-ogy in order to make sense of general principles of the human psyche that cannot beexplained by principles of lower levels of generality. Behavioral principleswellworked out by Pavlov, Bekhterev and Skinnerare not sufficient to explain thepoetry human beings have created over centuries, their self-destructive glory inghting endless wars, and their readiness to take care of children. The human

psyche functions at different qualitative levels, each of which has its own rulesfor functioning that are neither reducible downwards (e.g., neuronal reduction of higher psychological functions) nor diluted upwards (considering persons astexts of the semiosphere).

This notion of qualitative hierarchical heterogeneity of the human psyche leadspsychology to re-evaluation of the Morgans Canon. Usually, that imperative forsimplicity is given by a direct quote:

. . . In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher

psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one whichstands lower in the psychological scale. (Morgan, 1894, p. 53)

This quote has been, over generations, been considered out of the context where itwas placed. It forces the investigator to overlook the emergence of new regulatory




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mechanisms that operate between adjacent (i.e., both lower and next higher)levels of the psychological scale. Developmentally, the emergence of a new reg-ulatory mechanism (e.g., a higher-level semiotic mediating device, in the intra- orinter-psychological spheres) may be initially fragile and ill-formed. Developmententails such transitional forms between levelsthe higher levels are constantly information, and, once they emerge, enter into regulation of lower levels. Hence, thecanonical interpretation of Morgans Canon makes it impossible to explaindevelopment; while development entails emergence of hierarchically complex reg-ulatory mechanisms. A rewrite may be sufficient:

If we assume development to be a multi-level probabilistically epigenetic process, in nocase may we interpret an observable (i.e. emerged) outcome as being caused by aunitary lower level process (within the hierarchical network of processes), butalways as a result of causal systemic processes that operate between levels.Attribution of causality to a singular-level (higher, or lower) causal systems ispossible only and only if we have ruled out any possible regulatory impacts fromadjacent levels, especially by a process at the next higher level in the hierarchy.(Valsiner, 2006, p. 180)

This reformulation sets up a sequence of investigative activities in ways that at rstrequire determination of the lack of between-levels ties. In other terms, the study

needs to verify that instead of a system that involves at least two hierarchical levels(whole/parts), the whole phenomenon consists only of elements that never becomecongured into qualitatively new wholes.

The processes between levels in the human psyche are sign processeshence,semiotics becomes closely linked with psychology, and cultural psychologiesacquire the central stage in the pantheon of all psychology. Together with thistrans-disciplinary synthesis can come the return to general theory building inpsychologystarting from cultural psychologies.

Why general theory?There is a dire need of theory construction and development of new methodologythat honors the qualitative, dynamic, and holistic nature of cultural phenomena, inall cultural psychologies. Our contemporary social sciences have struggled to getover the postmodernist fashion for glorifying the local and contextual nature of cultural phenomena as a value for its own sake. The inductive-empiricist ethos thathas governed psychology over the last century has left a legacy that has arrested thedevelopment of psychology as science (Toomela and Valsiner, 2010). Trying to be

scientic has slowed down the disciplines capacity to be so as Sigmund Koch(1985) nicely illustrated

For some years I have argued that psychology has been misconceived, whether as ascience or as any kind of coherent discipline devoted to the empirical study of

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human beings. That psychology can be an integral discipline is the nineteenth-centuryautism that led to its baptism as an independent sciencean autism which can be shownto be exactly that, both by a priori and by empirico-historical considerations. (p. 92)

The diagnosis of psychology as autistic (and baptized) ts the disciplinevery well also in our 21st century. Yet any attribution of descriptors like suchorany other, even the opposite ones to theseis misleading. The diagnosis needs tobe followed up by a treatment strategy, and that of course is by far more difficult anendeavor. A deconstruction effort that fails to reconstruct an ailing disciplinesuffers from the very same problems that it detects in its opponent. Orthe ram-pant attacks on the remnants of positivism or dualism that one can encoun-terespecially, from the social constructionist side of the social sciencesprovideno solutions.

Where could cultural psychologies start in an effort to reconstruct psychology?What becomes clear from the present issue is that they cannot solve the problem bymere importing either evolutionary theory or anthropology into psychology anddeclaring the discipline to have solutions that might lead to popular acceptancemarked socially by Nobel or other prizes. Rather, they can start from the centralityof culture within the human psyche assuming that as a clear axiomatic stand,rather than a proposition that needs empirical support through some cross-cultural (meaningcross-countries) comparison of standardized test results.

Instead, assuming the centrality of culture axiomatically makes it irrelevantwhich of the manymore than 250denitions of the word culture one or anotherresearcher prefers to use. All of them entail the notion that psychology begins fromthe topfrom the most complex, most historically pervasive, and most dynamicinventions that Homo sapiens has created as a species. Thus, art, theatre, music,religion, architecture, governments, families, and other complex organismsratherthan laboratory rats or North-American college studentsare the starting data forthe cultural psychologies of the human ways of being.

Starting from complexity sets up limits on the methodology. It calls for the

development of general theories that can explain the high variety of the complexphenomena we can observe, and the ones which do not exist (yet), but could bepossible. Some paths in that direction have already been set (Van Geert, 1998).Systemic complexity of cultural phenomena leads to the need to leave behind theGeneral Linear Model and axiomatically assume that the human psyche is neces-sarily nonlinear (Puche Navarro, 2009) and can be studied through the applicationby nonlinear models. Good-bye, ANOVA, the method that has become not only atheory in psychology (Gigerenzer, 1993) but a magic wand! Instead, there can benumerous ways to build upon different versions of qualitative mathematics

(Rudolph, 2013) that may t with the nature of the phenomena.Much needs to be done. But it is rewarding to realize that after two decades of existence, cultural psychologies remain intellectually potent for innovation despite all the cognitive and social obstacles that the phenomena as well asthe social organization of sciences set up for it. Resilience is a virtue that can




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Morgan, C. L. (1894). An introduction to comparative psychology . London: Walter Scott Ltd.Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1994). The power of absence: Zero signifiers and their transgressions.

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del Valle.Rochira, A. (2014). The dialogicality of cleanliness: Thematizing the clean/dirty anti-

nomy in the background of the theory of social representations. Culture & Psychology ,20(2), 220231.

Rudolph, L. (2013). Qualitative mathematics for the social sciences . London: Routledge.Salvatore, S., & Valsiner, J. (2010). Between the general and the unique: Overcoming the

nomothetic versus idiographic opposition. Theory & Psychology , 20(6), 817833.Speltini, G., & Passini, S. (2014). Cleanliness/dirtiness, purity/impurity as social and psy-

chological issues. Culture & Psychology , 20(2), 203219.Toomela, A., & Valsiner, J. (Eds) (2010). Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years

gone astray? Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers.Valsiner, J. (1995). Editorial: Culture and psychology. Culture & Psychology , 1(1), 510.Valsiner, J. (2001). The first six years: Cultures adventures in psychology. Culture &

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Author biographyJaan Valsiner is the Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg

University in Denmark, and Professor of Psychology and English at ClarkUniversity, USA. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture& Psychology and Editor-in-Chief of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences (Springer, from 2007). In 1995 he was awarded the Alexander vonHumboldt Prize for his interdisciplinary work on human development. E-mail: [email protected]

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