Berry (2009) outlines the core questions regarding culture that are central to the epistemological ideologies of cross-cultural and cultural psychology: “what is culture; where is culture, and how can it be accessed?” (p. 363). For the first question, Berry considers both concrete and symbolic understandings of culture to be valid – that is, observable aspects like “artefacts and institutions”, as well as “abstract features” that serve to represent these outwardly discernable components through shared symbols and signs (i.e., language; p. 363).
Analogously, culture exists both outside and within individuals in Berry’s view, to such an extent that “cultures are ‘lying in wait’ for individuals to come along”, but while “particular individuals come and go… cultures remain more or less stable” (Berry, 2009, p. 363). However, culture can also be ‘incorporated’ into the individual, so its existence is somewhat internal to human psychology (though not a core tenet of cognitive functioning, because culture influences human psychology [see Sam & Berry, 2010]). For Berry, these dual-conceptualizations of culture are sufficient to capture the nuanced interactive nature of group-individual dynamics, but other scholars question the empirical and theoretical efficacy of these definitions.
Chirkov (2009a) laments that “there is no ‘culture’ in acculturation research” due to the lack of attention afforded to “shared norms, rules and meanings of the home and host cultures” (p. 101). Conversely, Bhatia’s (2007a, 2018) extensive ethnographic projects exploring dynamic understandings of cultural constructs like parenting and autonomy paints a different image of migrant experiences, investigating culture through a bottom-up approach that sought to understand migrant experiences from ‘indigenous’ perspectives (see also Cresswell, 2009). Bhatia (2007a) considered what it meant to part of an Indian diasporic community in America and in his later ethnographic project, he considered the effects of globalizing forces on cultural aspects in India, thereby differentiating between cultural contexts, groups, and constituents. What sets these projects apart from comparable cross-national scholarship that employed Berry’s model? Bhatia & Priya’s (2018) exploration of the effects of neoliberal globalization illuminates these questions by arguing that cross-psychological notions of culture portray monolithic, static conceptualizations of cultures while simultaneously situating them within
geographic contexts that, perhaps unintentionally, conflate notions of ‘nation’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘culture’ in ways that reify global inequities and coloniality (Bhatia & Mahalingam, submitted). Addressing these concerns, Bhatia (2002a) questions “is there such a thing as a univocal, monolithic, American, English, Arabic or Indian culture?” (p. 61) to which he, and other scholars (e.g., Said, 1993; Valsiner, 2007) answer emphatically: no. Bhatia and Mahalingam (submitted) reflect that cultures and groups are necessarily bounded within contexts of colonial
imperialism, neoliberal globalization, and asymmetrical power dynamics that influence them differentially depending on these circumstances. This allows for diasporic communities that differ greatly in their cultural expressions and experiences from those of the homeland culture (e.g., Indian-American diaspora’s culture versus Indian culture), yet both are still bonded and connected temporally, if not geographically, with possibilities for bidirectional influences (see also Appadurai, 1991; Bhatia & Ram, 2001). Through this conceptualization, culture is highly dynamic, context bound, and responsive to external influences (especially other cultures; more on this later). Two pitfalls of traditional concepts of culture immediately emerge as a result of this simple formulation: equivalencies drawn between culture and nation, and essentialized notions of culture located within individuals.
Cross-cultural psychology’s pursuit of universal psychological processes that are
influenced by cultural mediations are promising, but studies akin to Berry’s model often employ notions of dichotomous cultures / cultural artifacts that conflate nations with their perceived culture. Hofstede’s (1991) classic operationalization of culture in the business environment assessed attitudes along different dimensions to categorize different nations according to their relative position in order to better facilitate intercultural communication. He interviewed
individuals and, using statistical measures, correlated attitudes with behaviors and linked them with the participants’ nationalities. Furthermore, he ranked nations along continuums that established basic dichotomies like ‘individualistic vs. collectivist’. Hermans and Kempen (1998) dub this paradigm ‘perilous’, for it portrays culture as static and nation-bounded (see also Bhatia & Mahalingam, submitted; Bhatia & Ram, 2001). Huntington (1993) famously
appropriated this notion of dichotomous cultures aligned with their nationalities and posited that individuals from different ‘civilizations’ are prone to conflict due to incompatible cultural values. However, as Bhabha (1990) writes, nationalism is a process through which nation-states became associated with individuals, their ethnicities, and, finally, culture, implying that these are separate, but related, entities. Anderson’s (1983) notion of ‘imagined communities’ further reflects this concept, such that individuals in nations do not experience perceive their
geographically disparate bonds to be equivalent with local community bonds. Thus, individuals in their own nation know that their local culture does not reflect the entirety of the nation’s culture, yet researchers not incorporating indigenous psychologies fail to acknowledge this vital reflection in when conflating one nation with one culture (see also Bhatia & Ram, 2009).
Appadurai (1991) alternatively proposes that cultures are not necessarily bounded by geographic locations, but rather exist within the imaginations of groups and peoples within them. Thus, Syrian communities existing outside of the Syrian nation maintain cultural connections to their homeland, but necessarily evolve depending on their new local and national circumstances (see also van Oudenhoven & Ward, 2013). Importantly, scholarship investigating these diasporic circumstances must continue to interrogate culture within the paradigm of heterogeneity, for individuals within diasporas also exemplify extreme diversity in
cultural expressions, preferences, and identities. Furthermore, Bhatia and Ram (2001) emphasize that conflating nation and culture overlooks the contested national histories and identities that were suppressed through processes of colonialism and nationalism (see also Anderson, 1983). By disentangling nation and culture, it becomes possible to examine the enormous complexity of migrant youth experiences and to interrogate local / national structures that allow particular identities to emerge while simultaneously proscribing others.
In order to truly understand the complexity of cultural groups, intercultural contact, and cultural exchange, scholars must conceptualize culture as a dynamic entity. Berry’s (2009) perspective that cultures “are ‘lying in wait’ for individuals to come along” that, as a result of individual integration of particular cultural aspects, serve to influence “part of the psychological makeup of every person” (p. 363) approaches culture as a substance that can be outwardly observed and captured. However, his measures that address ‘cultural identification’ (Berry, 1997) imply that people choose particular aspects to adopt, and that these domains remain constant, so that others within the same cultural group can incorporate these same aspects years apart from one another. This perspective thus presumes that cultures are temporally stable and territorially located within ‘cultural groups’ and their constituents. These notions epitomize the dangers of “cultural essentialism” (Grillo, 2003) that views culture as “a conception of human beings as ‘cultural’… bearers of a culture… which defines them and differentiates them from others” (p. 158, emphasis in original). Oliveri (2008) highlights the preponderance of European studies explicitly incorporating these perspectives to emphasize the cultural makeup of migrants in contrast to secular Europeans, relating this understanding with aspects of Orientalism (Said, 1979) and Weber’s notion of an acultural modernity (Weber,
1921 / 1972). Thus, as Bhatia and colleagues have reflected (e.g., Bhatia, 2002a; Bhatia & Priya, 2018; Bhatia & Ram, 2001, 2009), notions of culture must embrace decolonial ideologies that actively resist these persistent colonial narratives and consider questions of race and citizenship to understand the developmental changes in the context of conflicting cultural influences.