Richard Shweder

Richard Allan Shweder (* 1945 ) is an American cultural anthropologist and cultural psychologist . Shweder is known for his critical stance towards ethnocentrism .

academic career

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Richard A. Shweder received his bachelor's degree in social anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 and his PhD from Harvard University's Department of Social Relations in 1972 . He then taught for a year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and has been at the University of Chicago ever since , currently as a professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and in the Department of Psychology.

Shweder carried out his ethnological field research outside of the United States in the temple city of Bhubaneswar in the Indian state of Orissa , where he dealt in particular with cultural ideas of the person, the self, emotions and moral judgment, gender roles, explanations of illness, and causal explanations for the causes of illness. This research led u. a. to a critique of universalist theory of moral judgment of Lawrence Kohlberg by Shweder argued that at least three different in those judgments ethics reflect: that of the autonomy (autonomy) that the community (community) and the holiness (divinity).

Shweder has presented a large number of essays on controversial debates in the field of cultural studies , which essentially deal with the question of the recognition of the other and his cultural and religious practices. Shweder is interested in showing the possibilities but also the limits of what is and what is not permitted in Western democracies . To this end, he primarily studies the conflicts of norms that arise when migrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America come to the rich countries of the northern hemisphere and bring their cultural and religious practices with them and of course practice them, such as B. arranged marriages, circumcision in boys and circumcision in girls , etc. Shweder advocates a cultural pluralism that he calls "universalism without uniformity" , a formula that refers to the "anti- relativism " of Clifford Geertz .

With this particular research topic, he is considered a proven expert in questions of cultural conflicts. He heads the joint working group of the Social Science Research Council and the Russell Sage Foundation "Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law", which deals with the question "Freedom for cultural practices: how free are they really? And how free should they be? ”. And only recently, for the same reason, he was accepted into the new working group "Indigenous Psychology" of Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (APA).

Richard Shweder has received a number of awards and prizes: He was twice on research grants at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1985–1986 and 1995–1996), and in 1999 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and later at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Shweder held a Hewlett visiting professorship at the Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University (2003-2004) and at the Stanford University Hoover Institution (2005-2006). He also held visiting professorships at the Russell Sage Foundation (1990–1991), received the John Simon Guggenheim Research Fellowship (1985–1986), was elected Carnegie scholar (2002) and he received the Socio-Psychological Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his article "Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?" During the 2008-2009 academic year, Shweder was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton . Shweder was president of the American Society for Psychological Anthropology. In 1997 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Cultural psychology

Following Clifford Geertz 's definition of culture as a symbol system, Shweder understands a person's environment as an intentional environment, which would not exist in its human form without the meaning-generating symbol system (language), as well as the person himself as an intentional person, which is not objective looks at the things in their environment, but experiences them individually and affectively . The relativism that characterizes this discipline is derived from this postulate , but it does not want to be a radical relativism as represented by Richard Rorty , but a cultural relativism based on the principle of universalism without uniformity . and does not try to understand the diversity of culturally human coexistence as variations of a certain genetic pool of humanity (biological-evolutionary universalism ). Following this criticism, cultural psychology relies on a different understanding of the relationship between the psyche and the environment than the study of mental representations , which gets by without the assumption of their precultural determination, universal validity and abstract-formalistic description. It is thus genuinely directed against a Eurocentrism , which has declared Western psychology to be a discipline that explores universals . According to Shweder, cultural psychology is the exploration of these psycho-semantic-socio-cultural realities in which subject and object cannot be separated from one another because they permeate one another so strongly. Intentional environments are "artificial worlds"; H. man-made, populated with human products. Intentional world means that nothing exists independently of ourselves or our interpretations. That is, a sociocultural environment is an intentional world because it is real, actual, and compulsive, but only as long as there is a community of people whose beliefs , desires, emotions, intentions, and other mental representations are directed towards and through them to be influenced. The principle of intentional worlds includes the idea that subject and object, human beings and sociocultural environments, dialectically permeate the identity of the other (through interpretive tools) and therefore cannot be captured as independent and dependent variables, as is the case in the general and theirs Extension of cross-cultural psychology is attempted. Their identities are pervasive; interdependent. Neither side can be thought, interpreted and lived without the other. The principle of intentional worlds also means that nothing “in itself” is real, but realities that are products of the way in which things are represented, embedded and implemented in various taxonomic and / or narrative contexts and thus constitute the reality of life.

For Shweder, the second pillar of cultural psychology is a special form of conception of the person. They understand the person as a semiotic subject or as an intentional person for whom the historically acquired meaning of a situation or a stimulating event is the main reason to react, and for which different situations produce different answers because they activate different local and rational response options - e.g. B. depending on which social position the person holds, which moral standards apply etc. In order to recognize meanings as such, the semiotic subject uses psychic tools (texts or symbols ). These psychic tools are first referred to by Shweder as conceptual schemes, to be later replaced by the more appropriate term experiential concept by Clifford Geertz (1983). These experiential concepts represent the mediating entity between culture and psyche, between the intentional world and the intentional person, because a person is always involved in historical, political, cultural, social and interpersonal contexts and derives their tools of interpretation from them.

Why Shweder called this anthropological program cultural psychology, he explained in 1999 in his essay "Why cultural psychology?" He wanted to get rid of the various stigmata associated with his research tradition, culture and personality studies . The anthropological school associated with the names Franz Boas , Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead had a reputation for conducting national character studies and being too strongly influenced by psychoanalysis . He also found the grammatical connection of culture AND personality problematic, since both can be understood as variables and which can be viewed individually. Despite the unfortunate name chosen, a cultural psychology, as it was first formulated by the Chicago Committee on Human Development , of which Richard A. Shweders is the most prominent representative, aims rather not to create a new science, but rather to create different, complementary disciplines : especially an anthropology (reunited with linguistics ), which is suitable for analyzing sociocultural environments in all their intentionality and particularity (meanings and means), and a psychology (reunited with philosophy ), which is suitable for analyzing people in all their intentionality and investigate historicity .

Publications (in selection)

• with Robert A. Levine (Ed.): Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion . Cambridge University Press, New York 1984.
• with Donald W. Fiske (Ed.): Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986.
• with George J. Stigler and Gilbert H. Herdt (Eds.): Cultural Psychology: Essays on comparative human development . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990.
• Cultural Psychology - what is it? In: George J. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, Gilbert H. Herdt (Eds.): Cultural Psychology: Essays on comparative human development . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 1-46.
• with Maria A. Sullivan: The Semiotic Subject of Cultural Psychology. In: Lawrence A. Pervin (Ed.): Handbook of Personality - Theory and Research . New York 1990, Guilford Press, pp. 399-416.
• Thinking Through Cultures. Expeditions in Cultural Psychology . Harvard University Press, Harvard 1991.
• with Maria A. Sullivan: Cultural Psychology: Who needs it? In: Annual Review of Psychology. Volume 44, pp. 497-523.
• with Richard Jessor and Anne Colby (Eds.): Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996.
• Welcome to the Middle Age! (And other cultural fictions) . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1998.
• Why Cultural Psychology? In: ethos. 1999, 27 (1), pp. 62-73.
• with Martha Minow and Hazel Markus (eds.): Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies . Russell Sage Foundation Press, New York 2002.
• Why do Men Barbecue ? Recipes for Cultural Psychology . Harvard University Press, Harvard 2002.
• with Byron Good (Ed.): Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005.
• as editor: The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2009.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Controversial psychology professor to speak at the Chicago Cultural Center ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Shweder, RA, Much, N.C, Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "Big Three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "Big Three" explanations of suffering. In: AM Brandt & P. ​​Rozin (eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119-169). New York: Routledge.
3. ^ Richard A. Shweder, Maria A. Sullivan: The Semiotic Subject of Cultural Psychology. In: Lawrence A. Pervin (Ed.): Handbook of Personality - Theory and Research. Guilford Press, New York, NY 1990, pp. 513f.
4. ^ Richard A. Shweder: Cultural Psychology - what is it? In: George J. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, Gilbert H. Herdt (Eds.): Cultural Psychology: Essays on comparative human development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA 1990, pp. 2, 22.
5. ^ Richard A. Shweder, Maria A. Sullivan: The Semiotic Subject of Cultural Psychology. In: Lawrence A. Pervin (Ed.): Handbook of Personality - Theory and Research. Guilford Press, New York, NY 1990, pp. 402ff.
6. ↑ Shweder, Sullivan: The Semiotic Subject of Cultural Psychology. 1990.
7. ↑ Shweder: Cultural Psychology - what is it? 1990.
8. ↑ Shweder & Sullivan, 1993?
9. ↑ Rome Harré, Grant Gillet: The Discursive Mind. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA 1994, p. 25.
10. ^ Richard A. Shweder: Why Cultural Psychology? In: ethos. 27 (1) 1990, pp. 62-73.

Web links

• Official homepage: Richard A. Shweder
• Richard Shweder's Biographical Note