A few years ago, in the preface to an earlier book, I wished for a future in which cross-cultural psychology would not be taught just as a stand-alone course, but for one in which culture would be pervasive in the study of behavior. It would be, I hoped, an integral aspect of the mainstream psychology curriculum, embedded in all our courses. With each passing year, we move a step toward that goal. This book is an effort to take us a little further in the direction of a psychology of all people.
For millennia, people have formed groups and have interacted across groups, sometimes peaceably, and sometimes in conflict. They have faced challenges of communication, stereotyping, aggression, fear, and curiosity – all the stuff of culture. Yet, as my friend Walt Lonner has noted, researchers have sometimes considered culture simply “noise” – prompting him to wonder how such a profound part of people’s lives could be so easily dismissed, and leading John Berry to observe that culture is not noise, but music. Lonner, too, has thought of culture as music, likening its rich composition and texture to that of an opera, and John Dewey, in his Art as Experience, noted that we exist not in a void, but in ongoing interaction with environment – with culture.
My hope is that this book brings together some of the key sections of the orchestra that comprise the teaching of psychology. Sometimes our efforts have been isolated, sometimes discordant, but as we strive to bring harmony to the process, blending the local with the international, the culture bound with the universal, the biological with the contextual, we make incremental progress toward a more complete understanding. In the light of the challenges faced by people living in this twenty-first-century world, to do otherwise would be irresponsible. We owe it to our students, to our children and grandchildren, and to our sisters and brothers around the globe to do our part to broaden our comprehension and to bring our science to bear on the problems they face, now and in the future.
There is something here for teachers of most of the courses found in typical psychology curricula and in most introductory psychology classes. To see further integration of contextual, cultural knowledge in these areas would indeed be music to the senses. And to paraphrase Shakespeare, if culture be the music of life, play on, play on.
