The chapter begins with a very interesting claim – the term “culture” is everywhere and then further explains the diverse areas of life that add up to make the concept or culture. What made me interested was an addition to the information that culture can be or cannot be ‘geographically bound’. As a Pakistani, I have thought about culture as a geographically restricted concept and this was something new for me to think about. Even though I am a Pakistani, that is only my nationality making it only one perspective of my culture. There might be many other aspects to that like my SES, educational level, caste, ethnicity etc.
Moving on, I was impressed by author’s comment “all psychologists should be cultural psychologists”. I agree with this phrase to a great extent because I believe that psychology is incomplete without sociocultural contexts. I saw an Instagram reel of a psychologist that mentioned that immigrants in European countries don’t believe in therapy because the European psychologists hyperfocus on individualism which might seem unreal or at least unachievable or immigrants from Eastern cultures. In such cases, psychologists cannot function without entirely examining the sociocultural situation of an individual.
Furthermore, the author mentions culture as a sum of “in the head” (concept) and “in the world” (material) which makes sense if we think about art for example – methods, ideologies as concept and buildings, museums, art pieces as material.
Finally, I would like to talk about culture cycle. I imagined culture cycle to be a non-directional cycle – individuals affect interactions and interactions affect institutions. Likewise, laws and regulations or certain societal expectations from institutions also shape the individual level or self.
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