Cultural Identity

Abstract

Cultural identity is a key term and major research topic of psychologists who adopt culturally sensitive approaches like cross‐cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychology. However, the meaning of the concept is unclear due to the fact that neither of the component concepts “culture” and “identity” has been defined consistently in the history of ideas or the history of science. As is well known, definitions of “culture” abound and vary from discipline to discipline. Similarly, in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, “identity” is used interchangeably with terms like “self” or “person” and overlaps with terms like “personality,” “personhood,” “selfhood,” “individuality,” and even aspects of “autonomy.” Although these conceptual ambiguities need to be further examined, based on current research the following broad understanding of cultural identity or the cultural self can be suggested: If identity is seen as the sum total of psychological experience (e.g., sensations, thoughts, feelings, motives), which forms our understanding of our place, role, and meaning in the world, then cultural identity can be conceived of as the result of our co‐constructive interactions with the meanings, beliefs, thinking styles, practices, and traditions that are implicit in our social environment and considered essential for our perception of our place, role, and meaning in a given culture in comparison to other cultures. Thus, people often attribute their feelings and behavior as well as that of other individuals or groups to their respective cultural identity.

Religion as an invaluable source of psychological knowledge: Indigenous Slavic psychology of religion.

“…Constructing indigenous psychology (indigenous psychologies) involves performing an analysis of culturally specific terms, beliefs, practices, and human functioning through a prism of a person’s natural cultural context. This aim is being realized through transformation of the folk psychological theory (ethnopsychology) into scholarly psychology, which meets scientific criteria defined in a broad sense (Chakkarath, 2005; Dalal & Misra, 2010; Sundararajan, 2015). The proximity of indigenous psychology and cultural psychology is expressed by treating a human being in his or her familiar and local context and rejecting premises of psychological universalism, as well as perceiving Western, objective definitions and research methods as ethnocentric elements of colonization of non-Western cultures, including academic groups (Pankalla & Kośnik, 2018b).…”

Personhood, Masculinity, and Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence

“…The implication is that, within the cultural ecology of Ghana, a person can be an adult male without being (becoming) a man or attaining maleness, or an adult male can be incompetent at maleness (Adjei, 2016), as there exists certain fundamental notions and ideals to which the behavioural prescriptions and social conduct of an adult male, "sɛ ɔyɛ ɔbarima a" (if he is a real man), ought to conform. Masculinity also involves men's psychological sense of self because identity, personal or collective, may be conceived of as a person's or group's aggregated sum of psychological experience (such as sensation, thoughts, feelings, motives) that forms an individual's understanding of his or her place, role and meaning in society (Chakkarath, 2013). Similarly, men's understanding of their masculine identities reflect their psychological experiences such as thoughts, feelings, motives, and actions, and these experiences also define men's understanding of their place, role and meaning in a given society.…”

Intercultural Communication and Cultural Identity in English Language Teaching

“…Moving forward from the discussion of identity issues, the expression of cultural identity can be discussed from a more specific point of view. Although cultural identity is popular with cultural, cross-cultural and indigenous psychological topics, there is no single definition of cultural identity because there is no generally accepted single definition for culture or identity terms individually as the explanation of both terms differs from discipline to discipline (Chakkarath, 2013). Moreover, as the concept of cultural identity is directly related to many concepts and phenomena that fall under the scope of human and social sciences, it takes place in various disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, social psychology, history, political sciences, language, literature, history, communication and culture studies.…”