Culture and the Individual

Theory and Method of Cultural Consonance

William W Dressler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351672832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Winner of the 2019 Society for Anthropological Sciences Book Prize

This book engages with the issue of how culture is incorporated into individuals' lives, a question that has long plagued the social sciences. Starting with a critical overview of the treatment of culture and the individual in anthropology, the author makes the case for adopting a cognitive theory of culture in researching the relationship. The concept of cultural consonance is introduced as a solution and placed in theoretical context. Cultural consonance is defined as the degree to which individuals incorporate into their own beliefs and behaviors the prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in shared cultural models. Dressler examines how this can be measured and what it can reveal, focusing in particular on the field of health.

Written in an accessible style by an experienced anthropologist, Culture and the Individual pulls together more than twenty-five years of research and offers valuable insights for students as well as academics in related fields.

1
Introduction

The aim of this book is to address a fundamental question: how do we describe the relationship between culture, conceptualized at least in part as a property of aggregates (i.e., groups or societies), and the individual? As Ortner notes:

One could look at the unfolding of social and cultural theory over the whole 20th century as a struggle over the role of the social being—the person, subject, actor, or agent—in society and history.

(Ortner 2005: 31)

Various answers have been provided, including theorizing the whole issue away. For example, some social scientists—perhaps most notably Alfred Kroeber (1917) in anthropology—have dismissed the individual as of no interest whatsoever to the analyst of the social and cultural, positing instead a distinct phenomenal reality that stood apart and could be analyzed separately from the individual (Kroeber borrowed Spencer’s term “the superorganic”). Nor can this be thought of as some antique aberration of thought; Clifford Geertz (1973), probably the most influential anthropologist in the latter half of the 20th century, introduced his own other level of social and cultural analysis when he argued that culture was to be found in “public symbols,” existing “between minds.” In other words, the individual was just not that relevant.

And, of course, the opposite point has been argued as well. The anthropologist Edward Sapir (1917), writing within months of the publication of Kroeber’s (1917) re-introduction of the concept of the superorganic, asked “Do We Need a ‘Superorganic’?” (and, interestingly, along with being another former Boas student, Sapir had recently been working for Kroeber). Somewhat later Ruth Benedict (1932) would argue that culture was nothing but “personality writ large.” Much later Vayda (1994) would argue that all of human social and cultural life could be thought of as simply an average of the variations in the way that individuals behave, echoing (although without acknowledgement) precisely what E.B. Tylor wrote in 1871.

This book develops the linked ideas that there is indeed a collective cultural reality that envelops us as individuals that cannot be reduced exclusively to the thoughts and feelings of individuals, and that, simultaneously, cultural reality exists within and is modified by individuals. And we don’t need to go all squishy metaphysically by inventing new orders of reality (like the superorganic). Culture is in the individual because it can’t be anywhere else, ultimately, and individuals are active agents who are creating their lived experience in ongoing interaction with collective culture as well as with various resources available through, and constraints imposed by, social structure and organization.

A central concept for accomplishing this is “cultural consonance.” Cultural consonance is the degree to which individuals, in their own beliefs and behaviors, approximate the prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in cultural models (Dressler 2007). I do not make the claim that this is some radical and new way of thinking about human beings. Quite the contrary, other thinkers, from the anthropologist Sapir (1927) to the biomedical researchers Henry and Cassel (1969), have suggested the utility of a concept like cultural consonance. Two things have limited other researchers from realizing the full potential of this approach. First, the theoretical framework for sorting out some of the vexing conceptual issues involved had not been developed. I argue that a contemporary cognitive theory of culture, incorporating insights from anthropology and from the cognitive sciences in general, provides us with a way of better understanding the relationship between culture and the individual (D’Andrade 1995). Second, and closely related to the first, methodological innovations emerging from cognitive anthropology—specifically the cultural consensus model (Romney, Weller, & Batchelder 1986)—provide social scientists with a remarkably useful tool to assess the degree to which culture is shared and distributed. These qualities of culture—that it is shared and distributed—will prove to be essential in building an adequate account of culture as a construct that refers both to aggregates and to individuals.

This theory and method serves as a background to cultural consonance, and this concept carries this thinking one step farther: to a conceptualization and a measurement of how individuals incorporate culture into their own lives. Put slightly differently, we can observe how closely individuals, in their day-to-day beliefs and behaviors, match the culture in which they live.

And, as we shall see, culture matters. A major part of the research strategy I have employed in my work on cultural consonance over the past twenty-five years has been to examine how variation in cultural consonance is associated with outcomes, specifically health and biological outcomes. As a biocultural medical anthropologist, I’m interested in how culture shapes, and is shaped by, our biology. In my early work on cardiovascular disease risk factors and mild to moderate depression, I adapted theoretical models of psychosocial stress, developed to study the working and middle classes in the United States, to settings such as the West Indies (Dressler 1982) and the African American community in the rural South (Dressler 1991).A major thrust of that work was to tailor concepts and measurements to different cultural contexts in which the kinds of stressors people encountered and the resources available to people to resist or adjust to those stressors were quite different from the contexts in which the concepts and measurements had originally been developed (Dressler 1995).

As that research progressed it became clear to me that describing what has been rather imprecisely referred to as “cultural patterns” (and I introduce a much more exact way of talking about this in this book) was an essential task in the work. For example, if being exposed to stressful events and circumstances was the only important part of this process, then we would all be dropping like flies, since such events and circumstances are, if not exactly constant, at least pretty common in all our lives. What really matters is how we cope with or respond to those stressors—what is called the “stress-buffering model” (Cassel 1976). An important feature of this response is the potential for help and support from others in our social network, or social support. In much research in the United States, social support is thought to be available from “anyone,” so long as that person is connected to us in a social network. This, of course, is based on the long tradition of voluntarism and individualism in social relationships in American society. Within very broad limits, we get to associate with just about whomever we care to, and we may end up asking any of them for help and support in times of felt need.

In other settings, not so much. Classic ethnographies in anthropology describe in precise detail how reciprocal rights and obligations in social interaction are guided by normative expectations, very often along the lines of kinship. You can expect (even demand) certain kinds of things from kin, but not from non-kin. Furthermore, you can expect certain kinds of things—such as help and assistance—from only certain kinds of kin, and not others. Therefore, describing social support systems in other cultural contexts starts with an understanding of the patterning of these normative expectations. Then, and only then, can you begin to look at individual variation in how much people have access to that help and support, defined by the cultural context. And access to social support within culturally specific systems of social support has proven to be extremely important in relation to cardiovascular risk factors (specifically arterial blood pressure) and depressive symptoms (Dressler 1982, 1991).

As this research progressed, it began to dawn on me that this process did not have to be viewed just within the confines of theoretical models of psychosocial stress. Rather, the broader idea simply of the “fit” between the individual and his or her cultural milieu may be what is most important. It certainly seems plausible at face value that not fitting into your own society is problematic, and other researchers have argued for this as a central feature of their theories of the stress process (e.g., Cassel, Patrick, & Jenkins 1960; French, Rodgers, & Cobb 1974). Again, what limited early work in this area was simply the lack of adequate theoretical or methodological tools to initiate satisfactorily a program of empirical research. Actually, Cassel ended up virtually abandoning this theoretical approach, instead returning to a stricter model of psychosocial stress (Cassel 1976), I think because he lacked the necessary tools. With the tools of cognitive culture theory and the methods of cultural domain analysis, the concept of cultural consonance can be specified and measured much more precisely and its associations with health and biological outcomes determined more clearly.

In the past twenty-five years, working mainly in Brazil (Dressler 2007) as well as in the African American community in the southern United States (Dressler & Bindon 2000), my colleagues and I have carried out multiple studies, finding that cultural consonance is associated with depressive symptoms, psychological distress, arterial blood pressure, immune system function, and body size, and that it plays a mediating role in gene-environment interactions in relation to depressive symptoms (see Chapter 7). Students and colleagues working independently have replicated and extended these associations. The theory and method of cultural consonance would appear to be robust—it has pretty good legs, in other words.

My aim in this book is to pull all of this work together, to situate cultural consonance in the broader context of culture theory, to explicate the associated research methods and measurement model, and to review the empirical results generated thus far from its application in research, by my colleagues and me, and by others.

Beyond this, however, I hope to make clear that the study of culture and the individual, and the utility of the theory and method of cultural consonance, extends well beyond our applications in biocultural medical anthropology. It is particularly well-suited to research in this area, to be sure, but it would seem to be applicable to many research questions in anthropology.

Organization of the Book

In Chapter 2, I discuss the history of the concept of culture in anthropology. If we are interested in linking culture and the individual, we need to figure out what culture is in the first place. What I suggest in the chapter is that there have been five problems that recur in thinking about the concept of culture in anthropology, and that a satisfactory solution to these five problems is necessary for research to proceed. These five problems are: (a) an adequate ontological account of culture, or, literally, what is the mode of existence of culture? How does such a thing happen in the universe as we know it?; (b) the aggregate-individual (or part-whole) problem, or developing a concept of culture that can seamlessly describe something that is both a property of collectives and a property of individuals; (c) intracultural diversity, or how culture varies within society; (d) culture and behavior, or how we deal with the well-known fact that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the two; and, (e) a definition of culture that clearly distinguishes it from other common terms used in the explanation of human behavior, especially social-psychological terms such as belief, value, and attitude. I won’t argue that these are the only problems that must be resolved in understanding culture. Rather, I suggest that a working definition of culture must deal with these problems. Also, here I am not using the phrase “working definition” in its usual sense of a heuristic. I literally mean “working” in the sense that the concept of culture has some real work to do in the research process. It must be a useful tool.

Chapter 3 outlines a cognitive theory of culture that provides solutions to these five problems. At the outset I rely heavily on the work of the analytic philosopher John Searle (2006, 2010) who, I believe, has provided a very clear account of the ontology of culture (and please note that I use the term “ontology” in its traditional philosophical sense, not in the recent anthropological usage as in the phrase “the ontological turn,” more on this in Chapter 3). Searle’s work lays an essential foundation for a cognitive definition of culture, derived from Goodenough’s (1956) original thoughts on the subject. But the cognitive definition of culture only really works when it is linked to the idea that culture is distributed, hence intracultural diversity and its study are an integral part of the account developed here. A cognitive definition of culture is also critical in developing a useful approach to culture and behavior, since this characterization of culture does not conflate culture and behavior as so many definitions do. Instead it conceptually distinguishes these two phenomena, thus enhancing the potential to link them empirically. Finally, the same logic applies to distinguishing culture from other concepts such as belief, value, and attitude. A cognitive definition of culture shows clearly how culture is a foundation for belief and value, but not composed of belief and value.

The concept of cultural models and the method of cultural consensus analysis are introduced in Chapter 4. The cultural consensus model has been, in my opinion, paradigmatic in anthropology, in the strict Kuhnian sense of that term. It has enabled anthropologists to do empirically what historically they could only do by assumption, and that is to verify that culture is indeed shared. That culture is learned and shared is axiomatic, but a distributional model of culture admits to degrees of consensus or sharing, and taking that seriously is necessary for an understanding of intracultural diversity. The cultural consensus model can help the analyst to identify, with a precision previously unavailable, widely shared cultural models, weakly shared cultural models, contested cultural models, and everything in between. The cultural consensus model helps us to identify, in any given cultural domain, what is prototypical (or, in imprecise terms, “ideal”) in a society with respect to that cultural domain. It does not, however, enable us to determine if people, in their daily lives, actually do or believe what is encoded in these shared cultural models. This is the theoretical function of cultural consonance, to make that link from shared understanding to actual belief and behavior.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the measurement of cultural consonance. There is an approach in the philosophy of science, termed “operationalism,” which basically is the notion that the definition of any construct has two sides. On the one hand is the familiar lexical definition of the term, as in my definition of cultural consonance given earlier in this chapter. But the lexical definition does not exhaust the meaning of the term. The term comes to mean something also in the way in which it is embedded in a semantic network of other terms, for example, the close association of the idea of cultural consensus and cultural consonance. Finally, a term means something by the research operations employed to actually observe its variation in the world. In our research on cultural consonance we have developed a clear measurement model, a set of systematic procedures for deriving a way of ordering people along a continuum in terms of their proximity to, or distance from, a shared cultural model. One of the important features of measures of cultural consonance is what we have called “emic validity” (Dressler & Oths 2014). That is, these measures order people along a continuum that is based on the way in which th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Culture and the Individual in Anthropological Theory
• 3 Solutions to Five Recurring Problems in Culture Theory
• 4 Cultural Models and Cultural Consensus
• 5 Cultural Consonance
• 6 Measuring Cultural Consonance
• 7 The Relationships of Cultural Consonance and Health Outcomes
• 8 Conclusions
• Index