Drinking from the Same Well

Cross-Cultural Concerns in Pastoral Care and Counseling

Johnson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781630876715
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Drinking from the Same Well is designed for those who seek a praxis-oriented theological grounding in the exploration of cross-cultural perspectives in the field of pastoral care and counseling. It traverses the broad terrain of cultural analysis and also explores in depth a number of discrete cross-cultural issues in pastoral counseling, related to communication, conflict, empathy, family dynamics, suffering, and healing. Cultural analysis and theological reflection are situated alongside numerous case studies of persons and situations that enflesh the concepts being discussed, and readers are invited to engage personally with the material through a variety of focus questions and reflective exercises. This book can serve as a helpful textbook for seminarians and a useful guide for pastors and priests, church study groups, multicultural parishes, and anyone engaged in helping ministries with persons from other cultures. The goal is to develop culturally competent pastoral caregivers by providing a comprehensive and practical overview of the generative themes and challenges in cross-cultural pastoral care.

1

Being Human, Being Cultural

Starting Where You Are

We will begin each chapter by enabling you to reflect on your own experience of the themes we will be exploring. As you then move into more in-depth explorations of relevant ideas and insights, the hope is that you will be able to analyze what you learn in relation to your own experiential reflections. In this first chapter we will be exploring the term culture. It is a word we use quite readily, in a variety of contexts, and, as we will discover, it is a concept of great complexity. Culture is not merely something exotic and foreign, like a National Geographic display of dancing natives in bizarre costumes. Each of us is living out the word culture every day. We will therefore begin our reflections on culture by locating ourselves in our own cultural framework. You can begin this process by responding to the questions below.1

Focus Questions About Your Culture

1. Do you feel “at home” in the culture where you now live? Why or why not?

2. If asked to describe your primary culture (either your birth culture or an adopted culture), how would you summarize its major characteristics?

3. Are there any significant conflicts between your primary culture and any other cultural groups? If so, how do these conflicts affect you?

Defining Culture

Culture may be one of the most complex terms in the human vocabulary. Our intention in this chapter is to expose you to several approaches to understanding what culture is, especially from the perspectives of those with an interest in cross-cultural pastoral care and counseling. There is obviously no one correct answer to the question, “What is culture?” Many cultural anthropologists have stressed the centrality of meaning in any adequate definition of culture, a classic catchphrase being historically transmitted patterns of meaning embodied in symbols.2 It was Melville Herskovits who famously defined culture as how human beings shape their environment—accentuating the fact that culture is a human construction.3 This anthropological view describes culture as “the way in which social groups develop distinct patterns of life and give ‘expressive form’ to their social and material life experience.”4 In other words, culture is how a particular group of people decide for themselves how they will live, what they will value, and how they will collectively assign meaning to their shared life as a people.

In recent decades, a growing number of cultural anthropologists have highlighted the need to broaden our conceptualizations of culture. They have emphasized the need for greater awareness of the complexities of cultural characterizations, and the dangers of lumping together cultural groups within a particular nation or ethnicity as a homogenous cultural monolith.5 Their warnings are a helpful reminder of the perils of generalization and reductionism in our efforts to define culture.

It is important to keep in mind the significance of meaning as we think about how culture shapes and influences one’s understanding of oneself and the world. The meaning-laden nucleus of culture is of particular relevance to those involved in cross-cultural pastoral care, because how one has been socialized to construe the meaning of one’s place in the world will have a significant bearing on how one views one’s own problems and the potential solution to those problems. This is true both for the caregiver and the careseeker.

Juris Draguns has provided a broad overview of the interface between cultural analysis and the field of counseling.6 He draws heavily on the work of H. C. Triandis, who first used the term subjective culture7 to speak of how we internalize our cultural predispositions as taken-for-granted “givens” which we seldom feel the need to objectify or scrutinize. Draguns has this to say about subjective culture:

This “culture in our heads,” which is composed of the shared experience and knowledge of a self-perpetuating and continuous human group, is part and parcel of our personal reality. It is absorbed in the process of socialization rather than actively taught and effortfully acquired. The components of subjective culture, in the form of perceptions, expectations, and other cognitions, are acquired unobtrusively over a lifetime of incidental learning. That is why the tenets of subjective culture appear to be so intuitively true or self-evident. Subjective culture, then, is like the air we breathe; only when we are deprived of it do we become aware of it.8

An awareness of the subjectivity of culture can help us to understand why we often have difficulty analyzing or being self-critical about our own cultural predispositions. As just one example, it has been generally assumed in the West that self-actualization, the primary goal of the therapeutic process, is a universal “given.” Yet self-actualization is in fact a reflection of a Eurocentric worldview,9 which values the self-determination of the individual above all else. This individual-centric paradigm has certainly been taken-for-granted in the field of Christian pastoral care and counseling. As Emmanuel Lartey confirms, “The forms of pastoral care and counseling that have been practiced in the twentieth century reflect the dominant social, cultural, theological, and psychological theories of the West.”10

Such a Eurocentric paradigm is clearly inadequate and even counter-productive in the multicultural world in which we now encounter culturally-different “others” as a matter of course. We therefore need to broaden the parameters of both cultural analysis and pastoral care and counseling to embrace a broader continuum of ways of understanding and relating between caregivers and careseekers from diverse cultural backgrounds. The starting point for such a task is gaining a better understanding of the significant degree to which culture is determinative of our very understanding of selfhood.

Cultural Self-Constructions

The unifying construct in the field of counseling, across all cultures, is the self. Yet there is no universal or culturally neutral definition of the self. We will explore self-concept in greater depth later on, when we examine identity issues in cross-cultural pastoral care. For now, we will simply note the most critical distinctions between understandings of the self in Western and non-Western cultures.

One common way to describe cultural contrasts in notions of selfhood has been to speak of the referential self of Western cultures—in which the self is viewed as an autonomous entity, the originator and controller of one’s behavior and destiny—versus the indexical self of most non-Western, collectivist cultures—a self which encompasses family (broadly construed), the wider community, even ancestors.11 A good example of the indexical self is the concept known as ubuntu in the Zulu culture of southern Africa, roughly translated “a person is a person by virtue of other persons.” Clearly, if one is in a counseling relationship with someone from an indexical-self culture, one would have to take into account to a much greater degree than in the West the centrality of the ext...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Being Human, Being Cultural
• Chapter 2: Cultural Worldviews and Values
• Chapter 3: Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Chapter 4: Empathy in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Chapter 5: Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Chapter 6: The Family in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Chapter 7: Conflict in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Chapter 8: Suffering and Healing in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Epilogue
• Bibliography