Abstract
Since Rivers’ early discussions regarding the role of environmental experience in focusing the “direction of attention” in perceptual inference habits, research has accumulated indicating that psychological activities are inextricably embedded in socially organized, ecocultural contexts. Increasingly, findings from cross-cultural psychology, ethnography, and ethology suggest that patterns of cognitive performance are more situationally sensitive than current theories of human development indicate. Indeed, a growing corpus of inter- and intracultural evidence points to the conclusion that data used to support notions of psychological universals may represent little more than indications of individual experience and skill with the social and physical resources comprising ecocultural domains. Drawing on four years field research among nomadic artisans and entertainers in Pakistan, my purpose in this paper is basically twofold: first, from my ethnographer’s perspective to point out some of the pitfalls of short-term investigations of psychological performance; secondly, to present a “native model” of psychological functioning and its utility for interpreting patterns of psychological performance. I conclude with the observation that while cross-cultural psychologists may lack a “workable theory of situations,” the informants that we study do! These native explanations may profitably be tapped in our efforts toward enhancing the ecocultural validity of cross-contextual research.
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Berland, J.C. (1983). Dress Rehearsals for Psychological Performance. In: Irvine, S.H., Berry, J.W. (eds) Human Assessment and Cultural Factors. NATO Conference Series, vol 21. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2151-2_11
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