Abstract
Psychology has been relatively late in considering culture, its characteristics, and the functions it embodies in human life. Historically, psychology has imposed a western, ethnocentric perspective (“emic”) on culturally diverse populations. This imposition presumed that a culturally specific western (“emic”) perspective was universal (“etic”) thereby holding that all who differ from these mono-culturally specified norms were “primitive”, deviant, or deficient. Inherent in this imposition was the Type I error of pathologizing normative and adaptive cultural differences as well as supporting existing power relationships in society.
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Salzman, M.B. (2018). The Human Condition. In: A Psychology of Culture. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69420-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69420-7_2
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