Cultural Forces Shaping Personality and Social Identity

1. Chapter 6 Social Identity, Personality, and Gender 1

2. What Will You Learn? • Assess the cultural forces that shape personality and social identity. • Explain how cultures are passed on and learned by offspring. • Distinguish between sex and gender from a cross-cultural perspective • Illustrate the cultural relativity of normal and abnormal. • Identify culturally specific mental disorders. 2

3. Enculturation: The Self and Social Identity • Human children are biologically ill-equipped to survive without culture. • There are several case studies around the world of “feral” children, none of which had happy endings. 3

4. Self Awareness • Enculturation begins with the development of self-awareness or the ability to: • Identify oneself as an individual. • To reflect on oneself. • To evaluate oneself. • Self-awareness does not come all at once. In modern industrial and postindustrial societies, for example, self and nonself are not clearly distinguished until a child is about 2 years old, lagging behind other cultures. 4

5. Self-Awareness • Self-awareness develops in concert with neuromotor development, which is known to proceed at a slower rate in infants from industrial societies than infants in many small scale farming or foraging communities. • While it is not clear what accounts for this yet, the amount of human contact and stimulation that infants receive appears to play a role. 5

6. Self-Awareness • In the majority of the world’s societies, infants routinely sleep with their parents, or at the minimum their mothers. • They are carried most of the time • Any cry or fuss is quickly responded to with the offering of the breast • Example: a Ju/’hoansi child is with their mother 70% of the time and an American child is with their mother 20% of the time. (In close contact). 6

7. Social Identity Through Personal Naming • Personal names are important devices for self-definition in all cultures. • A personal name will establish a child’s birthright and social identity. • Some cultures wait until birth or soon after and other’s might pick a name before the child is born (typical in the United States). • These naming ceremonies are special events or rituals that mark the naming of a child. 7

8. Naming Practices Across Cultures • While naming practices and timing vary cross-culturally, names can also be changed after birth. • When an ethnic group or nation falls under the control of a more powerful and expanding neighboring group, its members may be forced to assimilate and give up their cultural identity. Thus making naming of a child more difficult because of the abandoned practices. • People may be forced to change their names into more culturally accepted names by mainstream society to avoid racial discrimination or ethnic stigmas. 8

9. Critical Thought • Tuareg of Niger naming ceremony. Child is named on 8th day. People come from neighboring villages to celebrate in the naming process and see the new member of the clan. • An animal might also be sacrificed. • How do we choose a name for our children? 9

10. The Self and the Behavioral Environment • There are four main orientations that must be learned by an individual as they mature into their culture and natural environment. • Object Orientation • Spatial Orientation • Temporal Orientation • Normative Orientation 10

11. Orientation • Object Orientations are when individuals must learn about all objects in the world and then they tend to ignore or lump together those which are deemed unimportant by their culture. • Spatial Orientations are when one must remember or recall how to travel from one place to another; incorporates placing yourself in a geographical context. 11

12. Orientation • Temporal Orientation allows people to have a sense of their place in time. Also a part of the behavioral environment. • Normative Orientation deals with the understanding of moral values, ideals, and principles which are relative to one’s culture. 12

13. Culture and Personality • As children are enculturated, each individual is introduced to a society's natural and human-made environment along with a collective body of ideas about the self and others. • One’s personality is typically a generalization about that person’s internalized map over time. • These personalities are products of enculturation, as experienced by individuals - each with their own unique genetic makeup. • Personality is the distinctive way a person thinks, feels and behaves. 13

14. How Personality is Acquired 14 www.dailymail.co.uk

15. Personality Development: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Gender • Not only is what one learns important to personality development but also how one learns. • Traditional Western society emphasizes that men should be tough, aggressive, assertive, and self-reliant whereas women have been expected to be gentle, pliable and caring. • Margaret Mead identified through her studies that biology is not destiny when it comes to gender. 15

16. Two Patterns of Child Rearing • Dependence training - promotes child rearing practices that foster compliance in the performance of assigned tasks and dependence on the domestic group rather than reliance on oneself. • Independence training – child rearing practices that foster independence, self-reliance, and personal achievement. • Which best describes the United States? 16

17. Dependence Training • This technique is common to non-industrial societies where co-habitation with extended families is a necessity. • Family members all actively work to help and support each other, rather than one doing the work for the whole family. 17

18. Independence Training • Common to industrial and postindustrial societies where these traits (independence and self reliance) are best for success, if not for survival. • Infants in these societies typically spend less time with their parents than in non-industrial societies. 18

19. Group Personality • Often it is possible to characterize a “group” personality without falling into a stereotype, especially among more traditional societies. • The larger and more complex a society becomes the more diverse it may become. Here we may speak of cultural personality in a broad sense. 19

20. Modal Personality • The modal personality of a group is defined as the character traits that occur with the highest frequency in a social group and therefore the most representative of its culture. • Modal personality is a statistical concept. • It opens up for investigation the questions of how societies organize diversity and how diversity relates to culture change. 20

21. National Character Studies • Focused on the modal characteristics of modern countries. • National character studies were flawed in the 1930-1940s because they were generalizations based on limited data, relatively small samples of informants, and questionable assumptions about developmental psychology. • Although still debatable in their relevance they did help to shift focus to modern cultures as opposed to traditional non-industrial small scale societies. 21

22. Core Values • An alternative to national character studies that allows for the fact that not all personalities will conform to cultural ideals. • Studying the Core Values or values promoted by a particular culture can be a way to study a group of people. 22

23. Alternative Gender Models • When there are only two biological sexes among humans (male/female) how does one identify their personality and social identity if it does not fit clearly into one of those sexes? • Many societies identify more than one sex (third gender) and have developed special roles for these individuals. • Intersexual is a person born with reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or sex chromosomes that are not exclusively male or female. 23

24. Transgenders • People who cross over or occupy an intermediate position in the binary male-female gender construction are usually referred to as transgenders. 24

25. Critical Thought? • Around the world many societies accept and consider a third gender. These people may even hold a status higher than someone of a traditional gender. • Do we recognize a third gender in the United States? Why or why not? 25

26. Eunuchs • Historically the practice of castration – the damaging, cutting, or crushing of testicles has been practiced world-wide. • Often Eunuchs could rise to a high status such as a priest or administrator during the Persian, Byzantine and Chinese empires. • Largest population of eunuchs in the world today is found in India known as hijras. They are performers and may even perform at important rights of passage such as births or marriages. 26

27. Mental Disorders Across Time and Cultures • Despite odd or even rare cultural practices it is possible for there to be “abnormal” activities, thoughts, or actions no matter what the culture. • Although each culture might identify the disorder in a different capacity. • Culture Bound Syndrome or Ethic psychosis- mental disorders specific to particular ethnic groups. 27