A Psychology of Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Definitions and Perspectives

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 1-18

3. The Human Condition

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 19-29

4. Culture and Human Needs

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 31-42

5. Culture and Self-Esteem

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 43-54

6. A Psycho-Existential View of Culture

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 55-65

7. Cultural Trauma and Recovery

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 67-78

8. Historical Narratives: Stories We Live By

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 79-93

9. Intercultural and Inter-group Relations

   • Michael B. Salzman

   Pages 95-105

10. Inter-cultural Training

    • Michael B. Salzman

    Pages 107-122

11. Conclusions

    • Michael B. Salzman

    Pages 123-124

12. Back Matter

    Pages 125-128

    PDF

This thought-provoking treatise explores the essential functions that culture fulfills in human life in response to core psychological, physiological, and existential needs. It synthesizes diverse strands of empirical and theoretical knowledge to trace the development of culture as a source of morality, self-esteem, identity, and meaning as well as a driver of domination and upheaval. Extended examples from past and ongoing hostilities also spotlight the resilience of culture in the aftermath of disruption and trauma, and the possibility of reconciliation between conflicting cultures. The stimulating insights included here have far-reaching implications for psychology, education, intergroup relations, politics, and social policy.

 

Included in the coverage:

 

·         Culture as shared meanings and interpretations.

·         Culture as an ontological prescription of how to “be” and “how to live.”

·         Cultural worldviews as immortality ideologies.

• ·         Culture and the need for a “world of meaning in which to act.”
  
• ·         Cultural trauma and indigenous people.
  
• ·         Constructing situations that optimize the potential for positive intercultural interaction.
  
• ·         Anxiety and the Human Condition.
  
• ·         Anxiety and Self Esteem.
  
• ·         Culture and Human Needs.
  

A Psychology of Culture takes an uncommon tour of the human condition of interest to clinicians, educators, and practitioners, students of culture and its role and effects in human life, and students in nursing, medicine, anthropology, social work, family studies, sociology, counseling, and psychology. It is especially suitable as a graduate text.                                                                                                       

• Terror Management Theory
• construction of an intercultural sensitizer
• cultural anxiety-buffer
• cultural empathy
• cultural identity developement
• cultural recovery
• cultural trauma
• culture in context
• decolonization
• existential anxiety
• human development
• inter-cultural conflict
• inter-cultural cooperation
• internalized oppression
• perspectives of Aristotle
• perspectives of Bhagavad Gita
• perspectives of Buddha
• perspectives of Confucious
• self-esteem motive
• social identity

• Department of Educational Psychology, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Honolulu, USA

  Michael B. Salzman

Michael B. Salzman is Professor and Chair in the Department of Educational Psychology. He has published in the areas of cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, intercultural training and counseling. A licensed psychologist, he has worked with cultural diverse populations as a teacher in “inner city” Brooklyn, counseling in the Navajo Nation, and serving as a clinician in a CMHC in South Tucson, AZ. He has worked with Alaska Natives coordinating a model rural mental health program and most recently with the Native Hawaiian Leadership Project and the Native Hawaiian Education Association. Dr. Salzman is interested in psychological functions of culture, consequences of traumatic cultural disruption, intercultural conflict, indigenous psychologies, movements of cultural recovery, and processes of psychological decolonization.

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