Vygotsky’s Account of Biology in Relation to Psychology and Culture
Carl Ratner, PhD.
Institute for Cultural Research & Education
Trinidad , California , USA
Vygotsky Was Systemic Thinker
· Wrote “On Psychological Systems” in vol. 3 CW, chap. 6: “Habits …are induced to activity only as subordinate points in some general structure, a common whole” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 8).
· Integrated view of human psychology
· All elements logically consistent and unified under the influence of dominant elements. Thinking is the dominant element that transforms all other psychological elements: “Development of thinking has a central, key, decisive significance for all the other functions and processes” (p. 81).
· Opposed additive, interactions of discrepant elements
· Since culture is the basis of psychology, all related influences on psych. must be congruent with culture
· This includes biological influences on psych. They cannot have an independent quality which “interacts” with culture in an algorithm: X% biology + Y% culture
Cultural-Historical Nature of Psychology
Vygotsky said, "Higher mental functions [are] the product of the historical development of humanity" (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 34, my emphasis).“Once we acknowledge the historical character of verbal thought, we must consider it subject to all the premises of historical materialism, which are valid for any historical phenomenon in human society. It is only to be expected that on this level the development of behavior will be governed essentially by the general laws of the historical development of human society” (Vygotsky 1986, pp. 94-95). “Already in primitive societies…the entire psychological makeup of individuals can be seen to depend directly on the development, the degree of development of the production forces, and on the structure of that social group to which the individual belongs…Both of these factors, whose intrinsic interdependence has been established by the theory of historical materialism, are the decisive factors of the whole psychology of primitive man” (Vygotsky, 1994b, p. 176).
This sentiment gives an entirely new meaning to psychological phenomena. They are rooted in historical forces such as government policy, wars, immigration, mode of production, technology, art, industrialization, nuclear family, religious beliefs. Psychological phenomena are subjective aspects of these cultural-historical phenomena; psychology is not a realm of its own, independent of these.
· Psychology and biology must be congruent w. historical forces so that psych. follows the principles of historical materialism as elaborated by Marx.
· If psych. and biology followed other principles, they would detract from historical materialism. If biology had an independent influence on psychology, this would diminish the influence of culture on psychology. Culture would only exercise a portion of the influence on psychology.
· Making biology consistent w. culture and subordinate to it, maximizes the cultural influence on psychology because there are no other competing influences, and enables psychology to follow cultural principles.
· This is exactly what Vygotsky did. He reconceptualized biology’s relation to psychology to subordinate it to cultural influences.
Subordinating Biological Processes to Cultural-Psychological Ones
Development of thinking has a central, key, decisive significance for all the other functions and processes. We cannot express more clearly or tersely the leading role of intellectual development in relation to the whole personality of the adolescent and to all of his mental functions other than to say that acquiring the function of forming concepts is the principal and central link in all the changes that occur in the psychology of the adolescent. All other links in this chain, all other special functions, are intellectualized, reformed, and reconstructed under the influence of these crucial successes that the thinking of the adolescent achieves. … Lower or elementary functions, being processes that are more primitive, earlier, simpler, and independent of concepts in genetic, functional, and structural relations, are reconstructed on a new basis when influenced by thinking in concepts and … they are included as component parts, as subordinate stages, into new, complex combinations created by thinking on the basis of concepts, and finally … under the influence of thinking, foundations of the personality and world view of the adolescent are laid down (Vygotsky, 1998, CW vol 5, p. 81).
“One of the basic laws of development of the nervous system and behavior is that as higher centers or higher formations develop, lower centers or lower formations yield a substantial part of their former functions to the new formations, transferring these functions upward so that the tasks of adaptation that are done by lower centers or lower formations at lower stages of development begin to be done by higher functions at higher stages” (p. 83).
· In other words, lower centers and formations are controlled by the higher centers and formations and work as subordinate units. They do not maintain an independent existence and original powers. However, if the higher centers and formations should be struck by some disorder, the subordinate unit may resume elements of its old type of functioning and act as a safety value to provide rudimentary survival activities (pp. 83, 218-220).
Analysis
· Emphasizes psych. as a unitary system in which elements play a contributing role to the system. Elements are congruent w. each other.
· Natural, biological processes with independent features become reconstituted and superseded by higher, conscious, social processes.
· Natural reflexes and instincts drop out as determinants of behavior. Are replaced by higher, conscious, social processes.
· The central idea that informs all of Vygotsky's work on developmental psychology is that qualitatively new psychological phenomena arise over the life-span. These phenomena consist of novel psychological operations, content, and relationships that are not continuous with previous ones. Consequently, perspectives and methods that are suitable to comprehending early behaviors are not necessarily suitable for comprehending mature psychology. Different concepts and methods must be devised to apprehend understand the different psychological stages.
The most fundamental qualitative change over the life-span, as Vygotsky identified it, is from lower, elementary processes to higher, conscious, psychological processes. There is a transition from "direct, innate, natural forms and methods of behavior to mediated, artificial, mental functions that develop in the process of cultural development" (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 168). Lower, elementary processes are biologically programmed, natural behaviors that are immediate responses to stimuli. Sucking and rooting reflexes are examples. In lower processes, there is nothing mental, psychological, or conscious. By contrast, psychological processes are mental and conscious. Consciousness intervenes, or mediates, between a stimulus and the response. Consciousness comprises a "mental space" of psychological phenomena such as perception, emotions, memory, thinking, motivation, self, language, and accumulated learned information. These psychological phenomena "process" incoming stimuli and construct a response that is willful and intentional. Psychological processes are humanly created, mental phenomena. They are artifacts, not natural biological phenomena.
· Vygotsky emphasizes this difference as follows: "Higher mental functions are not simply a continuation of elementary functions and are not their mechanical combination, but a qualitatively new mental formation that develops according to completely special laws and is subject to completely different patterns" (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 34). "In the thinking of the adolescent, not only completely new complex synthetic forms that the three-year-old does not know arise, but even those elementary, primitive forms that the child of three has acquired are restructured on new bases during the transitional age" (ibid., p. 37).
· Vygotsky (1994b, p. 175) put it thusly: ”The struggle for existence and natural selection, the two driving forces of biological evolution within the animal world, lose their decisive importance as soon as we pass on to the historical development of man. New laws, which regulate the course of human history and which cover the entire process of the material and mental development of human society, now take their place.”
· The essence of psychological phenomena is that they are conscious, cognitive, and conceptual--that is to say, they are intellectual. It is only when the child has achieved these capacities that he develops a psychology.
· Lower and higher functions rest upon different biological, cognitive, and social foundations. Lower functions are determined by biological mechanisms and they are minimally cognitive. For instance, infantile attention is a simple, involuntary "orientation reflex" that is biologically programmed. Temperamental traits of infants are similarly biologically programmed, involuntary, spontaneous, simple reactions to events. Vygotsky maintains that early, or natural, memory is likewise a spontaneous recollection that is prompted by a direct similarity between a current and prior sensation (CW vol. 5 p. 98).
· In contrast, higher, mature, complex psychological phenomena are stimulated and organized by social experience and they are mediated by, or depend upon, conceptual thinking. Vygotsky explains this difference in a succinct statement about lower and higher forms of attention:
“the importance of the organic process, which lies at the foundation of the development of attention, decreases as new, qualitatively distinct processes of attentional development emerge. Specifically, we have in mind the processes of the cultural development of attention. When we speak of the cultural development of attention, we mean evolution and change in the means for directing and carrying out attentional processes, the mastery of these processes, and their subordination to human control...Voluntary attention emerges owing to the fact that the people who surround the child begin to use various stimuli and means to direct the child's attention and subordinate it to their control...In and of itself, the organic, or natural, development of attention never could, and never will, lead to the emergence of voluntary attention”(Vygotsky, 1981, pp. 193-194).
Qualitative Change
· Vygotsky reiterates the notion of qualitative change throughout this volume. He says that mature psychological functions which are culturally stimulated and organized, and rest upon conceptual thinking are qualitatively different from biologically based, non-cognitive elementary functions. Another use of the notion of qualitative change is his discussion of the unique character of cognitive concepts. He said that "A concept is not just an enriched and internally interconnected associative group. It is a qualitatively new formation that cannot be reduced to more elementary processes that characterize the development of the intellect at earlier stages" (CW, vol. 5, p. 40).
· Vygotsky frequently criticized psychologists who recognize only quantitative changes in psychological functioning. One statement expresses this clearly: "if one holds the point of view [that] the process of intellectual changes that occur at adolescence can be reduced to a simple quantitative accumulation of characteristics already laid down in the thinking of a three-year old...the word development does not apply" (p. 29). Vygotsky was especially critical of Thorndike for whom "higher forms of thinking differ from elementary functions only quantitatively according to the number of associative connections that enter into their composition" (p. 40).
· Vygotsky describes how memory changes from a lower to a higher function through the intercession of cognition: "in the child, intellect is a function of memory; in the adolescent, memory is a function of intellect" (p. 96). "We have seen that the child's thinking depends specifically on concrete images, on visual representations. When the adolescent makes the transition to thinking in concepts, his remembering what he perceived and logically comprehended must disclose completely different laws than those that characterized remembering during primary school age" (p. 97).
· Perception is another function which is transformed by conceptual thinking:
“Isolated objects of perception become connected because of thinking; they become ordered and acquired sense - a past and a future. Thus, speech leads to thinking about perception, to analysis of reality, to the formation of a higher function in place of an elementary function.
If we turn to the perception of an adult, we will see that it represents not only a complex synthesis of present impressions and images in memory, but its basis is a complex synthesis of processes of thinking and processes of perception. That which we perceive and that which we know, that which we perceive and that which we think merges into one...
Ordered and comprehended perception, connected with thinking in words, is the complex product of a new synthesis in which visual impressions and processes of thinking are merged in a single alloy that can justifiably be called visual thinking. In contrast to the developed thinking of an adult, a child's thinking unites, orders, and comprehends what is perceived entirely differently. For this reason, the hypothesis of E. Claparede, who says that the child sees differently than the adult, and the statement of K. Koffka that the child lives in another world than we adults do are true in a certain respect. The developed perception of an adult places a net of ordering, logical categories over reality. His is always a comprehended perception" (p. 88).
Analysis
Vygotsky is saying that sensory processes become informed by, reconstituted by, higher intellectual functions. They do not remain “lower,” natural functions. As such, they cannot be determined by natural processes that determine lower, natural functions in infants and animals. New functions require new bases and mechanisms.
Fantasy
· Vygotsky says that imagination and fantasy are also intellectualized during adolescence and consequently fulfill a completely new function in the new structure of the adolescent's personality:
· If we correctly defined the higher development of the thinking of the adolescent as a transition from rational to judicious thinking and if we determined correctly the intellectualization of such functions as memory, attention, visual perception, and willful action, then in the same logical sequence we must reach the same conclusion with respect to fantasy. Thus, fantasy is not a primary, independent and leading function in the mental development of the adolescent; its development is the result of the function of forming concepts, the result which completes and crowns all the complex processes of changes that all of the intellectual life of the adolescent undergoes (p. 154).
· Contrary to popular opinion, the intellectualizing of fantasy and imagination enrich them in comparison with their impoverished existence in early childhood. Fantasy and imagination in childhood are bound to real objects and therefore have limited freedom. "The imagination of the adolescent is different from the play of the child in that it breaks the connection with real objects" (p. 161). Utilizing abstract concepts, the adolescent's imagination is more varied than the child's (p. 161; cf. Ratner, 1991, pp. 180-182).
Psychological vs. Sensory Pleasure
An example of the qualitative difference between a cognitively mediated psychological phenomenon and an elementary, natural, biological reaction is the difference between infantile sensory pleasure and psychological happiness. Psychological happiness is modulated by understandings and expectations. The happiness one experiences while gazing at a sunset over the ocean is different from the happiness one experiences when one's favorite basketball team wins the championship with a last-second basket, and from the warm glow that one feels when receiving a thoughtful present from a lover. These different forms of happiness entail, respectively, an appreciation of nature's grandeur and subtle richness; an identification with a group of players and even a city or country; and an appreciation of being wanted by and being together with a valued individual. The simple, inchoate pleasurable sensation that a neonate feels when fed and rested entails none of the foregoing cognitions and therefore none of the foregoing subtly and richness. Vygotsky says that the young child can feel pleasure but he does not know he is happy; he does not know (conceptualize) what happinessis. In the same way, an infant feels hunger pangs but he does not know he is hungry because he has no concept that identifies hunger as a phenomenon. "There is a great difference between feeling hunger and knowing that I am hungry. In early childhood, the child does not know his own experiences" (ibid., p. 291).
Vygotsky strongly believed that human psychology is a cultural phenomenon. It originates in cultural processes, embodies them, and perpetuates them. He speaks about "the central and leading function of cultural development" (ibid.) in psychological growth. Specifically, the content of thinking is related to one's position in societal production (ibid., p. 43).
Circumventing the distinction between basic form and content
In proposing that psychological phenomena are culturally and cognitively organized, Vygotsky denied any natural, "basic," or pre-cultural form and content to psychological phenomena. The frequently noted distinction between basic psychological forms and cultural psychological content is false. All aspects of psychological functioning (both form and content) are cultural. As Vygotsky said, "Actually, the form and content of thinking are two factors in a single whole process, two factors internally linked to each other by an essential, not accidental, bond" (ibid., p. 38). He also noted that “deep, scientific studies show that in the process of cultural development of behavior, not only the content of thinking changes, but also its forms, new mechanisms, new functions, new operations, and new methods of activity arise that were not known at earlier stages of historical development" (ibid., p. 34).
· In the first pages of chap. 2 of CW vol. 5 Vygotsky relates form-content to qualitative change. Qualitative change in psychology requires change in the form of psych., not just in content. He says most psychologists only recognize change in content, but this preserves basic forms that are presumed to be universal, and also pre-given in a child’s nature. In these pages, Vygotsky rejects this idea and argues that the form, or process, or psychological phenomena change. They become infused with social thinking which alters the form or process of emotions, perception, etc. “The break in the evolution of forms and content of thinking is very characteristic for any dualistic and metaphysical system in psychology that does not know how to present them in dialectical unity” (p. 32).
Emotions, Schizophrenia
Mainstream theories of emotion and schizophrenia differentiate innate, universal, biologically caused “basic processes,” and culturally directed expressions of these processes.
Vygotsky rejects this distinction. He argues that all aspects of psychology are cultural and variable.
Vygotsky's qualitative distinction between cognitive-cultural psychological phenomena and immediate, automatic, elementary biological responses (of animals and infants) is revolutionary because it undercuts all attempts at explaining psychological phenomena in terms of biological processes. Explanations of normal psychology in terms of genes, hormones, neurotransmitters, neuroanatomy, evolution, instincts, sensory processes, and infantile reactions are negated by Vygotsky's fundamental distinction.
Irreducibility of Psychology to Biology
· Higher psychological functions actually stimulate neuronal growth in particular directions. They create their own biological mediations. They do not depend upon specialized biological mechanisms which pre-determine them. If they did so, they would not be socially organized and they would not be higher functions. Vygotsky expressed this point as follows: "There is every reason to assume that the historical development of behavior from primitive forms to the most complex and highest did not occur as a result of the appearance of new parts of the brain or the growth of parts already existing" (p. 35-36, CW vol. 5; Donald, 1991, pp. 1-19).
Infantile Reactions are not Psychological
Let us examine one popular developmental theory to demonstrate its implausibility and incongruence in light of Vygotsky's approach. One theory holds that infants possess emotions, perceptions, motives, intentionality, memory, will, personality, and social responsiveness that are quite similar to those of adults. For example, two-day old infants are said to "prefer" their mothers' voices over other women's. This conclusion is based on an instrumental conditioning experiment where long sucks on a rubber nipple were rewarded by a tape recorded story read by their mothers while short sucks were rewarded by a story read by another woman. (I have simplified the design in this discussion.) The infants produced more longer than shorter sucks.
However, this experiment does not demonstrate a psychological preference, certainly not according to Vygotsky. A psychological preference is cognitively mediated and bound up in psychological phenomena. A preference for Beethoven's music over Bartok's, for example, involves aesthetic criteria, emotional reactions, and recollections. Using Vygotsky's terminology, a psychological preference involves knowing that one prefers something to another thing and knowing something about the features that make it preferable. The response to sounds by the two-day old does not entail such knowledge or any psychological elements.
It is likely that infants suck to elicit the mother's sound because it is a familiar stimulus (similar to sounds the infant heard while in the womb), not because it is their mother's voice (which they surely do not realize). Familiar stimuli may be positively rewarding because they have been proven safe to the neonate. Novel stimuli may be difficult for the immature neonate to cope with, so they are less rewarding. Such an automatic tendency to gravitate toward familiar stimuli as a survival mechanism would be as non-psychological as the hummingbird's attraction to red flowers.
This interpretation is supported by evidence that even fetuses respond differently to familiar and unfamiliar sounds. Mothers recited a story to their fetuses from the 34th through 38th week of gestation. During the 38th week, each fetus heard either the familiar story or a novel one. Fetal heart rate was lower when the familiar story was presented and higher when the novel story was heard. This automatic reaction has nothing to do with an intentional preference. It is governed by the same biological mechanism which makes familiar sounds positively rewarding to the neonate
No Blank Slate
Even though Vygotsky emphasizes an ontogenetic transformation from elementary biological reactions to higher, conscious psychological phenomena, he does not regard the infant as a blank slate. It is a misconception to hold that cultural psychology begins with an empty organism. Vygotsky clearly recognized that the infant comes equipped with numerous innate response tendencies that confront the caregiver. However, these natural responses gradually extinguish during childhood. The lower brain centers that control them become subsumed under developing cortical centers that enable learned, conceptually guided behavior to supersede reflexes.
By seven years of age, most natural determinants of behavior have died out and the basis of behavior is overwhelmingly cultural, and Vygotsky repeatedly stresses this qualitative transformation. There is no longer an interaction of biological and social determinants of behavior. At this point, the child's individuality is a function of her particular social experience, which has increased exponentially over the years (i.e., more in the later years, less in the early years). The manner in which others have reacted to her behavior and physical traits (such as beauty, gender, and skin color) replaces biological determinants of behavior.
The Integration of Psychological Phenomena
· We have just seen how each psychological phenomenon is integrated with conceptual thinking. Their common integration into conceptual thinking also unifies the various phenomena together. Vygotsky expressed this as follows:
“Various functions (attention, memory, perception, will, thinking) do not develop side by side like a bundle of branches placed into a single vessel; they even do not develop like various branches of a single tree that are connected by a main trunk. In the process of development, all of these functions form a complex hierarchic system where the central or leading function is the development of thinking, the function of forming concepts. All the other functions enter into a complex synthesis with this new formation; they are intellectualized and restructured on the basis of thinking in concepts” (p. 84-85).
Socialization is not Mechanical
Vygotsky's cultural psychology is not mechanical. The fact that a culture pre-exists the newborn, is external to him, and structures his life, does not mean that psychological development is a mechanical process of receiving inputs passively. Children actively strive, concentrate, learn, remember, figure out patterns, differentiate essential from non-essential issues, and identify with cultural events and figures (cf. Bandura, 1986 on the active nature of human learning). Vygotsky prized children's activity and insisted that educators encourage independent activity in order to enhance learning. Vygotsky despised autocratic pedagogy and rote learning of boring material (Vygotsky, 1926/1997).
Socialization as External Structuring of Internal Psychology
Vygotsky observes that socialization occurs by providing external structures within which psychological development occurs. “As a rule, the child always masters external forms earlier than the internal structure of any mental operation. The child begins to count long before he understands what counting is and applies it intelligently. In speech, the child has such conjunctions as ‘because,’ ‘if,’ and ‘although’ long before the realization of causality, conditionality, or opposition appears in his thinking. Grammatical development in children’s speech precedes the development of logical categories corresponding to these language structures” (CW, vol. 5, p. 66).
Socialization is not mechanical. It provides objectified structures (numbers, grammar, causal terminology) containing psychological significations which the child gradually appropriates from those structures. The child actively appropriates psychology from their objectified forms. The child does not passively have psychology implanted in her mind.
Psychology does not naturally emanate from inside the child. Rather, it emanates from social structures that contain psychology which is appropriated by the child.
It is therefore important to examine the social structures with which children come into contact (games, entertainment, media) because that is the source of their psychological development.
Cultural Organization of Shyness
Cross-cultural research demonstrates how personality attributes are socially structured. Chen, et al. (1995, 1998) found that shyness-inhibition can arise from social experience and be shaped by social experience to result in quite variable personalities. Shy-inhibited children are treated quite differently in
Some Contemporary Vygotskyians on Biology and Culture
· Rogoff, for example, is sympathetic toward Vygotsky's sociocultural approach. Yet she maintains that biology and culture contribute equally to generating social-psychological phenomena. She believes that "gender roles can be seen as simultaneously biologically and culturally formed" (Rogoff, 2003, p. 76). According to Rogoff, certain specific features of gender roles spring from the genetic make-up of men and women (which is the result of phylogenetic evolution), and certain features spring from contemporary cultural factors. She claims that this in fact accords with Vygotsky's explanatory schema: "In Vygotsky's terms, evolutionary (biological) preparedness of gender roles involves phylogenetic development, and social learning of gender roles involves microgenetic and ontogenetic development of the current era's gender roles during the time frame of cultural-historical development" (ibid., p. 76).
· Rogoff is not simply claiming that biology prepares gender roles in a general way by preparing humans to learn, speak, use tools, and think; she claims a much more specific role for biology. Rogoff (2003, pp. 71-73) claims that biological mechanisms prepare features of gender roles and personality as follows: A biological trait of women, which they share with many animals, is that they have to invest heavily in each child to reproduce their genes, whereas men need invest little time and effort. Women need to spend nine months pregnant, two to three years nursing, and more years protecting and teaching the child how to survive. In contrast, it is possible for men to father as many children as women allow, with very little time invested. Biological, reproductive processes of men and women are said to generate a social psychology wherein women are more attentive to and involved with children than men are.
Our discussion has emphasized that Vygotsky opposed biological explanation of social-psychological phenomena--even in combination with cultural explanations. He denied that biological mechanisms determine the form and content of higher, complex psychological phenomena; only cultural processes do. Biological mechanisms only determine simple reactions in animals and human infants. Biology enables psychology to develop, but it does not determine the specific features of psychology.
Opposite Interactionism
· Vygotsky was not an interactionist--he did not believe that biological mechanisms and cultural processes each contribute particular features to psychology. He believed that cultural processes supersede biological determinants of behavior. Vygotsky explains psychology in thoroughly sociocultural terms, not as something partitioned into biological features and cultural ones.
In Studies on The History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child, Vygotsky and Luria (1930/1993) specifically address the question of phylogenetic (evolutionary), ontogenetic, and cultural-historical processes in psychological development. They argue that human culture marks a qualitatively new stage in phylogeny. Culture replaces evolutionary, biological mechanisms as determinants of behavior: "The use and `invention' of tools by anthropoid apes bring to an end the organic stage of behavioral development in the evolutionary sequence and prepare the way for a transition of all development to a new path, creating thereby the main psychological prerequisite of historical development of behavior" (ibid., p. 37, my emphasis). All human psychological development depends upon cultural processes because organic, biological evolution has ceased determining human behavior.
Human psychology, according to Vygotsky, does not consist of cultural behavior plus natural (evolutionary, biological) behavior. What is natural behavior in animals (and infants) is converted into cultural behavior in humans. "The development of man's behavior is always development conditioned primarily not by the laws of biological evolution, but by the laws of the historical development of society" (ibid., p. 78). Vygotsky and Luria rejected an eclectic combination of biological and cultural determinants in psychology, where both would have equal footing.
Biology as General Potentiating Energy
As behavior develops from natural to cultural-psychological, the role of biology changes. It strictly determines the behavior of infants and animals; however, it relaxes its control over adult behavior. Biology provides a potentiating substratum that allows a wide range of behaviors to be organized by cultural processes. Biology provides the energy, anatomical structure, physiology, and neuroanatomy that make psychological functioning possible, but biology itself does not make psychological functioning occur, nor does it determine what its specific form will be.
Human and Animal Behavior Systems
Macro Cultural Psychology
Explores the cultural-historical creation of psychological phenomena in macro cultural factors.
· An example of these points is honor killings among devout religious people: For choosing a lover outside of her Kurdish community and living with him, Fadime was brutally shot and killed by her father at point blank range in front of her mother and younger sister in
Honor killings exemplify a complex of emotions, perceptions, reasoning, self-concept, and sexuality organized in cultural norms. These norms are represented by sexual honor. Sexual honor embodies and sustains a social system of proper male-female interactions and proper interactions between daughters and parents. Violating sexual norms violates the entire normative system of gender and familial relations which sexual honor represents. This is why it is so serious and why it must be corrected. Sexual honor is made serious by attributing it to an entire family, not to an individual. The siblings of a disgraced woman are disgraced and become unfit for marriage. This social construction of sexual honor gives family members a vested interest in preventing her disobedience against the entire social system. Honor killings are generally supported by the entire family including mother and sisters. Honor killings can also be committed on males who seduce women.
· The emotional fury and murderous behavior directed at the miscreant daughter is organized by the social construct of honor, it incarnates the social construct, and it sustains and reinforces the social construct of honor. The emotional fury contains the code within itself as its operating mechanism. The code is what generates the fury at particular activities of the daughter in particular circumstances (when non-family members discover the tabooed behavior). The code is also what mandates particular behavioral responses to assuage the fury.
· The fury bears the quality of the code. It is disgraced fury, not some other kind of fury. Fadime’sfather’s fury was not related to jealousy or abuse, nor was it blind passion. It was a calculated response based upon knowledge that outsiders were aware of the daughter’s disgraceful sexual behavior and the inability of the parents to control it.
· Disgraced fury is nuanced differently from the fury a mother feels at her child who runs into the street without looking for approaching cars that might injure him. The latter fury is tinged with concern for the child’s well-being, not family honor. The eliciting event, quality of the emotion, and resolving behavior form a unit or system in the two cases.
· Macro cultural psychology does not regard fury as a neutral, natural, fixed, universal, independent process that becomes associated with -- conditioned to -- various events/stimuli in various conditions. Rather, we regard fury as specifically formed by macro cultural factors such as honor codes, in order to achieve specific cultural states. The same is true for love, memory, perception, and reasoning. Psychology is not generic, it is culturally specific.
· The cultural code was inside the psychology, modulating and organizing it; but psychology was also inside the code. The cultural norm of honor and dishonor regarding sexual behavior of daughters rested upon particular perceptions, emotions, sexuality, self-concept, self-control of impulses, reasoning. These psychological phenomena were the subjective element of the code.
· Macro cultural psychology argues that the way that Fadime’s father’s psychology was constructed at the macro cultural level, objectified in macro cultural factors, organized by them, socialized by them, maintains them, and individuals to them exemplifies the cultural nature of all psychological phenomena.
· Macro cultural psychology argues that psychological phenomena are public, definite, objective, cultural tools/means whose form and content are culturally organized to be suitable for achieving cultural purposes Thus, there is nothing extraordinary or unfathomable or “inhuman” about honor killings, or the psychology of evil in general. Its commonality testifies to its normalcy. Assuming that the psychology of evil is peculiar and violates human nature, erroneously assumes that human nature has a natural beneficient content that requires some abnormal countervailing influence.
References
Bandura, 1986 on the active nature of human learning
Chen, et al. (1995, 1998)
Donald, 1991, pp. 1-19
Ratner, 1991, pp. 180-182
Rogoff (2003, pp. 71-73)
Rogoff, 2003, p. 76
Vygotsky 1986, pp. 94-95
Vygotsky and Luria (1930/1993) Studies on The History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child,
Vygotsky, 1926/1997
Vygotsky, 1994b, p. 176
Vygotsky, 1998, CW vol 5, p. 81
Vygotsky, 1998, p. 34
Vygotsky, 1998, p. 8?
