When Hall, Yip, and Zárate (2016) suggested that cultural psychology focused on reporting differences between groups, they described comparative research conducted in other fields, including cross-cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is a different discipline with methodological approaches reflecting its dissimilar goal, which is to highlight the cultural grounding of human psychological characteristics, and ultimately make culture central to psychology in general. When multicultural psychology considers, according to Hall et al., the mechanisms of culture's influence on behavior, it treats culture the same way as cross-cultural psychology does. In contrast, cultural psychology goes beyond treating culture as an external variable when it proposes that culture and psyche are mutually constitutive. True psychology of the human experience must encompass world populations through research of the ways in which (a) historically grounded sociocultural contexts enable the distinct meaning systems that people construct, and (b) these systems simultaneously guide the human formation of the environments. (PsycINFO Database Record
An interdisciplinary qualitative study working with 40 Native American academics, who were selected for their specific diverse backgrounds, focused on selected aspects of subjective experiencing they generally had in common. Participants experienced the socio-cultural contexts of mainstream academia and tribal communities as incongruent and based on conflicting values associated with the conceptualizations of individualism versus relationality and communal cooperation. Viewing these seemingly dichotomous concepts from the perspective of Native American tribal world views, however, enabled meaningful integration of these concepts. The innovative relational individuality conceptualization allows for appreciation of uniqueness and self-improvement efforts without adherence to the mainstream principle of competitive individualism. At the core of the involved conceptualization of relationality, with preference for communal cooperation, is the experience of one's embeddedness in personal relationships and one's involvement within groups as a valuable member, which cannot be explained by either the necessity of socioeconomic and ecological factors or the imperative of conformity to collective conventions. The extent to which the independenceinterdependence and individualism-collectivism dichotomies apply to this case is limited. The discussed relational individuality conceptualization, facilitated by Native American tribal world views and culturally specific narratives, extend the repertoire of thus far recognized mechanisms that underlie the existing cultural variation.
This interdisciplinary conceptual study discusses significant implications for psychological functioning of the heterogeneous historically based socio-cultural contexts that are intrinsic to different societies and cultures. Promoting deeper inquiry into the complexity of diversity viewed as a resource, this article elucidates its propositions by examples using observable circumstances concerning various populations, previous literature relevant to the topic, and selected findings from research conducted with 40 Native American academics. In particular, this article contributes novel insights concerning the importance for identity construction and experiencing of the fact that the status of Native American tribal nations is politically and legally unique, and their situation historically and socio-culturally in many regards different from that of ethnic minority populations. Correspondingly, master narratives that fundamentally favor either full inclusion into the dominant society or the idea of tribal sovereignty and self-determination seem to facilitate distinct ways of construction and experiencing of qualitatively different identities. Some of these are conducive to constructive interpretation, integration, and coping within mutually incongruent socio-cultural contexts. Master narratives that carry such potential under adverse circumstances constitute an important asset within the contemporary ever more diverse, yet interconnected societies.
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