Richard Shweder

Richard A. Shweder (* 1945) is an American cultural anthropologist and cultural psychologist. Shweder is known for its critical stance towards the ethnocentrism.

Academic Career

Richard A. Shweder received his bachelor's degree in social anthropology in 1966 from the University of Pittsburgh and received his doctorate in 1972 from the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. He then taught for a year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, and since then has been at the University of Chicago, is currently employed as a professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the Department of Psychology and in the.

His anthropological fieldwork outside the United States resulted Shweder in the temple city of Bhubaneswar in the Indian state of Orissa, where he dealt in particular with cultural conceptions of the person, the self, the emotions and of moral judgment, Gender roles, illness explanations, causal explanation approaches for disease causation. This research led inter alia to a critique of universalist theory of moral judgment of Lawrence Kohlberg, by Shweder argued that reflect at least three different ethics in those judgments.

Shweder has a large number of essays submitted to controversial debates in the field of cultural studies, in which essentially deals with the question of the recognition of the other and its cultural and religious practices. This involves Shweder to the demonstration of the possibilities and limits of what is permissible in Western democracies and what is not. To this end, he studied mainly norm conflicts that arise when migrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America come to the rich countries of the northern hemisphere and bring their cultural and religious practices and of course practice, such as arranged marriages, circumcision in boys as female circumcision, etc. Shweder represents thereby a cultural pluralism, which he calls " universalism without uniformity", a formula that refers to the "Anti Anti- relativism " by Clifford Geertz.

With this particular research topic, he is an acknowledged expert on the issues of cultural conflicts. So he heads the joint working group of the Social Science Research Council and the Russell Sage Foundation " Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law," with the question "Freedom for cultural practices: how free are they really? And how free they should be " deal? . And most recently, he was the same reason in the new working group " Indigenous Psychology " Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (APA) was added.

Richard Shweder received a number of awards and he was twice for research fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1985-1986 and 1995-1996), and in 1999 at the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin and later at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Shweder ever held a Hewlett visiting professor at the Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University (2003-2004) and at Stanford University Hoover Institution (2005-2006). He was a visiting professor in addition to the Russell Sage Foundation (1990-1991), was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Research Fellowship (1985-1986), was elected to the Carnegie scholar, (2002) and he was awarded the Socio- Psychological Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "? Does the Concept of the person Vary Cross - Culturally " During the academic year 2008-2009 was Shweder member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for his article. Shweder was president of the American Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Cultural Psychology

Following Clifford Geertz's definition of culture as a symbolic system Shweder sees the environment of people as intentional environment that would not exist without the meaning -generating system of symbols (language) in their human form, as well as the people themselves as intentional person who just can not be objectively looking at things of their environment, but these experienced individually and affective. On this postulate, the discipline these formative relativism derives, however do not want a radical relativism, as it represents Richard Rorty be, but a cultural relativism that. Based on the principle universalism without uniformity based and does not try to understand the diversity of cultural human coexistence as variations of a particular genetic pool of humanity ( bio- evolutionary universalism. This critique into sets of cultural psychology on a different understanding of the relationship between psyche and the environment as the study of mental representations that without the presupposition of their pre-cultural determinism, universality and abstract- formalist description manages. It is aimed therefore genuinely against Eurocentrism, has declared the Western psychology to universals exploratory discipline. cultural psychology is, according to Shweder exploring these psycho- semantic- socio-cultural ( psycho- - semantic- socio -cultural ) realities in which subject and object can not be separated, because they penetrate each other so much. Intentional environments were doing "artificial worlds", ie man-made, populated with human products. Intentional world means that nothing exists independently of ourselves or our interpretations. That means: A socio-cultural environment is an intentional world because it is real, actually and foreclosed, but only so long as a community of persons exists whose beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions and other mental representations directed at them and through them be affected. The principle of intentional worlds involves the idea that subject and object, human being and socio-cultural environments, the identity of each others penetrate dialectically ( by interpretive tools) and therefore can not be recognized as independent and dependent variables, as in general and their expansion of Cross-Cultural Psychology ends ( Cross-Cultural Psychology) is attempted. Their identities are mutually penetrating; interdependent. Neither side can be thought of without the other, interpreted and lived. The principle of intentional worlds also means that nothing > in itself ' is real, but realities, the products of fashion are represented in the things in different taxonomic and / or narrative contexts, be embedded and implemented and thus constitute reality of life.

The second cornerstone of a cultural psychology provides for Shweder a special form of presentation of the person; they understand the person as a semiotic subject or as an intentional person, for which the historically acquired significance (meaning) of a situation or stimulating event is the main reason, it to respond, and for which different situations yield different answers because they activate different local and rational response options - for example, depending on the social position of the person who holds that moral standards are applied, etc. In order to detect meanings as such, makes use of the semiotic subject of psychological tools (texts or symbols). These mental tools are first described by Shweder as conceptual schemes, to be later replaced by the more appropriate term experience near concept of Clifford Geertz (1983). This experience -related concepts represent the mediating entity between culture and psyche, between intentional world and intentional person, because a person is always involved in historical, political, cultural, social and interpersonal contexts and gains from these their interpretation tools.

Why Shweder has referred to this program as an anthropological cultural psychology, he has pointed out in his essay "Why cultural psychology? " 1999. He wanted the various stigmata, which were connected with his research tradition, culture and personality studies store. The anthropological school connected with the name of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead was reputed to operate national character studies and to be strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. Even the grammatical connection of culture AND personality he found problematic, because you both understand as variables and can be considered individually. Despite the name of ill-chosen targets a cultural psychology, as it was first formulated by the Chicago Committee on Human Development, whose most prominent representative Richard A. Shweder is, rather it off to create not a new science, but rather different, to create complementary disciplines: particularly an anthropology ( reunited with linguistics ), which is suitable socio-cultural environments to be analyzed in all its intentionality and specificity ( meanings and agents), and psychology ( reunited with the philosophy ), which is suitable for persons in all their intentionality and to investigate historicity.

Publications ( selection)

• Richard A. Shweder, Robert A. Levine (ed.): Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion. Cambridge University Press, New York 1984.
• Donald W. Fiske, Richard A. Shweder (Ed.): Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and subjectivities. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986.
• George J. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, Gilbert H. Herdt (ed.): Cultural Psychology: Essays on comparative human development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990.
• Richard A. Shweder: Cultural Psychology - what is it? In: George J. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, Gilbert H. Herdt (ed.): Cultural Psychology: Essays on comparative human development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 1-46.
• Richard A. Shweder, Maria A. Sullivan: The Semiotic Subject of Cultural Psychology. In: Lawrence A. Pervin (Ed.): Handbook of Personality - Theory and Research. New York, 1990, Guilford Press, pp. 399-416.
• Richard A. Shweder: Thinking Through Cultures. Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Harvard University Press, Harvard 1991.
• Richard A. Shweder, Maria A. Sullivan: Cultural Psychology: Who needs it? In: Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 44, pp. 497-523.
• Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, Richard A. Shweder (ed.) Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996.
• Richard A. Shweder: Welcome to the Middle Age! (And other cultural fictions ). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.
• Richard A. Shweder: Why Cultural Psychology? In: ethos. 1999, 27 (1 ), pp. 62-73.
• Richard A. Shweder, Martha Minow, Hazel Markus (eds.): Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies. Russell Sage Foundation Press, New York 2002.
• Richard A. Shweder: Why do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2002.
• Richard A. Shweder, Byron Good ( eds.): Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.
• Richard A. Shweder (Ed.): The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009.