I. Introduction

II. Difficulties with the subject (The definition of culture and the definitions of cultures)

• Deterministic definitions of Culture
• Between Deterministic and Individualistic
• Individualistic Approaches to the definition of Culture
• Culture is an abstract concept
• ‘Difference’ and ‘similitude’ are also abstract concepts
• Culture and personality
• Culture and society

• The temporal dimension
• The authority issue: who defines what a particular culture is
• The problem of inclusion: who is included in which culture
• Pluriculturalism: the problem of exclusion

III. Difficulties with the analyst

• The analyst’s own culture: a culture filter for the study of cultures
• The analyst’s ideology
• Something about the concept of ‘ideology’

IV. Difficulties with the sciences

• The cultural constraints

• The ideological constraints

V. Conclusion: Towards a new understanding of cultural differences

• The definition number 151
• An ideological necessity for differences?
• Where is then the relevant difference?

VI. Bibliography

"Culture" is an adamantine concept. Like the diamond, it is endowed with multifarious surfaces, that shine newer and more wonderful sparkles at each turn of the stone about the fingers –about the intellectual cavils– of the observer. Also, like the diamond has been the goal of tireless struggles in pursuit of the artificial way to contrive it in an alchemistic endeavor, so "culture" has been the dream for numerous researchers to "produce" its definition in ways more or less close to a laboratory setting. The modern alchemists of culture may easily yield to the temptation of looking at it more as a tool that is to be designed, performed and utilized for the purposes of their respective fields of study, than a reality of endless richness that is there to be discovered, polished, and admired.

Concealed behind the notion of "cross-cultural conflict" there is the assumption that ‘culture’ is a phenomenon that by itself is enough to produce substantial differences among people, creating divisions between cultural groups, with different values, beliefs and behaviors, leads us to the following questions: Are there differences in the interpersonal or in the Intergroup level of conflict (Deutsch, 1973)? If there are, what are those differences, and how does culture influence each level? In the intergroup level: Does culture’s influence on people work as a factor for group formation? In the interpersonal level: does culture function as an element in the conflict? In both levels: If it does, how does it operate? Can culture change conflict? If it does, how does it, in what way?

In the way towards the goal of grasping the concept of culture, of cultural differences, and how to answer the questions posed before, we trip over many obstacles. The main purpose of this paper is a description of some of those obstacles.

The difficulties in the study of any subject can arise whether from the analyst, from the subject itself, or from the tool employed to approach it, that is the methodology of the sciences involved. In the cross cultural studies I encountered that difficulties abound stemming from all three sources. The organization of the paper then, will be structured around these three sources of difficulties: the subject, the analyst and the science.

The definition of culture calls for a special strain because of the multiple difficulties encountered on the path to reach it. Even worse, the task of definition is twofold: culture as an abstract concept, and the definition of a particular culture; we have to cope not only with the ‘definition of culture’, but also with a seemingly endless series of ‘definitions of cultures’ (assuming that the definition of the abstract concept allows us for such a multiplicity). If the definition of culture as an abstract concept appears as daunting, the definitions of each particular culture can easily be deemed as an impossible and fruitless task.

The definition of Culture

The various efforts at defining Culture as an abstract concept vary in a range that I tend to see in relation to the higher or lower proximity to the individual personality. On the end of the range of lowest proximity we find the "deterministic" theories, that define culture as a concept that determines the individual’s behavior as far as the determined individual is enclosed within the boundaries of a certain culture-group. It also –or before– determines other factor’s in the individual psychology, as values, beliefs and attitudes, but what really counts is the determination of the behavior, since it is the observable fact –and thus apprehensible by measurement– in a laboratory setting, and since it is what really matters at the hour of utilizing those ‘scientific’ findings in a practical way.

Deterministic Definitions of Culture. Parting from that point of absolute determinism of human behavior, there is a graduation of what we could call ‘softened’ positions that allow the individual personality more and more freedom –therefore, more responsibility– in the determination of the self.

To be truly honest I should admit that I did not find any author explicitly enlisted in neither of the extreme positions. What I found were tendencies among them that are more or less biased to either of the poles of the continuum. "Group" is the key concept used by the theorists that lean towards the deterministic end (see Lewicki et al, 1994; Price-Williams, 1985), with strong emphasis in the understanding of the ideas of "patterns", "shared", and "set", among others of the like. Klineberg offers the idea, perhaps closest to the deterministic end when he defines culture as "a whole ‘way of life’ that is determined by the social environment" (D.R. Price-Williams, Cultural Psychology, quoting Klineberg).

Between Deterministic and Individualistic. Going away from the ‘deterministic’ pole the words "individual" or "personality" start timidly making appearance, still in close relation to the concept of group. "I define culture as the set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the next" (David Matsumoto, 1996, p. 16; the bolded is mine).

A peculiar position is that sustained by Rubin and Sander (1991, note 2) when they define culture "as the set of attitudes and behaviors that are broadly generalizable across a national or cultural grouping, and which tend to persist over time" on the one hand. On the other, they "note that such a definition is deliberately parallel to the view of ‘personality’ as the set of attitudes and behaviors that persist over time for a single individual", what does not seem to be nothing more than a mere parallelism. But when we ponder statements such as "the object of stereotypic judgments is deprived of individuality, and is instead rendered a pigeon-holed occupant of some set of preconceived notions", or as "it is also true that stereotypes rob both perceiver and ‘victim’ of a sense of underlying individuality" (p. 250, bolded is mine) we tend to conclude that the concept of ‘individual’ has a much stronger impact on their idea of culture than what they make explicit.

Individualistic Approaches to the definition of Culture. Already passing a middle point, we can find theorists that openly challenge the very methodology of the "cross-cultural social psychology" (see Spindler, 1978; Turner, 1986; Schwartz, 1992; Moore, 1971). A very strong point is made by Victor Turner when emphatically includes among the features of what he criticizes as ‘modern anthropology’,

In direct relation to our point it is interesting Theodore Schwartz’s view of what he calls the ‘distributive existence of culture’ as the set of personalities of the members of a population:

Culture is an abstract concept. If we are to build a theory, the definition of the key term becomes crucial: the accuracy of the answers to the questions raised in the Introduction will greatly depend on the accuracy we achieve in the definition of culture.

Unfortunately, "it is embarrassing to admit a lack of precision in the very building blocks of an edifice, but that in fact is what we face in this area of discourse" (Price-Williams, 1985-994) Disheartening could perfectly be the adjective to describe the feelings that one is bound to experiment when we read that Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) listed over one hundred fifty definitions of culture … (!)

Anyway, whichever the way we find it defined, culture will always remain as a theoretical or conceptual entity. As such, it can be dangerously manipulated from an ideological or cultural standpoint, and we should not lose sight of this fact.

I found that there is a coincidence across all the definitions (see Lewicki et al., 1994; Matsumoto, 1996; Price-Williams, 1985; Rubin & Sander, 1991): culture’s influence in people does have a dividing as well as an agglutinating property. It works as a factor for group formation; it agglutinates people together in-group, and makes a real difference with out-groups. Hereunder the concept of culture appears as intrinsically related to the notions of ‘difference’ and ‘similitude’, and herewith it also appears an ‘extra’ difficulty which is the level of abstraction of these terms.

‘Difference’ and ‘similitude’ are also abstract concepts. They are relational concepts. They can only be understood in relation to a comparative point. Grammatically speaking, they are substantivations of the adjectives ‘different’ and ‘similar’. As adjectives, they cannot be found in reality unless you relate them to a noun, to a substance. ‘Yellow’ is an adjective, ‘yellowness’ would be its substantivation. You cannot find ‘the yellowness’ in reality, because it is an abstraction of the mind. You can find a leaf (a noun, a substance) that is yellow, but it is not possible to find yellowness.

‘Difference’ and ‘similitude’ are, in the same way, and even in a poorer one, abstractions of the mind, they are ‘construals’ as Theodore Schwartz puts it (1992). However, ‘yellow’ has advantage over ‘different’ or ‘similar’ in the sense that the former only needs one substance to endure, whereas the latter ones need two, since they are relational adjectives.

It is crucial, then, when we talk about cultural differences, not to lose sight of the level of analysis we are talking about (or the level of substantiality, or reality). This is even more important when we consider that, most of the time, we are using the word ‘culture’ as an adjective that modifies difference –we talk about ‘cultural differences’–, another adjective that, at its time, is relational, that is, a second class adjective. In other words, it is what Matsumoto (1996) explains by saying that "culture cannot be seen or felt or heard or tasted. We see the manifestations of culture, but we never see culture itself" (page 14).

Culture and personality. We are talking about human-behavioral sciences, about psychology, sociology, anthropology. All of those sciences’ primary object of study is the human being, taking into account in a greater or lesser degree the fact that human beings live in society. Therefore, the definition of what a human being is and what society is, will have at its turn, a deep impact in the definition of culture.

The "deterministic" theories define culture as a concept that determines the individual’s behavior in a unidirectional way, not allowing the individual person but a merely passive function, – as Victor Turner puts it – as "wax to be imprinted with ‘cultural patterns’" (1986, page 72). Towards the ‘personalistic’ end of the scale, instead, I find aligned the definitions that allow a wider and wider range of participation of the personal individual in the determination of his/her own culture, which conversely translates into a wider range of indeterminacy –I would say of ‘freedom’– in the behavior of the individual person. There is, in these cases, a ‘reciprocal’ or ‘bi-directional’ relationship, since the person has his/her influence on his/her own culture, whether in the intrapersonal or in the societal level.

A deterministic definition, that entirely denies a reciprocal relationship between culture and personality, could leave us facing the bare impossibility for a human being to study ‘cross-cultures’. Why, if, as a human being, the scientist has to be included in a certain culture, it ensues that all his/her study will be inevitably distorted by the filter of his/her own culture. Hereof we need to reject this type of definitions, if we are to continue the analysis.

Nevertheless, this ‘rejection’ raises another interesting question. If culture does not determine behavior, and therefore it does not permit its accurate explanation or prediction (Matsumoto, 1996), what would be the sense of taking culture into consideration for the study of conflict and negotiation? Let us skip this disturbing question for now, and let us assume that there is a bi-directional interaction between culture and personality.

The argument in favor of this bi-directional interaction becomes particularly strong when we consider the readily observable differences between members of an allegedly identical culture. Culture is as much an individual, psychological construct as it is a social construct that to some extent exists in each and every one of us individually –therefore working as a factor of individual differentiation– as much as it exists as a global, social construct.

Yet, the question so raised may sound too simplistic. Of course, it is hard to believe in a complete identification of both concepts, but it may not be so hard to conclude with the impossibility of grasping the ‘abstract’ concept of culture in pure state, in complete isolation from any particular personality. Another fact comes in our way when we try to detach both concepts: there is not a person who personifies a pure culture (assuming that we were successful in the daring task of defining a particular one). The phenomenon of a ‘multiplicity’ of cultures criss-crossing a unique person, clearly speaks of a rather intimate relationship. Further more, it is even harder to deny any relationship when we confront the cases of individuals that transcend their supposedly own culture to adopt a ‘strange’ one.

The answer to this puzzling question is something that has to be analyzed, researched and found. It is not of the kind of matter that can be postponed. We cannot go on a Cross-Cultural study if we do not have a clear understanding of what a human person is, and what the nature of the relationship between culture and personality. Nonetheless, for the sake of analysis, let us postpone this other annoying obstacle and move on to the following one.

Culture and society. Since society is composed by persons, and a relationship between person and culture is unavoidable, also the relationship between society and culture is very interlinked (Price-Williams, 1985; Firth, 1963). Further more, if we assume that culture plays a core role in aggregating and differentiating societies, it becomes evident the relevance of the concept of ‘society’ in the definition of culture. Needless to say that we are treating over central issues which understandings seriously compromise our lives and the actual structures of power in our societies, and further, the specific systems devised to legitimize power. Therefore, a definition of society and the ensuing definition of culture, will not only be likely to be culturally but also ideologically bound.

The temporal dimension. Culture, as any other human construct, is temporally pervaded. Assuming culture as a certain set of attributions made to a group of people, it develops and changes along time. "In this sense, even as an abstract concept or principle, culture is never a static entity. It is always dynamic and changing, existing within a tensive relationship with the actual behaviors it is supposed to explain and predict" (Matsumoto, 1996, page 16).

This difficulty becomes particularly significant when considering that culture has been the subject of a science that uses an experimental methodology, hence particularly bound by time limitations. Notwithstanding all the efforts that "within the constraint of prestigious ‘paradigms’ (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense)" are made to "fix social reality" (Turner, 1986, page 79), culture and society (I would even include, ‘the individual personality’) will always be further ahead. As soon as an experimental research is made to explain a determined social or cultural reality, that reality has already changed. What could be suggested? To subject a culture to a permanent experimental research? Useless to explain the uselessness of this suggestion. The findings of such an experimental research would not only undergo a constant process of ‘desupdating’, but would also face the unavoidable shortcoming of the life term of the researcher (usually much shorter than any culture or society).

The authority issue: who defines what a particular culture is. We were wrestling with the issue of the political relationship between China and the United States. It was during one of our interesting classes, where my class-mates in charge of the ‘seminar leadership’ had raised the question of whether or not was the U.S. entitled to force in a foreign country a higher level of respect for the so called ‘human rights’. The argument went in the sense that there is no Cross-Cultural authority to determine that a certain practice within a certain culture is undesirable just for the reason that it is undesirable in ‘our’ culture. In a democratic and pluralistic world this would sound as arrogant and unacceptable dogmatism.

And we were completely unaware of the even more arrogant dogmatism meant by the attribution of a certain practice – it does not matter here whether it is against human rights or not – to a certain culture. The warning was raised and our Chinese class-mate, help up his belief that what was going under discussion was – for him – doubtlessly not proper of Chinese culture. After the episode, I was left with a somewhat bitter feeling and a big question mark: Who is the authority enabled to define what is proper and what is not within a certain culture?

The problem of inclusion: who is included in which culture. Again, Matsumoto (1996) raises the question when writing that " … there are not hard and fast rules of how to determine what a culture is or who belongs to that culture" (page 17). However, after stating that "culture is a sociopsychological construct, a sharing across people of psychological phenomena such as values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors" (page 17), he goes on to declare that "what distinguishes members of the same culture is whether they share these psychological phenomena" and "what separates members of one culture from another is the absence of these shared phenomena" (page 17). We do not need to think too much to realize that this is tantamount to declare that a certain individual is considered included within a certain cultural category for the only reason that he or she is already included. This is what is called a petition of principles, or in logic, a tautology. Why, if the only reference for inclusion is the inclusion itself, what is the sense and utility of the inclusion?

Judging from what Price-Williams (1985) says, attempts have been made, from "psychologists and even some Cross-Cultural psychologists, to identify nationality or ethnicity with culture" (page 994). The plurality of cultures within the United States is only an example, among many, of the error enclosed in the identification of culture with nationality. And, in relation to ethnicity, apart from the fact "that race is not as clear a concept as many people think it is" and "confusion abounds about whether race is even real and, if so, whether it is biologically rooted and genetically encoded" (Matsumoto, 1996, page 17), it is well known that ethnic traits go across national borders with surprising facility. With more reason then, will they go across cultures, and it would not be isolated the case of a person finding more coincidences with someone of an allegedly different race than with someone of his/her own.

Pluriculturalism: the problem of exclusion. Not only because I mentioned it before it is not a novelty that people are criss-crossed by multiple cultures. Many authors from the social sciences have suggested what Kuo-Shu Yang (1988) calls the "hypothesis of societal convergence" according to which the phenomenon of societal modernization will eventually eliminate Cross-Cultural psychological differences (See also Apter, 1965; Black, 1966; Kerr et al., 1960; Karsh and Cole, 1968; Feldman and Moore, 1962; Levy, 1966). I interpret this phenomenon as simply a wider accessibility that technological progress, particularly in the world of communications, allows an increasing number of people to the knowledge of diverse cultures. Together with this wider accessibility comes the phenomenon of ‘pluriculturization’ which means that a particular individual contains in itself characteristics of several cultures. We described this in class as a "person criss-crossed by multiple cultures". This permits the person cornered by a taxonomy of fixed stereotypes, to easily adopt an attitude of exclusion, alleging values, beliefs and behavior acquired from his/her knowledge of cultures different from the one which he/she is being forced in.

According to one of our assumptions, culture divides people into different groups, and according to another assumption implied by almost every definition of culture (Lewicki et al., 1994; Matsumoto, 1996; Price-Williams, 1985; Rubin & Sander, 1991) is that it is a concept that encompasses all people. That is, there is nobody who can escape from the tile of various cultures that divide humankind; that is, culture is a universally comprehensive concept.

Therefore, any possible classification of cultures will unfailingly pigeonhole in one of them the very designer of the classification. Otherwise, it would not be a complete classification.

The immediate question will be: To what extent is it possible for the analyst to immunize him/herself from the influences of his/her own culture? A deterministic definition of culture would severely endanger the availability of immunization and, on the other hand, if culture does not determine behavior, it is its relevance as a factor affecting conflict what decisively enters the miry terrain of doubt.

Faure (1995) makes a strong argument in pointing out the flaws in the culture studies from an ‘American’, ‘parochial’ perspective:

As an example, Gabrenya (1988) performed a content analysis on 3,305 journal references in 177 papers recently appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, the American Anthropologist, the American Sociological Review, and Ethos, which indicates that JPSP has an extremely low percentage of foreign journal cited (3 percent) and none of the other journals exceeds 10 percent.

Faure goes even further, somehow concerned not only in the cultural bias of the particular analyst, but also in the cultural bias – he talks about ‘insularity’ – revealed by the framing, in their very outset, of the social and behavioral sciences, which he perceives as isolated from outside contributions. (I will come back later to this difficulty, because this is a different kind of problem. What I am analyzing now is the cultural filter that the analyst might undergo, and this is more about the cultural filter that may affect the sciences that study culture).

As it was mentioned in the section describing the relationship between culture and personality, as well as culture and society, the analyst’s approach to the study of culture can be easily ideologized. Parting from an ideological standpoint, the concepts of both person and society will most likely result in an ideologization of the concept of culture, since a relationship among all three of them is very difficult to refute.

As Foucault (1977) explains, language performs a constitutive function; discourse is seen as the way in which social processes emerge, reconstitute themselves, and change, albeit masking its own role in the constitution of social life. I call this, the language of ideologists, that masks the real nature of process, although this nature is such that is not real, but ideal. It is the ‘idea’ what creates a world. Hereof the power of ideas, their ability to ‘create’. This creational sense of power is thus measured as in relation to a scale from ideal to real, from nothing to something, from not being to being. The wider the gap between nothing and something, the more powerful the idea. In the universe of extensible things, the absolute extent of this power is only attributed to ‘magic’, or supernatural forces. In the universe of social relations, the understanding of this power can be substantially different. I understand by ‘relation’, something that is not completely within the universe of extensible, measurable things, and not completely out of it.

But there is an understanding of power ‘a contrario sensu’. Instead of creation, destruction, instead of bringing something from nothing, making something disappear, ‘annihilating’ it (in latin, ‘nihil’ means nothing). This concept is out of scale: it starts from zero to the left, and its measured in negative numbers. I see this reversal sense as used to show nothing else but impotence that does not want to be impotent and ends up being the least powerful. The absolute numbers can be apparently greater, but they are preceeded by a negative sign.

If we assume that ‘absolute power’ understood as an ‘ex nihilo’ creation, we – as human beings, limited by an extensible ‘humanity’ – are bound to be left out of this possibility, and have to content ourselves contributing to someone else’s creation, through enhancement of what is given, ‘something’ already made. In social relations, however, as far as we understand ‘societas’ as humanly contrived, and not as something that comes together with human nature, the ground is fertile to produce the creational illusion, the ‘ideology’.

‘Idealist’ is that who shelters an ‘ideal’ about himself, and about society. He or she, does not strive to ‘change’ himself/herself or society, but only to improve both as received, not as constructed. On the other side, ‘Ideologist’ is that whose idea encloses a creational illusion. Through language, the idea may become allegedly real (Foucault, 1977), thus translating into ‘ideology’. It is not real, because it never goes beyond the world of ideas, but posing it on the negative side of the scale, can generate, through change, that creational illusion. But there is no real creation of reality. It is like a mirror of reality, as if being on the other side of the scale meant to be beneath the surface of crystalline water, on the other side of reality. Thus, even though ideas cannot really construct reality, they can mirror that construction. Nonetheless, in the same way as in the mirror everything appear backwards, ‘construction’ would mean ‘destruction’. Ideas cannot construct reality, but they can destroy it through action. Of course, the ideologist will not preconize ‘destruction’ for the sake of destruction. The ultimate goal will be creation. So, in Hegel, dialectic conflict implying destruction of the thesis was not intended to but in pursuit of the ‘creation’ of synthesis. So, in Marx, the destruction of the established system through fight of classes was not intended to but in order to achieve the communist paradise.

When an idea under the surface of reality, is set forth through language - if successful- becomes ideology. When is it successful? When it gets sway in minds different from the ideologist’s own, and ensuing in action, destructive action, to the extent to which it deviates from reality. When I say ‘reality’ I refer to "reality outside the mind", independent from the mind, not to the known reality, but to the knowable reality. We can identify that Turner’s "strain towards order and harmony" as the clue to the reality. As long as the idea is in syntony with that logos, in consonance with reality, it enhances it, in some way it creates it by growth, by completion, and the result is harmony. The idea in open challenge to the logos, implies and generates conflict and destruction.

This concept of ideology, which I perceive in close relation to the one stressed by Kobb and Rifkin (1991), appears as highly attributable to many of the analysts we have been studying, as the intellectual construct that comes into a sort of reality (‘world’, in the words of Kobb and Rifkin) in a laboratory setting.

The insularity which Faure (1995) denounces, finds its origin in the history of the social and behavioral sciences in North America. According to him, social psychology has tended to isolate itself from outside contributions, and it has grown from an "Anglo-Saxon cultural base, on North American questionings, and on Western human and social values" (page 47).

An example of this insularity is given by the fact that the concepts, models, and paradigms of the behavioral sciences –according to Sarason (1981)– largely focus on the self-contained individual, that has thus become psychology’s own subject matter (see also Bond, 1988; Gabrenya, 1988; and Pepitone, 1981).

"This construction – based on American values and concerns such as the individual subject, social intervention, efficiency, and adjustment – drives the research in an ideological direction." (Faure, 1995, page 49). Hereof the perspectives and analytical categories developed in the United States by American researchers to structure a problem, define it, and organize it are not only culturally determined – hence biased – but they also respond to a certain ideology.

A previous statement is owed at this point. All the knowledge I have about Social Psychology stems from only one source: the readings for this Program (whether for Cross-Cultural Conflict class, for Ethical Issues and Public Policies class, and Theories of Conflict class). Herewith I want to acknowledge my weak position to write about it.

Insofar as I understood, it seems that this science rests on the building of theories, usually sustained by "prestigious paradigms" (as Turner puts it), which basic rule of demonstration consists of experimental research carried out whether in laboratory settings (like the ones we read from authors like Brewer & Silver, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1985, Rabbie et al., 1989, and many others) or – maybe more recently – through statistical findings extracted from "natural settings" (like the one we read in Flippen et al., 1996). The data thus obtained is interpreted and analyzed from a heuristic frame borrowed whether from mechanistic structures of thought, from biological sciences or from liberal economics, which use approaches at its time borrowed from Newtonian physics (Faure, 1995).

Somewhat cynically, Kuhn (1962) already described this research methodology "as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (page 5), which sounds a lot like the concept of ‘ideology’ that I stressed supra. Since then on, throngs of works have contributed to a tougher or lighter criticism of the methodology of behavioral sciences. Authors already quoted, like Faure (1995), Gabrenya (1988), Malpass (1988), Messick (1988), Jahoda (1979), Sarason (1981), Bond (1988), and Pepitone (1981), focus their criticism on the fact that the immense majority of the research has been made in United States with people from the United States. This authors, however, have remained as deviants from the mainstream of social psychology. Their concern, albeit some of them like Faure mention ideology, is more orientated towards the cultural insularity. Yet, Kuhn (1962) was talking not about cultural constraints, but rather about ideological constraints. What he started sitting on the defendant’s seat was the very methodology of behavioral sciences.

Bond (1988) observes that "research conducted in the United States informs us that we humans seek out information that holds promise of confirming our established constructions of reality", and Tajfel & Turner (1985) are not unaware that the outcome of their experiments can be misled "by some form of the experimenter effect or of the demand characteristics of the experimental situation" (Page 14). Even more, when they make explicit references to group membership they might be not only communicating to the subjects that they are expected to, or ought to, discriminate, but also them, as experimenter are already making the discrimination!

The three "points" made by the authors about this question are definitively unsatisfying. The first – necessity (for the experiment to have sense) – it is not an explanation of the objection, but just a justification of the methodology. As Faure (1996) says, "in studying conflict, the point is to carefully distinguish the context of discovery from the context of justification" (page 53). My point becomes reinforced even further when recalling the acknowledgment the authors made that "this requires not merely that the subjects perceive themselves as similar to or different from others as individuals, but that they are members of discrete and discontinuous categories – that is, ‘groups’" (page 14). It is obvious that they needed to ‘force’ the sense of membership to a group, otherwise the experiment would not have made any sense.

The second point –the participants’ unawareness (according to postsession reports) – is easily refutable by my naive experience of the influence that the title of the course induced in me the behavior in accordance with determined expectations, only discovered after three months of course. This experience shows that a post-experimental unawareness does not indicate the absence of manipulation. Besides, as the easy response to manipulations is often seen as a sign of personal weakness, is logic to expect a good deal of reluctance in the people to admit it.

The third and last point was the addition of observer-subjects to the same cues (St. Claire and Turner, 1982), who failed significantly to predict the behavior of normal categorized subjects. Yet, this does not take into consideration that the observer-subjects were, in their part, put to undergo a different kind of expectancy. In the end, there is nothing that clear out the possibility of a behavior induced by a self-fulfilling prophecy (Rubin et al., 1990).

Always following Faure, there is an ideology in the origin of behavioral sciences that is perpetuated by dint of metaphors embedded in cultural meanings. Even though I do not have completely clear if he makes a neat distinction between ideology and culture, the words that Faure employs – "research can transform reality in surreptitious ways, through manipulation of the subjects"– convey an idea very akin to the one I stressed supra as the concept of ‘ideology’.

In my opinion, Faure makes a brilliant diagnosis of the limitations of Cross-Cultural studies, but he fails at the time of prescription. Why? Because he presents – after a rather tough and pessimistic analysis about the possibilities for the behavioral sciences to enjoy transcultural applicability – what he calls "options for moving ahead", without actually undressing himself off the clothes of biased assumptions– whether culturally or ideologically. Such, for instance, the assumption that the introduction of "more value neutrality" is a value in itself and universally accepted ‘across cultures’ for the Cross-Cultural studies. Anyway, beyond the ideological constraint susceptible to arise from a unicultural perspective, there is a much deeper one that directly relates to the relationship – mentioned before – between Culture and personality, which stems from a particular – ideological – understanding of the concept of human person. Such is the necessity for social psychology to assume that human behavior, as well as human relationships are measurable, measurability that, at its own turn, will allow their classifications in the style of biological taxonomies.

"Ultimately the world is measurable – epitomized in Galileo’s maxim, ‘to measure everything measurable and to make what is not measurable capable of being measured’" (Turner, 1986, page 73). In my opinion this is the core point in this issue. Social psychology has thrived at the shelter of an experimental methodology that finds its legitimacy on this assumption of measurability of human beings and their behavior and relationships. In that endeavor, grids are contrived, and multifarious attempts at labeling human groups, forcing them into schematic definitions of culture are carried out (perhaps inadvertently – or ideologically – fostering inexistent divisions between human beings… ?).

In the movie "Il Postino" (The Postman), the actor representing the worldwide famous Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, says: "When you explain it, poetry becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it". We are not talking about poetry, but about human beings. But, since poetry is a typically human work, I feel free to attempt the comparison. Maybe human beings also become banal when you try to explain them, or their behavior. Maybe it is against their very nature the possibility of explanation and prediction, presupposed in the understanding that research is intended not merely to collect data, but rather to construct theories with aspiration to generalizability.

There is a contradiction hidden behind a curtain of humility that assumes the impossibility to attain an objective truth, whereas the pretension is harbored of comprehending with – limited? – minds and experiments and classifications, someone else’s’ minds and behaviors, as if their fellow human beings were part of a whole, inferior to that to which they belong, and to which extent they are enabled to measure and synthesize them. (I do not misperceive the paradox, though: While being born and developed with the cultural filter of an ‘individualistic’ culture – as the American’s brags to be – psycho sociology is constrained to be, by methodology, in the collectivist extreme of "considering man as a part").

But what if each person in its very nature, is a whole in itself, therefore not susceptible to be encompassed within another? You would not be able to measure it. As far as I understand, science is not able to measure without a relational factor, and that relation is given from a part to a whole, thus allowing the various process of synthesis and classification. The arrogance in the attempt to comprehend that whole is tantamount to consider oneself out of that whole and belonging to a superior one, for if the analyst was enclosed in it, as a part, there would not even be a close possibility to comprehension. Logically, as whole is defined as comprehending parts, it is repulsive to our minds the idea of parts comprehending a whole which at the same time encompasses them. Experimental work, classifications, synthesis and grids are susceptible to be made by biological sciences, where the subject of study – a butterfly, a frog, a rock or a plant – can be presumed as belonging to a different and allegedly inferior whole than the one to which the analyst belongs. Can we assume the same in relation to social, psychological, anthropological or, in general, human sciences, where the subject of study are fellow human beings as human beings? We are intending to measure and predict human behavior, but is it really measurable? Is it in its nature the susceptibility for prediction?

To conclude this section, I add a last quotation from Turner (1986):

I cannot but totally agree with this approach to the human being, aware of its contradictions, and respectful of its freedom and creativity, which I perceive as stemming from that conception of the person as a whole.

"In the political macrocosm sharp divisions continue to exist fostered by the regulatory processes of nationalism and ideology" (Turner, 1986, page 79).

From my point of view, culture is an abstract that conveys the idea of an entirety composed by a continuum of every manifestation of the human spirit. From the first act freely and consciously accomplished by the first existing person on earth until the first free and conscious act of the child who has reached the age of reason in the precise moment you are reading this, there is a series of manifestations of the human spirit that is expressed by the word "culture".

It is an entirety, a "complex whole", in E. B. Tylor words, in which everything is encompassed, as long as it is a manifestation of the human spirit, understanding by "human spirit" the principle that allows human beings to behave in a way different from the way any other being does, characterizing this way by conscience and freedom (i.e., it is not ‘cultural’ the fact of eating, but it is ‘cultural’ the ways people eat, for whereas the command to eat is issued by an animal instinct, to use a fork or to prepare a delicate dish are options that a human being can freely and consciously make). And the word ‘manifestation’ is to express the idea of ‘epiphenomenon’ enclosed in the concept of culture, in the sense that a phenomenon can be cultural as long as it comes to the social surface, out of the barriers of the individual’s psychology.

I say "continuum" because I understand culture as a dynamic concept, not in the sense that culture changes, but because it is a whole in constant growth (i.e., we can not really say that a culture changed because a certain costume fell in desuetude, because if it did, it becomes a part of history, and history is an important part of culture). It is like a huge data base that is constantly up-dated, whether those data are used or not. The data-base is the same, what differ are the ways each person access it, the specific data that in fact is retrieved and the ways that information is assimilated. In the very end, what defines those ways and those data is the individual person.

And, finally, I say "abstract" because I see the concept of culture as non sustainable by itself, it does not have a grasp in reality by its own weight, but it needs of a "concrete" concept to subsist: the concept of "person". The individual person, in its concrete reality, is the beginning, the core, and the end of culture. Culture exist but in the concrete individual person. There is not such an entity as culture with existence in itself, what exists is the individual that creates it, receives it (from other individuals), augments it, and transmits it. But there is not an independent stage in this transition: it is from person to person, and no reality is achieved in between.

Anyway, we should distinguish between different levels of individuality and keep mindful of that those different psychological levels may vary –and they vary, as a matter of fact– within the same individual along time. There is a constant process of "individuation" of the personality until the "age of maturity" where the self is found, hence the individuality, yet encompassing in it the potent load of its natural sociability, will no longer need of the sense of ‘belongingness’ to a certain group, since that sense will be satisfied by the recognition of one unique group and one unique culture, within which what really makes the difference is given from individual to individual. Ethnocentrism, from this stand-point, is but a symptom of immaturity of the individual’s personality.

But we understand that "order and repetition are not all illusion, nor all ‘mere’ ideology, nor all fictive scholarly models, but are observable –and I would add often measurable– on a behavioral level, as well as in fixed ideas" (Moore, 1971, p. 38). And yet, the ‘behavioral level’ is such that does not determine the individual personality. As well as the culture-group does not determine the personal behavior, not even the personal behavior determines future personal behaviors, as long as it does not determines personality, since it is in a ‘different level’.

As Roy Malpass points out "cultural differences are trivial because they are at the wrong level of abstraction, and stand as ‘medium’ rather than ‘thing’ in relation to the objects of study. The readily observable differences among cultural groups are probably superficial, and represent little if any differences at the level of psychological process" (p. 31).

An ideological necessity for differences?

I hold the thesis that the concept of culture as an element that per se suffices to produce substantial differences among peoples, thus working as efficient factor for group formation, is an ideological construct (ideological in the sense that reality is contrived to support existent structures of power relations). Highly significant to this argument, are Tajfel & Turner’s words:

Support for this position is also provided by Stroebe & Insko(1989) who hold that "prejudice and stereotypes can be seen as part of an ideology of a group which, on one hand, buttresses group member’s beliefs in their own superiority, and on the other hand, justifies aggression and violence toward members of the outgroup" (page 15).They also show how "real threat increases ingroup solidarity, the awareness of own group ingroup identity, and the tightness of group boundaries." (Page 14) Further support is available in the theories that stress the relevance of interdependence as a trigger for in-group formation (Flippen et al., 1996).

It is obvious that conflict needs ‘differentiation’. If conflict can be so easily used with an ideological purpose, is because the ‘differentiation’ has been already ideologically contrived. Favorite excuses for differentiation throughout history have been mostly Religion (consider the use of Inquisition, both by the Kings of Spain in the end of the XVth Century, and by the King of England in the Process against Jeanne D’Arc) and, since the conception of la nation une et indivisible of the French Revolution, also Nationalism has played an important role in helping ideologists to create divisions that favor the status quo in the structures of power. Our agonizing XXth Century has also witnessed the horror ensuing from the ideological utilization of ethnic differentiations, another favorite excuse to contrive ideological divisions. Likewise, I tend to see, in the emphasis of cultural differences, an attempt to conserve current distributions of power in our modern capitalist society, distribution that, due to the actual globalization encompasses the whole world.

Many authors have already questioned the level in which culture impacts the individual personality and whether this impact is bi-directional in such a way that culture and personality somehow become an identical concept (Malpass, 1988; Matsumoto, 1996; Schwartz, 1992). Matsumoto (1996) is not wholly unaware of this distinction when he explains that we do not really perceive cultural differences, but just "differences in human behavior, in actions, thoughts, rituals, traditions, and the like". We never see culture itself , but just manifestations of culture, and because those manifestations are different "we infer that a cultural difference underlies these various behaviors and that because the culture is different the behaviors are different" (1996;14, my bolded. See also Rubin & Sander, 1994). But there is no way to support the accuracy of this inference (at least, this was the aim of this paper).

Of course, with this I am not saying that there are not cultural differences. What I am suggesting is that they "are probably superficial, and represent little if any differences at the level of psychological process" (Malpass, 1988; 31). Messick (1988) argues in the same direction, that cultural differences, at least the perceivable ones, are on the "we say house, they say maison; we drive on the right, they drive on the left" level (page 47). What this type of differences are able to engender is a greater difficulty in communication, but they are not capable per se to generate or worsen conflict. As Schwartz (1992) writes "differences may lead to conflict or complementarity" (page 432), they neither lead to conflict nor worsen it, unless ideologically misused.

On the one hand, I am suggesting that culture should be defined being aware of its ideological use: generate divisions. I am pleading for a definition of culture that keeps it out of reach of ideological attempts, for a definition that emphasizes the commonalties rather than differences. With striking cleverness Turner (1986) wrote: "… though, for most purposes, we humans may divide ourselves between Us and Them, or Ego and Alter, We and They share substance, and Ego and Alter mirror each other pretty well – Alter alters Ego not too much but tells Ego what both are!" (page 81).

It is not clear at all that cultural differences can be a variable influencing conflicts, unless it is used in a political-ideological way at the intergroup level, or as an scape-goat at the interpersonal level. Even if it was, the obstacles that arise on the way of striving to get a grasp of what those differences are, if they are culturally rooted, in which culture, in whose culture, seem nothing less than insurmountable, thus making useless the consideration of culture as a factor of conflict. Besides, culture can work as a veil that obscures the meaning of the real issues involved in the conflict, specially if it translates in stereotypical considerations, making necessary to dig "beneath antagonisms and stereotypes to get to the real issues involved" (Blake & Mouton, page 75).

On the other hand, I am pledging for a definition of culture closer to the individual personality and more respectful of his/her "flaws, hesitations, personal factors, incomplete, elliptical, context-dependent, situational factors", in the end, more respectful of the genuine novelty and creativeness able to emerge from the freedom of the "performance situation" (Turner, 1986). There are several authors who underline the importance of ‘individuating’ the parties in a conflict, at the interpersonal as well at the intergroup level (Rubin & Sander, 1991; Wilder, 1985). I see Schwartz’s (1992) view of culture as consisting of "all the personalities of the individuals constituting a society or subsociety, however bounded" (page 432), as very close to this pledge. I understand that, with his term ‘ideoverse’ to describe total human beings in full psychological concreteness, not abstract, generalized sociocultural entities, he is conveying a notion close to my idea of personalization of culture.

If in a first moment my proposal may appear as an eager call for the adoption of Kimmel’s (1994) fourth level of cultural awareness, now I am saying exactly the opposite: in some way each individual person is his/her own personal culture. If in the one hand I am advocating for a ‘minimization’, I am also calling for the most extreme of the maximizations: there are as many cultures as individual persons on the world. This is, perhaps, a reason why it is so difficult to grasp the notion of culture: it is impossible to get to know such a wide range of variations. More over if we consider that each variation is a whole, a ‘universe’ (to change Schwartz’s ‘ideoverse’) of endless richness and surprises.

To please the feeling of having my thought pigeonholed in Kimmel’s (1994) ‘minimization’ (if not because I really like it) I will finish, with some Victor Turner’s words, to somehow break the monotony:

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