CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY (PY2046)

Human beings are cultural beings. We cannot understand human nature without understanding its cultural fabric. We cannot understand ourselves and our being in the world without understanding this world as a cultural world, in fact, as consisting of multiple cultural worlds in which we live at the same time. In this course, we inquire why the cultural dimension is crucial for human psychology. To this purpose, we explore a number of cultural worlds, Western and non-Western. We also investigate various psychological functions such as thinking and consciousness, remembering and memory, and self-construction and identity. And we look at different cultural sign and symbol systems such as language, art, literature, and film. In this way, the course also offers the opportunity to think about our own cultural existence and the way we view ourselves and others.