CULTURAL MEMORY
There has been a lengthy existed criticism based on scholarship devoted study of cultural variation in psychology. The devoted study has ascribed easily the perceived difference between different societies in essential notions based on culture while giving less attention to the historical forces that shape the disparities. Therefore, this paper places arguments on the conceptual frameworks of cultural and cross-cultural psychology that should necessitate analysis of primary geopolitical events and historical development bear on the lives of people. Specifically, the discussion is based on colonialism, an argument that has been less incorporated in psychology. Thus colonialism and its legacies exerted a more powerful influence on many populations across the world. Besides, arguments based on colonialism and its legacies call for the attention of the prominent ideological cornerstones, which includes race and culture, hence perceived as the central concepts in psychology as a world discipline. Colonialism was primarily engaged in two ways, that is, the study of colonial of the impacts of colonization on individuals and the considerations based on the effects of colonization on the discipline and practice of psychology in previously colonized countries. This paper also challenges psychologists to pay great attention to sociopolitical discourses and historical contexts in theorizing culture in various ways based on responsive complexity and fluidity of social lives.
The secret path constitutes three major problematic features that ought to be challenged. The secrete path, therefore, invokes sexual abuse as the principal reason for the colonial resistance. Individuals who are familiar with archival records and testimonies concerning the oral transmission that are related to residential schooling usually know that students were in constant disagreement with colonial masters, thus made them successfully ran away from schools and even burned down schools. The weird actions that were imposed by students were due to various reasons such as severe punishment, inadequate food, and denied the opportunity of meeting with their parents or guardians, among other reasons. Therefore, the secret path singularly emphasizes on the abuse of rights, thus enabling readers to be repulsed by the priest’s touching rather than the more extensive matrix based on the grievances of students.
The relationship existing between memory and culture emerged in many parts of the globe. It constituted key issues of interdisciplinary research that involves fields as diverse as history, art, literature, media studies, philosophy, and sociology, among others, hence bringing together social reviews, natural sciences, and humanities in a unique way. The crucial aspect of cultural memory notion is not only documented by rapid growth, but also by various recent trends that attempted to provide overviews of state of the art in the emerging fields and as well synthesize different research traditions. Anthologies based on theoretical texts like the collective memory reader usually testifies the need of bringing focus to the broad discussion and considering the theoretical and methodological standards of a promising and incoherent dispersed field, therefore, working on certain concepts aid in establishing frameworks for cultural memory studies.
According to Downie (2014), culture can be perceived in a three-dimension framework that comprises material (media & artifacts), social (social relations, institutions, people, etc.), and mental aspects. The three dimensions are usually involved in establishing cultural memories. Therefore, studies involving cultural memory are characterized by transcending boundaries. Besides, cultural memories play a vital role since it is formed by symbolic heritage embodied in rites, monuments, objects, texts, sacred scriptures, among other media that serve as mnemonic triggers. Families may remember their history or specific salient occasion since every individual possesses some collective memory. The memories may be based on facts or interpretations like a remembrance of the embassy bombing.
Currently, the biomedical model has become a cultural imperative, whereby its implications have been easily overlooked. There has been the development of Western medicine to subculture based on history, codes of conduct, methods, language, and concerns based on support from science. Science teachings concerning human populations are governed by biologic universals transcending cultural boundaries. Therefore, the method and language based on biology and somatically focused health care has established an extraordinary gulf between the general public and practitioners. There is a difference between biomedical categorization of human beings’ disruptions as a disease and the personal and social experience of a patient’s illness.
Cross-cultural circumstances usually magnify the discrepancies between views held by health care practitioners and patients. Downie (2014) reiterates further that the inability to recognize and deal with illness perceptive deviating from the biomedical trained practitioners may paralyze attempts based on the identification of problems and plans developed in solving them. Therefore, biomedicine must incorporate approaches that recognize and accounts for the individual perceptions and values not only in determining the nature of the patient’s difficulties but also describing solutions. Moreover, culture also influences how people might perceive illness or treatment. For instance, it affects how physicians may address aged patients. Individuals from various cultures believe that disease is the will of a higher power, hence may be more reluctant to receive health care.
Colonization has a significant influence on cultural memory. Colonization led to the diversion or rather the traditional ways of human life more so to the African states where almost all cultural practice was abandoned. Besides, colonization changed how memory is conveyed by the text and shaped how cultural memory is addressed in the secrete path, as discussed above. Moreover, cultural memory has enabled biomedical models to be culturally imperative, whereby the implications of biomedical have also been overlooked. The three-dimension framework of a culture, that is, material (media & artifacts), social (social relations, institutions, people, etc.), and mental aspects, also play a vital role in understanding the impact of colonization on cultural memory as discussed.