Abstract

AGUIRRE BAZTAN, Silvio Ángel. Demarcación de la psicología cultural. Rev. Mal-Estar Subj. [online]. 2002, vol.2, n.1, pp. 92-117. ISSN 1518-6148.

Both in the acamic domain and in its attempts to explain human behaviour, psychology seems to have turned its back on culture, adopting an almost exclusively biological perspective. But it is fundamentally culture that gives meaning to human conduct. For this reason psychology should be considered from a dual dimension, incorporating both biology and culture; hence the need for an anthropological basis for psychology, via the construction of a cultural psychology. This study, after analysing cultural psychology from a historical perspective, from Wundt to the present day, analyses its theoretical construction, distinguishing between psychological anthropology and ethnopsychology. It seems clear that cultural psychology plays a decisive role in developmental psychology (cultures of fhe life cycle), educational psychology. (initiation, enculturation), social psychology (groups, organizations, institutions), and psychopathology (psychosomatics, symptoms, eating disorders, depression. etc.). The great problem with a biologically oriented psychology is that it reduces the study of a human, historical and symbolic conduct to a merely naturalistic endeavour.

Keywords : Cultural psychology; culture and personality; human behaviour.

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