Reactivation of Cultural Mediational1 Practices

• Published in: Psychology and developing societies 2001-03, Vol.13 (1), p.1-24
• Main Author: Hundeide, Karsten
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0971-3336; 0973-0761
• DOI: 10.1177/097133360101300101

This article is a theoretical statement on the significance of human meaning both in a context of adaptation to extreme situations, cultural change and to early intervention into caregiver-child relationships, and child rearing practices. In the first part of this article, I argue that human beings need a conceptual framework of meaning into which they can project their life so that it makes sense. These life-theories or -narratives are crucial for psychological adaptation and survival under difficult life conditions—something that makes suffering meaningful and worth enduring, a moral framework. This applies also to condi tion of cultural change, when the link towards established meaning resources are destroyed or inhibited—when there is loss of meaning-a situation of demoralisation may be the conse quence. In the second part of this article, I argue against the widespread tendency in psychology to detach psychological skills from content and meaning, as exemplified in the widespread tendency to develop cognitive intervention programmes directed towards children and their caregivers detached from a framework and context of cultural and social meaning. This argument is pursued further by requesting a new strategy of intervention where reactivation of relevant cultural practices may be the issue, not intervention in the sense of enforcing/ instructing universal skills, which are very often camouflaged as Western cultural practices that are taken for granted. In the last part of the article, I go more explicitly through some facilitative procedures and examples of how Feuerstein and Klein's criteria of mediation can be used, not in an instruc tive and imposive way, but to facilitate traditional cultural ways of communicating and relating between caregiver and child. Finally I go through different cultural modes of mediation that are more in line with the communicative practices which are common in traditional societies of the majority world