The Fusion of Cultural Horizons

A more slippery term than "culture" is hard to imagine. One need not venture far into theories of culture to see the ways in which the use of this term has been vast, imprecise and inconsistent. Given such disparities and ambiguity, meaningfully applying the notions of culture to the study and assessment of human behavior becomes almost too complicated. Problems posed by the various uses of the term "culture" have constituted a serious impediment to generating empirical knowledge and aligning cultural psychology with the study of developmental psychopathology. Cultural psychologists have tended to view culture as not only interpretable but meaningfully operational with regard to human behavior through empirical means. The papers in this special issue exemplify one way of thinking about the relationship between culture and science. They apply knowledge about cultural variation to research findings on children's mental disorders. The purpose of the essays is to look for the common horizon connecting cultures, to recognize that each culture sets its own linguistical limits on experience; that rates of disorders based upon diagnostic systems, when viewed through a cultural lens, automatically take into account that a diagnosis is an interpretation and interpretations are meaning-based, thus language-based; and, finally, that language can close the distance between different cultures or it can perpetually restrict our vision.