Prisoners of Paradigm

A final lecture with a last powerful message is the topic of this closing blog. So far in this series of blogs, the concept that culture has a flexible nature that spans across social contexts, time and the meaning it has to individuals has risen time and time again (Wong, Wang & Farmer, 2018). However, in this blog I suggest that in fact, we are prisoners to our culture. Humans, unconsciously, think and act under the influence of their dominant cultural paradigm. Our perception of reality and truth is constructed from birth as a result of our culture and therefore, what we believe is ethnocentric to say the least. Challenges to our cultural paradigm feel threatening and often confusing, resulting in the unconscious desire to protect our own paradigm and culture. We fundamentally believe other cultures are ‘wrong’ and look down on those not the same as ourselves.

Even when researching this, my point is furthered. Western society values the research of American psychologists, causing academia to be a colonised example of cultural differences (Prior, 2007). When researching in other cultures, specifically indigenous societies, it is westernised researchers who impose their own cultural understanding in order to make sense of a new culture (Humphrey, 2001). Universal theories have been proposed by these researchers, relying on biology to explain psychology, in turn stripping away the qualities which cause such drastic differences in human’s beliefs, truths and opinions (Le Grange, 2001). What is of further importance is the research that is out there to support this, or the lack of it. The research available to me, as a western student using western approved journals, is imposed by western standards. The “drive-by” research found by my searches and reported by researchers is often the view of white males who research a culture for less than a month and ignore or do not understand the cultural differences of many indigenous cultures. In my first blog, I posed the idea that there was a culture better than others which would one day become dominant. What I now know is that there is a dominance from the West in cultural research, where the west is the ‘right’ culture. But the money and resources which enable the West to do this does not necessarily mean that we are a more successful culture. It does not mean that what we report is the truth and it does not mean that the research is fact. It means that the West has the power to do what they are doing, but not necessarily rightly so. We are all prisoners of our own cultural paradigm and it is affecting everyone.

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References

Humphery, K. (2001). Dirty questions: Indigenous health and ‘Western research’. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 25(3), 197-202

Le Grange, L. (2001). Challenges for participatory action research and indigenous knowledge in Africa. Acta Academica, 33(3), 136-150.

Prior, D. (2007). Decolonising research: a shift toward reconciliation. Nursing Inquiry, 14(2), 162-168.

Wong, Y. J., Wang, S. Y., & Farmer, S. B. (2018). The Dynamic Paradigm of Ethnic Culture: Variations Across Context, Time, and Meaning. The Counselling Psychologist, 1, 1-27.