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Culture, Emotion and the Normative Structure of Reality

University of Alberta, cor{at}ualberta.ca

Paul Voestermans

Radboud University, p.voestermans{at}psych.ru.nl

A central concern for a psychology of culture is the question of how people come to commit themselves to ‘shared’ forms of understanding. Although the ‘shared’ or social nature of human understanding has received ample attention in different forms of cultural psychology, what is lacking is an account of the normative ‘force’ or compellingness of cultural forms. We argue that both phenomenology and social constructionism have failed to acknowledge the inherently normative dimension of social and cultural life. For an alternative grounding of cultural psychology we turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty. We show that at the end of his life Merleau-Ponty was working on a theory of meaning that acknowledges the normative dimension of our affective engagements in the world as well as the affective dimension of our normative engagements. We argue that this theory may be a powerful alternative for a social constructionist approach to culture.

Key Words: belief • cultural psychology • emotions • expression • language • Merleau-Ponty • normative structure • perceptual faith • phenomenology • social constructionism

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 15, No. 4, 449-473 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354305054747


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