Essentializing the binary self: individualism and collectivism in cultural neuroscience
- Within the emerging field of cultural neuroscience (CN) one branch of research focuses on the neural underpinnings of “individualistic/Western” vs. “collectivistic/Eastern” self-views. These studies uncritically adopt essentialist assumptions from classic cross-cultural research, mainly following the tradition of Markus and Kitayama (1991), into the domain of functional neuroimaging. In this perspective article we analyze recent publications and conference proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (2012) and problematize the essentialist and simplistic understanding of “culture” in these studies. Further, we argue against the binary structure of the drawn “cultural” comparisons and their underlying Eurocentrism. Finally we scrutinize whether valuations within the constructed binarities bear the risk of constructing and reproducing a postcolonial, orientalist argumentation pattern.
| Author: | Marina Martinez Mateo, Maurice Cabanis, Julian Stenmanns, Sören Krach |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-305865 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00289 |
| ISSN: | 1662-5161 |
| Pubmed Id: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23801954 |
| Parent Title (English): | Frontiers in human neuroscience |
| Publisher: | Frontiers Research Foundation |
| Place of publication: | Lausanne |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2013/06/21 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2013/06/21 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2013/06/28 |
| Tag: | binarity; cultural neuroscience; individualism-collectivism; postcolonial studies; self-views |
| Volume: | 7 |
| Issue: | 289 |
| Page Number: | 4 |
| Note: | Copyright © 2013 Martínez Mateo, Cabanis, Stenmanns and Krach. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 347476201 |
| Institutes: | Gesellschaftswissenschaften / Gesellschaftswissenschaften |
| Geowissenschaften / Geographie / Geographie | |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung 3.0 |
