Culture

Culture is something that everyone experiences but many of use don’t even realize that we have it. At least that was my experience early in life when I saw that other people had "cultures" that they came from and I just plain Canadian. In time I came to realize that culture is everywhere and it has an immense impact on us all.

In the fall of 1985 I moved to Montreal after having grown up in Vancouver and first came to see the culture that I had, at least he expectations and prejudices about my apparent culture from those around me. I live in the neighbourhood of Rosemont on the east side of Montreal, comprised mostly working and middle class francophone families in those days.

Upon my return to the west coast in the fall of 1986 I began to study culture through my work with Professor Anand Paranjpe, as I worked through my "Special Year" and then my MA and PhD studies with Anand and Jim Marcia looking at identity and acculturation I began to gain a better understanding of it. From 1990 onwards I have been a member of the International and Cross Cultural Psychology section of the Canadian Psychological Association.

In 1998 I first taught my course on Cultural Psychology as a special topic at Simon Fraser University psychology department. After moving to Victoria in 2000 to take a position at Camosun College I have continued to development my knowledge and understanding of culture in general and many cultures in particular. In 2004 I lead a field school of Camosun Psychology student in Santiago de Cuba where I learned a great deal about Cuban culture, music, dance, and Santeria. In 2008 I spent 3 months in southern Mexico to explore the historical legacy of the Mayan people, where we came to learn about acculturation in light of a flood of tourism to the region as well as some aspects of Mayan Medicine. In 2012 we travelled to Guatemala and got to see more of the Mayan life style in more traditional roles, but also undergoing the acculturative pressures of global farming, and mining as well a tourism.

In recent years I have been working on a collection of practices in the field of Cultural Psychology, drawing heavily from the works of Erik Erikson, Michael Cole, Richard Shweder, Carl Ratner, and more recently Jaan Valiner.

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