Handbook of Racial-Cultural Psychology and Counseling, Training and Practice
Chapter One
The Importance of Cultural Psychology
Theory for Multicultural Counselors
Paul Pedersen
The psychological study of culture has conventionally assumed that there was a
fixed state of mind whose observation was obscured by cultural distortions. The
underlying assumption is that there is a single universal definition of normal behavior
from the psychological perspective. A contrasting anthropological position
assumed that cultural differences were clues to divergent attitudes, values, or perspectives
that were different across cultures, based on culturally specific perspectives.
The anthropological perspective assumed that different groups or individuals
had somewhat different definitions of normal behavior resulting from their unique
cultural context. Anthropologists have tended to take a relativist position when
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