Something Greater: Culture, Family, and Community as Living Story

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to my son, Jamie, and my husband, Buddy, whose cooking and caregiving kept me nourished physically and spiritually. And to my two crones, Sara Barrios and Rose Marie Springer—though they hate being called crones, they are indeed women of great wisdom and guidance. These are the people who saw me through my daunting and interminable PhD experience. They never let me lose sight of the goal. I also thank my three congregations: The Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, Old First Presbyterian and Noe Valley Ministry for their on-going support and spiritual nurture. And, particularly, my small groups of gathered Christians who, over many years, listened to my moans and searchings for a life in the spirit. My thanks, as well, to Marlee LeDai, my writing coach and editor, who helped me move beyond the dryness of academic writing and go for the juice.

Introduction

Every day, Americans rub shoulders with the cultures of the world—on the sidewalks of their cities and, increasingly, in small-towns and rural areas. In these pluralistic times, as civil discourse becomes increasingly divisive, even coarsened, many long for a nation better at dealing with its diversity. On the other hand, Americans also wonder just how far the nation can stretch to embrace diversity and still maintain an identity. Is ethnic and religious diversity leading to the deterioration of a common American way of life? Do Americans still share a heritage of values, ethics and tradition?

If any one value characterizes American culture, it is that of the independent individual. Daily people in America operate as if the independent individual is a living, breathing reality. Indeed, the nation may have gone so far down the road of individual expression that individualism has become its only identifiable value. Parents, for instance, wonder how, in this individualistic society, they will raise children who value caring for others and living in community. Ethnic and faith communities, Americans of many varieties, are alike in their fear of losing their traditions. These fears are well-grounded: will the next generation still share in a meaningful heritage? Will they honor values of caring for others and contributing to community life?

A psychology of individualism undergirds this independent individual, pervading the culture and permeating childrearing practices. Independence and autonomy are the end goals of successful development, the hallmarks of maturity. To be a self-sufficient individual—owing nothing to nobody—is the American ideal. Enculturation into individualism begins at birth with nursing and sleeping arrangements as infants imbibe independence along with their mother’s milk. By the time a person reaches adolescence, the Self-as-Individual is as integral to being as the air a person breathes—and equally invisible. To be independent, the self must cast off the influence of early caregivers, cultural community and the out-moded traditions of previous generations. The grown-up self expects to stand ruggedly alone, acknowledging little need for relationships larger than the individual self.

Beneath the fragmentation and alienation that characterize modern and postmodern life lies a deep hunger for relationships of connectedness with others and with community. At a time when family and community life seem to be deteriorating, there is a palpable longing for a renewal of public life that builds on a heritage of shared values and meaning. To the extent that a psychology of individualism leads to a culture where it is every man for himself, it fails to address these basic human needs. While people may long to participate in meaningful relationships that enlarge the experience of the individual self, under the psychology of individualism, it is unclear how to do so without giving up one’s identity as an individual.

Human Beings as Makers of Meaning

Human beings are makers of meaning. They are builders of connections and creators of relationships. The species has a compelling need to create meaning larger than the individual self. The ability to try and make sense of the mystery, wonder and terror of life is a distinctly human activity. Unfortunately, America’s individualistic values work against this basic human need.

Meaning cannot be found in an isolated fact or an individual unit. Nor can personal identity be found alone and alienated within the individual self. The essence of meaning, the core of personal identity, can only be discovered through relationships with that which is other than and different from the individual self or the single unit. Meaning and identity are so deeply predicated on comparison with something other than oneself that Sampson states: [i]f there were no other, one would invent it.

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Both the infant and the developing child are construction sites for the making of meaning.² Every infant and child literally makes meaning of experiences by constructing an identity with the aid of caring others. An individual’s identity—that which is cherished as the one thing truly and uniquely personal, develops through relationships. A newborn first sees its identity reflected in the eyes of a caring other. From that moment on, in dynamic, ever-evolving relationships with a diversity of others, the construction of identity and meaning is a work in progress throughout life.

The making of meaning embraces the whole of a person’s being—emotional and cognitive, physiological and psychological. Each time new experiences challenge the meaning a person has made of life to-date, a period of disorientation follows while new meaning is made. Thus, from infancy through adulthood, life is underscored by a rhythm of organizing and re-organizing, separating and relating, as meaning is made in relationships of greater integrity and complexity.

It is not just what is within people but what takes place between them that sparks the ability to become fully human. From the initial caregiving relationship, meaningful, growth-enhancing relationships expand to include the larger relationship of family. Larger still, meaning is constructed in relationships of ever increasing diversity within a local community, an ethnic group or community of faith. Adults may find meaning and identity by joining a political party or other organization, in a successful career, or in raising a family. Participation in shared meaning and identity expands until it is as large as a nation or a culture, and as broad as the human species or the whole of creation. The most transcendent relationship of meaning imaginable is often labeled as the divine or God.

Culture as Shared Meaning and Values

If an individual is a maker of meaning writ small than culture is that meaning on the larger scale of shared meaning and values. Yet, in Western psychology, culture is often cast in narrow terms as inhibiting conformity and out-dated traditions. Or it is reduced to its more visible, material aspects—chopsticks and spaghetti, holidays and costumes, quaint rituals and out-of-date customs. It is then trivialized as exotic or old-fashioned—a dusty collection of rituals and traditions handed down from the past, far beneath the consideration of the modern, rational individual. As precious as grandmother’s bone china, cultural traditions are locked away in a box and placed high on a shelf to be brought down only for special occasions.

Lost in this stereotypic view of culture are its more hidden aspects—its shared communal values and lived meaning which connect an individual with the lives of others. Culture is how people communicate, how they create. For culture is an active form of meaning-making. It is dynamic and emerging. From the earliest of human times, culture has created interpretations of the world and tried to make sense of its mystery. Culture’s meaning has to be shared. It is also the means by which sharing occurs.

Intergenerational relationships are carriers of culture who bear its tools to the next generation. The developing child uses these cultural tools to construct identity and meaning in a living conversation between personal experience and the shared meaning of culture and community. Culture then not only connects people in community, it also nurtures each person’s development as an individual. Indeed the human mind only reaches its full potential through relationships that are culturally-shaped.

In America’s individualistic society, ethnic and faith communities may now provide the only remaining intergenerational space where a heritage of shared values is intentionally passed to future generations. Many of these communities share similar values of caring for others, commitment to living in community and raising children who value their heritage. Because their members know that children need a sense of connection and continuity to provide a foundation on which to build an identity, they are intentional in passing their heritage on to future generations. Here the birth of caring values in the parent-child relationship is supported. Here the essential role of shared meaning and values and a continuity of heritage are acknowledged for its ability to sustain life in community.

The values of individualism are so all pervasive in American culture, however, that it is next to impossible to escape their influence. Intergenerational communities, like ethnic and faith communities, therefore live under continual threat that their heritage of caring, communal values will be overwhelmed. Indeed many fear that mainstream individualism is so seductive that the next generation will no longer maintain their traditions or value a life lived in community. These communities therefore live in tension with the mainstream culture that surrounds them.

Fortunately, for the well-being of American society, intergenerational communities remain very much alive on the margins of the broader society. Here they provide a place for the creation of shared values and meaning that sustain the broader culture. Their heritage of caregiving, intergenerational values provides much needed balance that protects the vulnerable underbelly of Western society from being overwhelmed by its own individualism. For without a sense of shared heritage and communal values, no community or society can survive. If the values of individualism were to ever become completely dominant, Western society would crumble. There would be no renewal of generations, no remembrance of history, no cultural creativity.

The Myth of the Independent Individual

The psychology of individualism that undergirds American society is an illusion. In actuality, there is no such thing as a completely independent child. Such a child could not survive. Equally true, no adult exists completely independent of others. An old adage says people are born alone and die alone. In fact, it is not possible to be born into the world without at least one other person present. And it is the rare individual who dies without some human presence in the near vicinity. If people are not born alone and, for the most part, prefer to not live alone and rarely die alone, why does maturity have as its goal the solitary individual?

Though the angst of loneliness is often depicted as the primary human condition, the joy of relationship, even more than the anguish of isolation, is basic to human nature. The natural state of the human species is as likely to be, not its need to separate from others, but a need to be grounded in relationships of connection. Caring, and being cared for, along with a longing for community, lie closer to the heart of what it means to be human than the independent individual. Indeed the longing for relatedness is as foundational for human development as the desire to individuate.

When a psychology of individualism underlies society, culture and its intergenerational carriers are either invisible on the public screen or portrayed as inhibiting. Heritage is represented as frozen in time, out-of-date and irrelevant. Though child and caregiver, culture and psychology, are inextricably intertwined in a developmental relationship, rarely are the cultural origins of development explored. In most developmental theory, culture and development, the Self and an Other, only minimally interact.

If, as the saying goes, children need both roots and wings, then America’s children may have the wings to soar into the future but lack the roots to connect them to a heritage of meaning and values. Though mature development requires the ability to connect in relationships, to care for others, and to adapt the tools of culture in order to build viable human communities, Western psychology has directed its attention almost exclusively to within the individual. It has stripped human behavior of its interpersonal nature.³ The notion that an individual human being, as an isolated entity, can be adequately grasped, analyzed and understood as a self-contained reality separate from relationships with others and from context underlies developmental theory. If the social sciences had instead been constructed from a relational perspective, at this point in history, Western society might have arrived at an entirely different understanding of what it means to be human.

It is not so much that a psychology of individualism is wrong, as that it is a partial story. The independent individual is a truncated version of human potential and developmental reality. Instead of development focusing around individuation and separation, the ability to relate and care for others could be seen as a primary developmental goal. Dependency might be understood in more positive terms as the ability to depend on others in times of need. Or maturity could be measured by the ability to sustain thriving human communities. It could be seen as the ability to use the tools of one’s culture to build upon a culture’s heritage, changing and adapting it to meet the needs of current situations.

Many feminists and racial ethnic communities have long questioned whether a psychology of individualism is universal in scope. Can a psychology developed from an ethnocentric perspective and the viewpoint of one gender and a particular social class be applicable to every culture? Is this psychology adequate to guide American society into a pluralistic future? While the value of the independent individual is prominently displayed on the cultural map of modern America, other values—such as caregiving relationships and intergenerational heritage—are next-to-invisible.

The Self-as-Individual is, in fact, not universally shared but culturally-selected. Alternative ways of viewing and valuing the self, some much older than Western individualism, can be found in other cultures and times. Something Greater: Culture, Community and Caregiving as Living Story contrasts childrearing in early human communities and traditional Chinese communities to challenge a psychology of individualism as the dominant American paradigm. Support for caring, intergenerational heritage can also found in American society among many of its ethnic and faith communities. Along with current research on the infant-caregiver relationship, these contrasts reveal how caregiving relationships and communities of heritage play an essential role in human development. It is time to take culture down from its dusty shelf and lift it out of the box which has confined it. Its exotic wrappings removed, the story of intergenerational relationships as carriers of cultural heritage and community can now be told.

About the Author

At the age of 19, I crossed the American continent to find my identity as a live-in volunteer at Cameron House, a Presbyterian mission in San Francisco’s Chinatown. This marked what would become a life-long involvement with Chinese culture and the Chinese American experience. I have traveled and lived in many different places—from Peru to Norway, from Ghana to China, from Guyana and El Salvador to Nepal and Bhutan, from the island of Bermuda to a Tlingit Indian island off the coast of Alaska. Throughout these travels, the Chinatown community of immigrant and second-generation Chinese-Americans has been home base.

An educator in Chinatown’s first bilingual-bicultural childcare, I later established Yook Yau Ji Ga Childcare (Education and Love for Young Children in a Family Setting), the first-accredited Chinese bilingual-bicultural childcare in the nation. Here the staff of thirteen included Chinese immigrants and Americans of Chinese, African and European descent. Some were bilingual; others spoke only Cantonese or only English. Bi-weekly staff meetings presented an interesting challenge. For fifteen years, this staff worked together across linguistic and cultural differences. They enabled children to maintain their own language and ethnic identity while developing skills to function effectively in American culture.

Attracting talented and intelligent early childhood educators to stay in a field noted for its high turn-over was an even bigger challenge. I was struck by the respect and esteem accorded teachers in Chinese culture and the high value placed on intergenerational relationships. By contrast, caring for children has such low-status in America that friends and families of teachers would often ask when they planned to get real jobs.

Education involves the making of meaning, a concern ultimately of religious significance. Thus the development of the whole child includes spiritual development. As a Presbyterian lay pastor, it soon became apparent to me that the interdependent values of Chinese cultural heritage are, in many ways, closer to values held by early biblical communities than modern individualistic values.

My bicultural experiences inspired me to do an M.A. dissertation with Robert Bellah, author of Habits of the Heart, in which I compared educational values in Chinese culture with American values of individualism. This work, in turn, supplied the foundation for a Ph.D. in psycho-logy and religion from the Graduate Theological Union on Culture and Caregiving. As an interpreter of culture and caregiving, my perspective is informed by my career as an educator in bilingual/bicultural early-childhood, my biracial marriage and the parenting of a bicultural child.

Chapter Summaries

In conversations across differences, each person not only listens actively to others but also dares to speak honestly from the integrity of his or her own story. This includes claiming one’s own subjectivity, acknowledging the influence of life experience and cultural bias on perspective. In keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s adage that The Medium is the Message, each chapter in this book presents its own perspective as a unique story. At the same time, each chapter engages the other chapters in a lively conversation that transforms their relationships to each other. Knowing that culture influences perspective, these chapters are interspersed with autobiographical stories that explore some of the life experiences that inform my writing. Out of my own experiences with difference, I write of life lived on the borders between personal experience and the shared meaning of culture and community. For I too live on the borders between public and private life, between the longing to belong and maintaining my own unique identity as a self.

Chapter One: Maker of Maps, Teller of Tales

A psychology of individualism either overlooks culture or portrays it in terms of rigid, cookie-cutter conformity. Though current psychological theory excludes caregivers and intergenerational communities from its story, in actuality, their role in human development as carriers of culture is vital and essential. The first chapter explores culture as dynamic and evolving. In living communities, people use the tools of their culture to construct a world of shared meaning adapting it to their current needs. Though built on inherited tradition, communities and cultures change as they rub up against differences between generations and historical contexts.

Chapter Two: His-Story or Her-Story

To create historical contrast with the independent self, the second chapter explores the interdependent communal values of family households and tribes in early human communities. Here people embraced a communal identity that included the sacred, ancestors and kin, the land—indeed all creation. Here family relationships in kinship groups formed the center of society. Households served as the social, economic and religious axis of community life, affording caregivers a sphere of influence. Gradually, rising urbanization and a consolidation of power among the elite led to increasing separation between the public and private spheres of community life. The influence of households diminished and gender roles rigidified. Male interests dominated the public sphere while caregiving and family were confined to women in the private sphere. As the oral traditions of households came to be written down, the past was interpreted through a patriarchal lens of urbanized male elites. His-story excluded Her-story. While Christianity represented a return to caring community, in time, European culture moved away from those values toward individualism. Ultimately, individualism found its psychological articulation in the developmental theory of Freud and others at the turn of the 20th century.

Chapter Three: The Child Stands Alone

The third chapter moves to the shores of America to explore the impact of an immigrant experience with its intergenerational discontinuity on the emerging nation’s values. The first European settlers on the shores of the New World came expecting the lives of their children to be substantially unchanged from that of previous generations. Life on the new continent, however, rapidly turned these assumptions upside down. Children became the teachers of parents. Parental authority deteriorated as public schools took over the role of preparing children for entry into community life. As children became increasingly age-graded and peer-oriented in the 20th century, generational discontinuity became the American norm. When a popularized version of Freudian psychology met with the science and technology of modernism, a parent’s life experience became less important than the knowledge of experts. Free to establish individual identities, children learned to look to peers, media and popular culture as their authorities.

Chapter Four: A World of Relationships

Possibly no other culture stands in such great contrast to the American culture as the Chinese. The fourth chapter explores alternatives to modern American values through a contrast with mid-20th century Chinese childrearing. While the independent individual is highly valued in America, Chinese culture continues, as it has for centuries, to raise its children to value parent-child relationships and to understand personal identity in relation to the family. Based on philosophical traditions that extend for generations back in time, Chinese have chosen to focus on the family as the social structure deemed most capable of nurturing human, social development.

Chapter Five: Called into Being

Having explored the Self-as-Individual in historical and cross-cultural contrast, the fifth chapter looks at alternative developmental models. Until recently, the subtle, nonverbal changes of the infant’s emerging identity slipped under the scientific radar. Biased toward words and concepts that can be documented, what scientists could not measure was assumed either non-existent or deemed of little interest. Recent research, however, challenges Freud’s convictions about development as a process internal to the individual. Instead science is uncovering an interpersonal and cultural self similar to the sociocultural psychology of Freud’s Russian contemporaries, M. M. Bakhtin and L. S. Vygotsky. In this developmental theory, each child constructs an identity using cultural tools passed on by intergenerational relationships. As a result, no part of the psyche is so private it has not been shaped by cultural forces. Even thinking is a culturally-constructed process.

Chapter Six: Culture, Community and Faith as Living Story

Where a psychology of individualism has ignored the relational aspects of meaning-making, on the margins of American society, ethnic and faith communities continue to sustain a heritage of values and shared meaning. This includes caring for others, commitment to living in community, and raising children to value their heritage. Though often represented as unchanging, this heritage is dynamic and evolving, interpreted anew in each generation where it is re-created as living story before being passed to the next generation. The vital stories of these intergenerational communities speak from the cultural margins. When ethnic and faith communities affirm their values as counter-cultural, they raise an alternative voice that brings balance to mainstream individualism.

In Conclusion: Conversations across Cultures, Dialogues across Differences

Focused around individual units, a psychology of individualism lacks a language of relationships to converse across differences. The Western approach to communication, with its emphasis on reasoned arguments, tends to polarize conversations into either/or extremes. Fortunately, in the private sphere of American life, caregivers keep the embodied language of caring empathy and relationships alive. Their experiences challenge the notion that the individual human being, as an isolated entity, can ever be adequately grasped, analyzed and understood. When the untold stories of caregivers and intergenerational heritage are brought into public discourse, belonging to a community and honoring its heritage are no longer set in opposition to maintaining an identity as an individual. Then a fuller, more inclusive American story can be told—one that speaks to the longing of many Americans for meaningful relationships and connectedness in community.

1. Sampson, Celebrating the Other,

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2. It is not so much that a person makes meaning as if meaning were a noun or an object. Meaning is less an interpretation of experience after-the-fact than it is the act of experiencing in process. Or, as Kegan says meaning is not about the doing which a human does but about the doing which a human is. Kegan, The Evolving Self,

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3. Conventional wisdom tells us that we can never understand people’s real nature unless we first isolate them from their ongoing relationships with others and study them as though they were like objects in Whitehead’s glass-enclosed museum case, exhibited their own pure and essential form. The other can only be reintroduced once the essence of human nature in its pure and isolated form is discovered. Sampson, Celebrating the Other,

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Maker of Maps, Teller of Tales

Culture as Map and Story

Everyone, women and men, coming into the world inherits from their parents a piece of the song of their totemic Ancestors. . . . The pattern of inherited songs is literally a map . . . necessary to find one’s way in any part of the country. . . . Any person who knows and remembers the song can never lose their way, however far from home they may be. — Giuseppe Mantovani, Exploring Borders

This is the crucial question: is story telling us about a world out there objectively present before and apart from any story concerning it, or does story create world so that we live as human beings in, and only in layers upon layers of interwoven story? — John Dominic Crossan, Dark Interval

An infant is born, squalling into the world, without any guidebook to explain the rules of the universe. Those first few moments of life come without maps to point the way or stories to interpret life’s meaning. Everything about what it means to be human is yet to be discovered. A newborn does not yet know where its own body ends and its parent’s begins. While adults take the order of their lives for granted, infants must map every rule of social existence and physical survival. They must learn that crying and coos will get basic needs met, that people like smiles, that adults like to sleep at night.

If adults had to re-experience the world of an infant, the sense of lurking chaos would be overwhelming. Indeed psychological theories are built on the understanding that memories of childhood chaos are powerfully embedded in the unconscious, with the result that adults engage in a constant struggle against a return to this state of primal confusion.

Fortunately, the infant is a born map-maker. Gifted with the ability to organize, the developing child daily weaves the myriad of sensory impressions flooding awareness into meaningful patterns of a unified identity. This personal identity, in turn, enables a child to participate in relationships by creating shared meaning with others, and within communities.

Luckily, this discovery is not made alone. Adults have already mapped their world. They call that map culture. Human beings are makers of maps and tellers of tales. Culture creates a map showing how a community understands reality and infuses that map with meaning. Every culture unfolds a narrative about its traditions and past events. Every culture tells a story about its values, its intentions for the present, and its dreams for the future. This story orients its members to a particular network of shared meaning and teaches them what is decent, what is worth wishing for, what dignity is.

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Initially, a culture’s maps and stories are embodied in the infant-caregiver relationship. Later they are transmitted through intergenerational relationships in the broader community. Eventually, they are communicated through formal education and other communal institutions. Without these maps and stories, or, to use Geertz’ term—these webs of significance—to bind members of a community together, people would not be able to understand or communicate with one another. Ways of being in relationship and living in community would need to be completely reinvented with each new generation.

Culture’s maps and stories are far from passive, however. Some are more privileged than others. Every society privileges certain aspects of reality at the expense of others.² Once a person is enculturated into a particular community’s network of shared meaning that influence becomes next-to-invisible. Continually reinforced, for the most part unconsciously, culture not only validates, it also prohibits. This occurs not only in what is said but in what is not said or in what is labeled taboo.

Unaware of culture’s influence, individual members of a community become increasingly loyal to their particular cultural canon. They assume their way is the only natural way to be. Often, things right in front of a person’s eyes or integral to that person’s experience cannot be found on the map of their culture. Or, as in the days of Columbus, the map may affix certain areas with misleading or demeaning labels that send a clear message: Beware! Do not enter. Taboo. There be dragons here!

In the opening of A Guide for the Perplexed, E. F. Schumacher describes how he consulted a map of Leningrad during a visit to the U.S.S.R. in an effort to orient himself. Several large churches, clearly visible in front of him, were nowhere to be found on the map in his hands.

When asked, his interpreter explained We don’t show churches on our maps.

Schumacher pointed to one church clearly marked on the map.

Oh, the interpreter responded, That is a museum. . . . It is only ‘living churches we don’t show.

It then occurred to me, wrote Schumacher, that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes.³ He began to realize that the maps of life and knowledge he received at school and university not only failed to show living churches, things he could readily see or know from his own life experience—they also failed to show large portions of theory, ideas and lived experience. In fact, Schumacher declared that on the maps he received from his community heritage, there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most care about, and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life.⁴ He goes on to observe that not surprisingly, the more thoroughly acquainted we became with the details of the map, the more we absorbed what it showed and got used to the absence of the things it did not show, the more perplexed, unhappy, and cynical we became.

Border Crossings

The realm of culture has no internal territory: it is entirely distributed along the boundaries. . . . Abstracted from boundaries it loses its soil, it becomes empty, arrogant, it degenerates and dies. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Only when we encounter an other culture do we recognize the existence of our own culture as distinct; prior to that, we simply assume that our way of life and our interpretative horizon are universal. Not until I am exposed to another culture do I recognize myself as a cultural being, that is, as someone who has a particular way