Ambiguity and Substantiality as Essential Nature of Culture

Redefinition of Culture from the Perspectives of "Cultural Psychology of Difference"

Abstract

When we study cultural phenomena, we will encounter an important theoretical difficulty. In this theoretical paper, we clarified the difficulty that both cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology have faced when they understand theoretically the relationship between individual and cultural group. The most critical point of the difficulty is the paradoxical nature of cultural group that it appears simultaneously both as ambiguous object of which the intension and extension cannot be defined clearly, and as rigid substance which have heavy influence to human development and our daily social life. Based on the viewpoint of "Cultural Psychology of Difference", we have shown the new theoretical way to understand the paradoxical nature of the cultural phenomena, and set up original method of analyzing them with our concept of“Expanded Mediational Structure”(EMS).