From Gist of a Wink to Structural Equivalence of Meaning: Towards a Cross-Cultural Psychology of the Collective Remembering of World History

Abstract

Gibson and Noret’s (2010 [this issue]) critique of Paez et al.’s (2008) article on “remembering” World War II and willingness to fight applies social constructionist epistemologies based on hermeneutics to large-scale cross-cultural research. In criticizing our operationalization of historical experience, they privilege micro-analysis of discursive features that cannot be applied equally to different cultures; with regards to remembering, they identify the context-specific evocation of a particular aspect of collective remembering with collective memory in general. Their criticism of the wording of the central question on willingness to fight for one’s country is misplaced because this item comes from country-level data from the World Values Survey. Our work, involving 3,322 participants from 22 societies with at least 14 different majority languages, provides analysis of a general phenomenon and cannot be expected to incorporate micro-analysis of local discursive features. Cross-cultural psychology has advanced into a position of international prominence by using quantitative measures to construct nomological or associational networks that create complementary (and alternative) conceptions of meaning to the “thick descriptions” of ethnography favored by cultural anthropology. A division of labor with respect to these fields and across projects is recommended.