β Scribed by Anne Maass
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Cultures differ on a seemingly infinite number of dimensions, including language, cultural habits, value systems, collective beliefs, cultural heritage, and shared history. The central argument of Cohen and Leung's article on The hard embodiment of culture is that cultures also differ systematically with respect to the body comportments or postures they impose or encourage and that this will, in turn, affect the way people feel and think. Thus, a key assumption of the article is that ''culture is embodied in the way people walk, sit, stand, eat, wash, breathe, and otherwise comport their bodies as they go through daily life''. Although this prediction may sound familiar to people acquainted with cross-cultural work on nonverbal behavior, this is, in my view, an important, currently under-researched, aspect of embodiment. The main argument of the authors is that such culture-specific forms of embodiment will affect complex representations and that they will do so through two distinct routes: pre-wired versus totem embodiments. The most innovative aspect of this line of research is that culture is shown to emphasize the embodied aspect of cognition by making specific links between physical comportment and abstract concepts more accessible (pre-wired embodiment) or by creating them from zero (totem embodiment). This shows the power of culture not only in facilitating specific cognitive processes and specific behaviors, but also in promoting and creating the relation between the two. I will briefly comment each of these points, by establishing links with previous areas of research, identifying open problems, and delineating possible future developments.
The idea that cultures encourage different physical behaviors (body posture, orientation, gaze, distance) is by no means new to psychological research, but it gains new importance in the context of embodiment research. The question then arises of how cultures impose or encourage such comportments. Whereas Cohen and Leung's article makes only vague references to ''practices, affordances, artefacts, rituals, models, schemas, if-then rules'', I believe that there are at least two lines of research, namely the psychology of nonverbal behaviors and environmental psychology, that may help identify ways in which the cultural transmission of habitual embodiments occurs. Cultures may encourage specific comportments or postures either by establishing implicit or explicit rules or by creating environmental conditions that constrain or channel behavior in certain ways. As far as the former process is concerned, the long tradition of research on cultural differences in nonverbal behaviors provides impressive evidence that different cultures do indeed provide specific rules, generally referred to as cultural display rules, on how and when to display specific postures or facial expressions, how to manage eye gaze, how to orient the body, what distance to keep from others, and when to engage in touch (e.g., Matsumoto, 2006;Remland, Jones, & Brinkman, 1995). These rules tend to be acquired early during socialization and are remarkably pervasive, as in the case of interpersonal distance rules that are consensually shared within a given
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