Cultural relativism-relative agreement

JournalojFamzly Therapy (1985) 7: 273-275

Cultural relativism-relative agreement Annie Lau” I am glad to have the opportunityto respond to Dr Hodes’ paper which I enjoyed reading. I felt our views wereconvergent rather than divergent, the differences due to points of emphasis rather than categorical disagreement. Dr Hodes appears to have mistakenly assumed I intended to classify families regardless of ethno-cultural context; in my discussion of the West Indian single-parentfamily I took pains to point out how the strong sense of kin beyond the immediatefamily group provided strengths and supports not usually found in white one-parent families. Also extended family groupings function quite differently depending on their ethnocultural context, because the prescriptive rules to do with systems of authority,continuityandinterdependencearedifferent.Thusthe ‘Indian nuclearfamily’ Dr Hodes describes, functionsby different rules from theEnglish nuclear family, regardlessof life cycle phase; for when the sons marry, the idea, and hence the expectation, is that the sons’ families will live with their parents. In Britain, Indianswho live ‘as nuclear families’ are boundby kinship loyalties deriving from the Indian extendedfamily structure, members of whom have expectationsof each otherfor mutual support and protection, thatmost Europeans would generally find excessive. The ‘Geordie’ extended family also functions by different rules and expectations from the Indian extended family; as a rule, the young married couple live with the daughter’s parents; authority is not located in the grandparents, and the hierarchichal rankingof birth order and sex in Indian families is not present to the same extent. Thevery definition of ‘family’ is a cultural construction. Our enquiry must be directed to the structural principles of the ethno-cultural groupwhich determine both family organization and functioning. Dr Hodes also referred to my discussion of transcultural interphases between therapists and client families. HereI was concerned merely to Received January 1985. * Child Guidance Clinic, Loxford Hall, Loxford Lane, Ilford, Essex IG1 2PL. 273 0163-4445/85/030273

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point out the points of tension that have to do with the different cultural worlds, and moral imperatives, of therapists and client families. Of course there are many other areas that determine therapist ‘fit’ and effectiveness; these include social class, age andsex differences, and the capacity for ‘emotional neutrality’ on the part of the therapist. An acting-out adolescent could stimulate a therapist’sown adolescent fantasies and lead him to identify with that family member, whatever his ethno-cultural origin. A therapist could have achieved a comfortable degree of ‘emotional neutrality’ in the course of a personalanalysis, but this does not necessarily make him neutral on a cultural level. For example, with regard to the Oedipal conflict, he must analyse both his own subjective oedipal conflict and the form taken by the oedipal conflict in the culture to which he belongs. He must be aware of the means his culture uses to inhibit oedipal manifestations in some ways while encouragingthem in others, and he must know the mannerin which the oedipal conflict is integrated with the totality of his culture (Devereux, 1980). I would agree with Dr Hodes that family ‘each differs with respect to its symbolic structure’. Eachfamily is indeed unique; each family strives to make sense and meaning of the different events in its life cycle, and its affective experiencesare registered in mythsand beliefs unique to itself. However, I would also stress that each family shares withother families from its ethno-cultural group, a cultural and religious tradition that organizes the perceptionof experience, gives shape and form to its myths and beliefs, and determines thelimits of appropriate behaviour. In other words there is a cultural patterning to the belief systems and symbolic structure of the family, also to the choice of communicative idiom or metaphor- illness construction for instance; depression among traditional Chinese of all social classes in Taiwan was found by Kleinman to be most commonly somatized (Kleinman, 1980). Thus, the culturally determined concept of family honour is highly relevant toanunderstanding of why theMediterannean family described in Dr Hodes’ paper found the eighteen-year-old daughter’s wishes to live separately from the family, quite unacceptable. The threat of violation and loss offamily honour was a culturalissue that neededto be engaged simultaneously with other, affective issues. The same emphasis on preservationof family honour orizzat (Ballard, 1982) leads to withdrawal of family protection in Pakistani families for memberswho offend. Dr Hodes also suggests that I deny the plasticity and variability of humanbehaviourthat is auniquecharacteristic of man.Culture

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represents the actualization‘of man’s basic biological potential for differentiation and individualization. Rules about culture and cultural behaviour refer to consistent processes of differentiation and individualization between groups, rather than to the end products which, as Dr Hodesrightly observes, show a vast phenomenological diversity. Further, families differ in the degree of flexibility with which cultural rules are applied.For the family therapist, familiarity with these cultural processes enables him to be more usefully engaged with the family. The following case illustrates an example of successful redirecting of an intervent ion. An Indian boy had spentsome time at an Observation and Assessment Centre away from his family, and thefield social worker and residential social worker had been working with the goal of eventually sending the boy home. This boy had been in a great deal of trouble prior to his admission to the Centre but was settling down. During the supervision session with me, the social workers reported that ina meeting with the boy’s father attempts tointerest him in what was best for the boy in the way of vocational choice seemedto fall flat. The father seemed to think the staff were indulging his errant son’s ‘selfish interests’. When I explored this furtherit emerged they had been talkingwith the father purely on the level of what was ‘best for the boy’- i.e. where his interests and skills seemed to lie. I suggested they try again, this time first to acknowledge withthe father what he previously had agreed to in a family therapy session- thatthe boy neededto work onbeinga fully contributing member of the family. He had demonstrated his commitment to that goal by attending school attheCentre in a satisfactory manner over the past three months. T o move on he now needed family support in enabling him to choose the right job. The social workers agreed to try the ‘family first’ line and subsequently reported surprise at how much more effective it was in involving the parentsinplans for the boy’s future.Herethe social workers’ intervention was redirected in order to reflect the culturally determined principle of the pre-eminenceof the family.

References BALLARD. R . , (1982) South Asian Families. In: R. H . Rapaport, M . P. Fogarty, and R. Rapaport (E&.), Families in Bniain. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. DEVEREUX. G., (1980) Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatly. Translated by B. Miller Gulati and G. Devereux. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. KLEINMAN, (1980) A., Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley. University of California Press.