Handbook of Cultural Psychology [ハードカバー]

This volume is a wonderful introduction to the interactions of culture and individual thinking, mind, and self. It is highly authoritative and includes many of the great scholars of the field, not least the two editors. It provides a wonderful and readable introduction, summary and overview of an important and often neglected area.
My favorite chapter is Scott Atran's on religion, which is a really brilliant tour-de-force. Some of it is controversial, which makes it all the more exciting. One will see much more on this in the future. Other noteworthy chapters include Paul Rozin's on food, Robert Sternberg on intelligence (possibly the best short recent review on that extremely important subject), Medin et al on categories, Hatfield et al on love, and of course the editors' own chapters, on self and on method respectively. These chapters are only a selection of the superior work herein.
As a sometimes bemused watcher of this field for over 50 years now, I do have some comments. There is a general tendency among cultural psychologists to equate culture with particular language groups, as in "Japanese culture" and "Chinese culture," or particular linguistic-geographic groups, as in "(Anglo-)American culture." This neglects the ways that culture--i.e. socially learned ideas and behaviors--often cuts across language. Religion is the clearest case; a Catholic American woman shares many of her most profound beliefs, experiences, and emotions with Catholic women in the Philippines and Italy but NOT with her atheist and Protestant neighbors and coworkers in America. A Chinese physicist shares a great deal of his knowledge and even his very selfhood with American and Russian physicists but not with Chinese farmers or fishers. Popular culture also cuts across cultures. In past years I enjoyed watching my kids interact with other kids in remote lands, talking about movies and music about which I knew absolutely nothing. Much of my kids' deepest and most intensely felt cultural experience was totally shared with kids in Europe and Asia but not shared at all with Dad. It is such things that weave the world into a single cultural and human fabric, and prevent it from breaking down into the extremely isolated, closed, homogenous little cells that earlier generations of cultural anthropologists wrongly believed were created by culture.
Much of the book at hand concerns the contrast of the "individualist" west (especially "America," i.e. the white Anglo United States and perhaps Canada) with the "collectivist" or "interindividual" world of east Asia and other (vaguely defined) areas. Some chapters talk of little else. Can we use a division that makes no distinction between Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Philippine cultures? It does hold up a mirror to the west, but does it do more? The more incisive authors herein, such as Kitayama, admit problems; Kitayama notes that Hokkaido Japanese are quite individualistic (see p. 159; they had a frontier experience in the 19th century, as Americans did, and it shaped them accordingly). I have shown elsewhere that Chinese fisherfolk are highly individualist too. Conversely, many Anglo-Americans are notoriously abject conformists. I expect one major trend in cultural psychology over the next few years will be to look at distribution and variability of traits within cultures.
The balance between cultural difference and common humanity remains under study. One neglected area for research is literature, specifically the ease with which great literature transcends cultural boundaries. The world of Prince Genji is as alien to modern Americans as Shakespeare's world is to modern Japanese, but that does not stop us all from sharing "The Tale of Genji" and Shakespeare's plays with mutual delight and understanding. The great 18th-century Chinese novel "The Story of the Stone" is so true to deep human lifeways that I can never help reading my friends into it--I identify all the main characters with people I know.
Cultures, in the end, are just different ways of being human.

the works and theories of Prof. KITAYAMA are well known for many researchers of human sciences and especially in cross-culture psychology. In this book I found many interesting topics and new approaches to deal with interculturalism: Culture and Social Identity, Culture and Motivation: What Motivates People to Act in the Ways That They Do?, Cultural Psychology of Emotion.

This book is well-written and covers a broad number of topics relevant to cross-cultural psychological research. I've found the book a useful reference/guide to my own cross-cultural work in industrial/organizational psychology. I particularly like the chapter on 'Culture and Motivation' written by Steve Heine.