Culture and Cognitive Theory: Toward a Reformulation

In a provocative and important recent article Anthony Marsella (1998) makes an eloquent plea for the forging of a new metadiscipline of psychology that he labels global-community psychology. Marsella argues that we need a radical rethinking of the fundamental premises of psychology, rooted as they are in Western cultural traditions. Features of an emergent global-community psychology include an emphasis on multicultural and multidisciplinary approaches to human behavior that draw attention to the importance of context and meaning in human lives. Marsella's call for a global-community psychology reflects, in part, a growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of cultural factors in a diver-sity of psychological domains such as cognition, emotion, social behavior, and psychopathology. The relationship between culture and cognition, for example, has been explored in some detail by both psychologists (e.g., Semin & Zweir, 1997; Serpell & Boykin, 1994), and anthropologists (e.g., Bloch, 1998; D'Andrade, 1995). Bartlett's (1932) seminal work on the nature of human memory demon-strated the ways in which cultural knowledge, embodied in schemas, can affect the pattern and process of memory reconstruction. More contemporary research attests to the way cultural factors can impinge on various aspects of cognition, including memory and reasoning (D'Andrade, 1995), attribution style (Morris &amp