Precursors of Cross-Cultural Psychology and the Context of Culture

Abstract

I begin my remarks by making a few biographical comments on some major parts of my career orientation. My mentors at the State University of Iowa, between 1943 and 1947 (Lindquist, Bergman, Knott, Wendell Johnson, Robert Sears, Kenneth Spence and Kurt Lewin), provided me with solid theoretical, methodological and content knowledge about the science of psychology. But culture was not in the psychological vocabulary at that time, much less the term cross-cultural psychology. In Mexico, a mestizo culture, you could hardly avoid the term. For example, an early Mexican scholar, Ezequiel Chavez (1901) , wrote an essay on our national character. Upon my return from Iowa in 1948, as Head of the Department of Psychology of Mexico City College, I organized a course with the title “The Psychology of the Mexican People”. The bibliography included materials from Mexican philosophers and poets as well as European and American anthropologists and sociologists.

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