Examining the interconnections between genes and culture is crucial for a more complete understanding of psychological processes. Genetic predispositions may predict different outcomes depending on one's cultural context, and culture may predict different outcomes depending on genetic predispositions - that is, genes and culture interact. Less is understood, however, about how genes and culture interact, or the psychological mechanisms through which gene-culture interactions occur. In this Element, Heewon Kwon and Joni Y. Sasaki review key findings and theories in gene-culture interaction research. They then go on to discuss current issues and future directions in gene-culture research that may illuminate the path toward an explanatory framework.
Originally published in 1992, this Asian-authored book presents a cultural description and interpretation of American high school adolescent life and ethos, based on anthropological fieldwork in a semi-rural school and its surrounding community in Oregon. It combines a realistic account of late 1980s adolescent culture and a confessional tale of the Asian ethnographer’s fieldwork experiences among American youngsters. The three main parts of the book focus on a portrayal of adolescent daily life, an interpretation of these young people’s cultural values and ideals, and a reflection on the ethnographer’s fieldwork experiences respectively. Part 1, Adolescent Life, includes five chapters presenting a brief version of a key informant life history, a profile of the school, a portrait of the community, a sketch of a typical school day, and adolescent life out of school. Divided into four chapters, Part 2, Adolescent Ethos, identifies three dimensions of adolescent ethos and analyzes dynamics between the dimensions and reflecting ideals. The last chapter of this part, ‘The Duality of Ideals’ discusses how adolescents negotiated themselves in a complicated web of various ideals pressing on them. Part 3, Doing Ethnography, reports procedural and personal aspects of doing ethnographic research in two separate chapters. The former discusses each step from locating a field to writing an ethnography; the latter describes personal feelings and scholarly thoughts which occurred during and after fieldwork. Adopting the most inconspicuous, unobtrusive form of research methods (she even dressed like them and acted with and among them), the ethnographer tried to listen to the young people’s voices, peek into their lives from outside, and look out at the world through their eyes.
This methods book will guide the reader through the process of conducting and producing an autoethnographic study through the understanding of self, other, and culture. Readers will be encouraged to follow hands-on, though not prescriptive, steps in data collection, analysis, and interpretation with self-reflective prewriting exercises and self-narrative writing exercises to produce their own autoethnographic work. Chang offers a variety of techniques for gathering data on the self—from diaries to culture grams to interviews with others—and shows how to transform this information into a study that looks for the connection with others present in a diverse world. She shows how the autoethnographic process promotes self-reflection, understanding of multicultural others, qualitative inquiry, and narrative writing. Samples of published autoethnographies provide exemplars for the novice researcher to follow.
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