Slipping Away. Grief: Universal + Culturally Defined

"It seems reasonable to expect that the cross-cultural study of grief would have been a good subject for the emerging field of cross-cultural psychology because it is a shared experience among peoples. It also seems reasonable to expect that it would be a subject in the very old field of psychology of religion, because a part of the rituals and beliefs of the major religious traditions concern transcending death (see Chidester, 1990). Neither expectation turns out to be realized."



"Grief is understood to be universal, but grief has “variations” in different cultures just as, it seems, in a musical score there can be variations on a melody. “Death and grief, though they are universal, . . . occur within a social milieu, and deeply embedded within each person’s reality” (Irish, Lundquist, & Nelsen, p. 187), that is, the universal is only experienced within culturally defined reality."

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Klass, D. (1999). Developing a Cross-Cultural Model of Grief: The State of the Field. OMEGA, 39(3), 153-178.

Spaceflight and the Culture Assimilator

As spaceflights became more international and crews more multicultural, cultural awareness and sensitivity became one of the skills required for astronauts. Finding the right balance is crucial since overlooking cross-culturality might lead to cultural insensitivity and exaggerating it might promote stereotyping.
An approach to cross-cultural training (used in astronauts' training) is the so-called culture assimilator which consists of 100 to 200 scenarios where people from two cultures interact. Each scenario is followed by several explanations of why the member of the "other" culture acted in a specific way. The learner selects one explanation and then gets feedback for the chosen explanation. Trainees, after a while, start selecting explanations of the others' behaviour that are closer to the others' culture. In other words, the trainees' attributions become more specific, more complex, and less ethnocentric (Draguns & Harrison, 2011).

 

- Draguns, J. G. & Harrison, A. A. (2011) Spaceflight and Cross-Cultural Psychology. Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective; edited by Vakoch, D. A., 177-194
- Space age fashion à la Pierre Cardin, photograph via