Preschool in Three Cultures: A Method for Martial Arts Studies
/“They don’t want to know.”
The ancient Greek story, “Casandra” is about a woman laden with the curse to see the (dark) future, and yet also cursed to have no one believe her. Perhaps we should extend this myth for modern times. Like the situation where people have access to knowledge but simply do not want to look at it? Or the curse of being surrounded by people with blindspots who simply cannot see what you see?
The notion of cognitive bias is spreading mostly as a tool for seeing other people’s limitations, rather than our own.
Marshall McLuhan popularized the notion of culture shock in the 1970s. It has two parts 1) recognizing that behavior in another culture is inexplicable or incomprehensible (or at least extremely different) 2) seeing your own culture for the first time. These two experiences were once the primary drivers of anthropology.
Preschool in Three Cultures is the name of a book and a video study that was done in 1989. It remains the best cross-cultural study ever done. Why? Because no one has bothered to repeat it or extend it. It is fantastic because it does both jobs. It reveals insights into how cultures are different and reveals what we could not previously see about ourselves.
The authors invented a method called: Video Cued Multivocal Ethnography. This allowed them to compare cultures in a systematic way, self-referential within each culture, and between cultures. Brilliant. Now, of course, almost nobody cares about preschool. The disaster of academia is that the study itself is viewed, even by its authors, as being about preschool. This is absurd. The book is barely even about education. It is about cultural blindspots and how to get around them.
Why hasn’t it been replicated for other areas? For example, we could use the same method to study “motherhood,” or “what is a fish,” or “dreaming,” or chairs, dinner, flexibility, the shoulder, farming.” The subject does not even have to be a coherent category in all three+ cultures for it to work.
My guess is that it has not been replicated because people unconsciously resist knowing anything about their unconscious mind. And culture itself looking inwards, is always about the unconscious mind.
Preschool in Three Cultures had a big influence on both of my books. My first book attempted to look at Chinese martial arts from three points of view: theater, martial skills, and religion. My second book uses my experience of dance and religion in India, America, and China to guide my excavations into the origins of Tai Chi and Baguazhang.
The field of Cultural Psychology was also a big influence on my books. Richard Shweder is the man responsible for the field. It has the same problem. People don’t want to know. Bringing up his work in a university context is the kind of thing that gets you expelled or shunned.
I have a friend who invented a career for herself studying corruption in different cultures. The UN or some other granting organization would fund her to study corruption in a particular country. She would collect data and interviews for a couple of years and then move on to another country. After a decade she was the world expert on corruption. But she quit. Why? Because everyone was sort-of-curious about how corruption works in other countries but had zero (negative) interest in knowing how corruption works in their own country.
Given the current ubiquity of video capturing cellphones, these kinds of studies should be exploding. But I fear the opposite. Cellphones have stolen peoples attention to such an extent in the last two years that they can now travel the world without experiencing other cultures. Pity.
