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A Study of Personal and Cultural Values: American, Japanese, and Vietnamese (Culture, Mind and Society)
enlarge	Author: Roy D'Andrade Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Category: Book List Price: ~~$80.00~~ Buy New: $58.98 as of 9/9/2010 20:38 CDT details You Save: $21.02 (26%) New (11) Used (10) from $54.91 Seller: Pranga Bookstore Rating: 1 reviews Media: Hardcover Edition: First Edition Pages: 192 Number Of Items: 1 Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7 Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 ISBN: 0230602991 Dewey Decimal Number: 303.372 EAN: 9780230602991 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days



Editorial Reviews: Product Description This study analyzes American, Vietnamese, and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small differences in personal values between cultures. D’Andrade argues that people live in two distinct value worlds; the world of personal values and the world of institutionalized values. Assessing these value worlds, D’Andrade is able to explain the contrast between ethnography and survey data, while making vital commentary on American, Vietnamese, and Japanese culture. With insight and precision, this book contributes to the important debate that the Culture, Mind, and Society series has initiated.

Customer Reviews: Questionnaire-based cross-cultural study of values March 23, 2010 Blaine Connor (Pittsburgh, PA USA) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful Values are an important aspect of culture, but have not been the subject of sustained enquiry in the social sciences. Here D'Andrade takes up a quantitative-based study of values among "Americans ..., Vietnamese refugees in the United States ..., and native-born Japanese, primarily living in Japan" (D'Andrade 2008:22). D'Andrade acknowledges that using quantitative data from questionnaires to do a cross-cultural study of values has its limitations, but he argues that it has virtues too and our understanding of values is at such a stage where the contribution from such research would be important. His discussion of how his measures were constructed is also, as usual, thorough and forthright. Ditto his methods of analysis. Much can be learned from these two sections, and together they demonstrate the challenge of doing good quantitative research into cultural phenomenon. This is no simple ask-and-tally procedure. Although there are some surprising findings -- for example, the Japanese appeared more like the Americans than the Vietnamese on the individualism versus collectivism dimension -- for D'Andrade and others working on the project the greater surprise seems to be that the value differences were so small. This leads him to conclude -- and I may be missing something here -- that the "values" of the questionnaire were too general; what counts as satisfaction of that value for a given person in a given instance is more informative. I think that sums up the limitations of questionnaire research in a nutshell. It's why we do ethnography (if you're an anthropologist) -- although, as D'Andrade noted, that takes more time, money, resources, ... So what would the next step look like? One example is Adrie Kusserow's compelling American Individualisms (2004), which shows how different social groups may share the value of "individualism" but give different meanings to the word/concept, based on their (class) experiences. Note that these are all "Americans." Taking this one step further, if you will, Claudia Strauss shows how individuals learn, hold, and use different, even discordant, value-schemes to judge behavior in different contexts (see her chapter in Quinn's Finding Culture in Talk, 2005). I bought this book on the strength of the author's reputation, his fine The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (1995), and the book's title (I study Japan). I confess I was surprised at the approach he used here. I need more convincing on the subject of generalizing from small samples to large societies, for example. I would be more interested in seeing how values emerge in a more narrowly defined context, perhaps discussion of a specific moral dilemma (a la Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Naomi Quinn, or Claudia Strauss). In general, I find the approach of Strauss and Quinn more useful. All the same, I was glad to see this work published, because D'Andrade's honest scholarship really clarified for me the limitations of this type of research for this type of topic. And he has left us with some new questions. So if your library has a copy you might want to give this a look. Recommended Works: Kusserow: http://www.amazon.com/American-Individualisms-Rearing-Neighborhoods-Culture/dp/1403964807 Quinn: http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Culture-Talk-Collection-Methods/dp/1403969159/ref=cm_cr_wr_img Strauss and Quinn: http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Cultural-Publications-Psychological-Anthropology/dp/052159541X/ref=cm_cr_wr_img D'Andrade and Strauss: http://www.amazon.com/Motives-Cultural-Publications-Psychological-Anthropology/dp/0521412331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269315397&sr=1-1 D'Andrade: http://www.amazon.com/Development-Cognitive-Anthropology-Roy-DAndrade/dp/0521459761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269315308&sr=1-1

anthropology cognitive anthropology cultural psychology culture theory ethnology