This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

In the last fifteen years, psychologists have rediscovered culture and its influence on emotion, thought, and self. Many researchers have come to the conclusion that the world's cultures can be ranked according to the degree to which they are individualist or collectivist, with Western cultures falling at the individualist end and non-Western cultures at the collectivist end. These scholars argue that while individualist cultures give rise to "independent" selves, leading Westerners to think and act autonomously, collectivist cultures foster "interdependent" selves, leading non-Westerners, embedded in social-relationships, to think and act relationally. Culture and Identity in a Muslim Society presents an alternative to the individualist- collectivist approach to identity. Unlike most psychological and anthropological studies of culture and self, Gary Gregg's work directly investigates individuals, using "study of lives"-style interviews with young adults living in villages and small towns in southern Morocco. Analyzing these young adults' life-narratives, Gregg builds a theory of culture and identity that differs from prevailing psychological and anthropological models in important respects. In contrast to modernist theories of identity as unified, the life-narratives show individuals to articulate a small set of shifting identities. In contrast to post-modern theories that claim people have a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of fluid identities, the narratives show that the identities are integrated by repeated use of culturally-specific self-symbols, metaphors, and story-plots. Most importantly, the life-narratives show these young Moroccans' self-representations to be pervasively shaped by the volatile cultural struggle between Western-style "modernity" and authentic Muslim "tradition." Offering a new approach to the study of identity, the volume will be of interest to cross-cultural psychologists, anthropologists, scholars of Middle-East societies, and researchers specializing in the study of lives.

For over a decade the Middle East has monopolized news headlines in the West. Journalists and commentators regularly speculate that the region's turmoil may stem from the psychological momentum of its cultural traditions or of a "tribal" or "fatalistic" mentality. Yet few studies of the region's cultural psychology have provided a critical synthesis of psychological research on Middle Eastern societies. Drawing on autobiographies, literary works, ethnographic accounts, and life-history interviews, The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology, offers the first comprehensive summary of psychological writings on the region, reviewing works by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists that have been written in English, Arabic, and French. Rejecting stereotypical descriptions of the "Arab mind" or "Muslim mentality,' Gary Gregg adopts a life-span- development framework, examining influences on development in infancy, early childhood, late childhood, and adolescence as well as on identity formation in early and mature adulthood. He views patterns of development in the context of recent work in cultural psychology, and compares Middle Eastern patterns less with Western middle class norms than with those described for the region's neighbors: Hindu India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Mediterranean shore of Europe. The research presented in this volume overwhelmingly suggests that the region's strife stems much less from a stubborn adherence to tradition and resistance to modernity than from widespread frustration with broken promises of modernization--with the slow and halting pace of economic progress and democratization. A sophisticated account of the Middle East's cultural psychology, The Middle East provides students, researchers, policy-makers, and all those interested in the culture and psychology of the region with invaluable insight into the lives, families, and social relationships of Middle Easterners as they struggle to reconcile the lure of Westernized life-styles with traditional values.

Critical appreciations of George A. De Vos, a pioneer in the cross-cultural application of projective techniques (M. Suarez-Orozco, P. Lerner), and De Vos's own reminiscences, are followed by contributions true to the spirit of De Vos's methodology. They include a demonstration of the usefulness of projective tests in the psychodiagnostic evaluation of schizophrenia (J. Stone, P. Wilson & B. Boyer); an examination of the role of historical events in the development of Chinese and Japanese personality characteristics (J. Connor); a review of the impact of Freudian and Jungian thought in India (S. Kakar); and a study of loss and grief in a community of the North American Great Plains (H. Stein).

An “amazing” true account of traveling with Bedouins through a drought-stricken North African landscape (The Boston Globe). Having journeyed in the past across Siberia and up the Congo, Jeffrey Tayler was well accustomed to adventure and danger. But even this experienced travel writer was unprepared for the physical challenges that awaited him in a Sahara desiccated by eight years of unprecedented drought. In this book, he recounts his travels across a landscape of nightmares—charred earth, blinding sky, choking gales, and what is fittingly called the Valley of the Dead—and manages to describe the trip with “hilarious, horrifying, and wonderfully edifying details” (The Boston Globe). The last Westerner to attempt this trek left his skeleton in the sand, and even Tayler’s camels wilt in the searing wastes. But his remarkable perseverance, as well as his fluency in classical and Moroccan Arabic, helps him find here a bracing purity. The Saharawi Bedouin among whom he journeys are untouched by the modernity or radicalism that festers elsewhere in the Arab world. By revealing their ingenuity, their wit, their unrivaled hospitality, and more, Tayler upends our notions of what is, and what is not, essentially Arab. “Beautifully rendered . . . Tayler’s guides provide constant entertainment.” —The Seattle Times “Fascinating and informative.” —Booklist

"With a new epilogue, The Morning After"--Cover.