A late reply to a question asked me: “SOMETHING LIKE MACRO PSYCHOLOGY… DO YOU KNOW THE NAME FOR IT? AND DOES IT EXIST?”

“SOMETHING LIKE MACRO PSYCHOLOGY…   DO YOU KNOW THE NAME FOR IT? AND DOES IT EXIST?”

(for Tenzin Nanette Miles, North Carolina)

Hi, Nanette. I haven’t really forgotten the question you asked. I had to think a little about it, besides finding the time.

First of all, it’s a field I’m very much interested in; I don’t know if there is a single name to define it, because in fact it spans many areas (and different  field theories and sets of concepts).

One is the study of history on long periods and on many dimensions; for example LeGoff’s studies on Medieval civilization, Braudel’s on the Mediterranean worlds in the 17th-18th century; there is a delightful book  by a former jugoslav expatriate, Predrag Matvejevic, on the cultural landscape of the Mediterranean which I can only recommend- like ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ by E.P. Thompson.

Then:  period-studies, using a mixture of sociology, study of literature  etc., political history etc, popular culture. One good example is Al Filreis’ site on the ‘50s in the USA (it began as a university course I think): http://www.writing.upenn.edu/%7Eafilreis/50s/home.html. Another Toffler’s Future Shock, of some decades ago. Then English books like ‘Youth culture, and resistance’ (or ‘Resistance through rituals’), or ‘The metropolitan experience’ by Iain Chambers.

The study of subcultures (like Dick Hebdige’s ‘Subculture- the meaning of style’), or p.e. of chicano culture (anthropologically, historically etc). There is a whole area of geography (the Los Angeles school; see p.e. Edward Soja’s Postmetropolis) on the spatial determination and construction  of daily life. The researches on the technological revolution: William J Mitchell ‘City of bits’. Postmodern anthropology (James Clifford) studies p.e. the intersection and cross-fertilization of cultures, the cultural presuppositions at the base of the work of the founders of anthropology, concepts like diaspora and so on.

Mybe the general field might be termed cultural studies (see on Wikipedia)- branching through in many different directions and styles of interpretation. There’a a new area of ‘border studies’- on frontiers and the transfrontier space (one grand example is Dear and Leclerc’s ‘Postborder city’, on Tijuana; another the more than 1000 pages William Vollmann devotes to Imperial County, with lucidity, erudition and compassion; and finally, Michael Hemmingson’s book on ‘Zona Norte- Autoethnography of desire’; -of this one I have the pdf file- legitimately obtained-, if you’re interested).-

There is no vast unifying synthesis I know of. You may explore the Wikipedia article on cultural studies I mentioned- or start at different other places (among the links of my blog is for example one to a very good portal on border studies).

As to the significance of all of this: I think we must go beyond a purely subject centered psychology (or, worse, a symptom centered psychiatry) and try to build conceptual instruments which may be of help in trying to survive in a humanely significant way in this planet and with our relationships (inner and outer). That’s what I’m looking for anyway (trying to find space too for joy, love, self-help and mutual help, for esthetic experiences- horrible term I need to substitute somehow, altered states of consciounsness -which do no coincide with substance abuse- etc.) And I need a little philosophy too.

This is no treatise, so I can but stop here.

I’ll leave just few links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies;

a great portal is http://vos.ucsb.edu/, “The voice of the shuttle-  web site for humanities research”;

‘Border Crossings’, http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/resources/bordercrossings/index.html;

‘Exploring Dystopia’, http://hem.passagen.se/replikant/;

a really beautiful Italian site, ‘Il futuro visto dal passato’ (future seen from the past’) :

http://www.fabiofeminofantascience.org/RETROFUTURE/RETROFUTURE1.html

Lots of stuff, as you can see.

In this complex (agglomerate, rhizome) any point of entrance is good.

Arrivederci.

Giacomo C.

(The logo name of this blog is in effect ‘Beyond the advanced psychiatric society- an experiment for a collective research’; the idea was and is that without reciprocal cross-fertilization nothing useful is going to be found -paying perhaps the price of a lot of dullness too. And the question you asked was really to the point.)