Abstract
Culture and resilience prove to be slippery concepts unless deployed with care and attention. In this chapter, I demonstrate why a fine-grained approach to culture is important to the study of resilience, helping us avoid common pitfalls such as equating culture with society, religion, or ethnicity in ways that offer limited insights about people’s lives and local contexts. I advocate greater clarity of purpose with respect to concepts, methods, and evidence in resilience research, with a view to inform next steps for theory and practice. I illustrate mixed-methods approaches that operationalize vulnerability and resilience across cultures, as well as ethnographic approaches to resilience across cultures that uncover a political economy of health consonant with a quest for dignity, social justice, and respect. Resilience is driven by culturally specific, diverse, and often-changing goals: for youth, the relationship between culture and resilience is akin to bricolage, in the sense of navigating an array of pursuits, goals, and values. Thus resilience has important moral, social, and political dimensions, beyond the consideration of poor wellbeing or development.
Culture is perhaps the most neglected topic in the study of risk and resilience. (Feldman & Masalha, 2007 , p. 2)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ager, A. (2013). Annual research review: Resilience and child well-being – Public policy implications. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54(4), 488–500.
Almedom, A. M., & Glandon, D. (2007). Resilience is not the absence of PTSD any more than health is the absence of disease. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 12(2), 127–143.
Almedom, A. M., Tesfamichael, B., Mohammed, Z. S., Muller, J., Mascie-Taylor, N., & Alemu, Z. (2005). “Hope” makes sense in Eritrean sense of coherence, but “loser” does not. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 10(5), 433–451.
Barber, B. K. (2008). Contrasting portraits of war: Youths’ varied experiences with political violence in Bosnia and Palestine. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 32(4), 298–309.
Barber, B. K. (2013). Annual research review: The experience of youth with political conflict-challenging notions of resilience and encouraging research refinement. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54(4), 461–473.
de Berry, J., Fazili, A., Farhad, S., Nasiry, F., Hashemi, S., & Hakimi, M. (2003). The children of Kabul: Discussions with Afghan families. Kabul, Afghanistan: Save the Children Federation.
Dressler, W., Borges, C., Balieiro, M., & Dos Santos, J. (2005). Measuring cultural consonance: Examples with special reference to measurement theory in anthropology. Field Methods, 17(4), 331–355.
Dressler, W. W. (2012). Cultural consonance: Linking culture, the individual and health. Preventive Medicine, 55(5), 390–393.
Eggerman, M., & Panter-Brick, C. (2010). Suffering, hope and entrapment: Resilience and cultural values in Afghanistan. Social Science and Medicine, 71, 71–83. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.023.
Eggerman, M., & Panter-Brick, C. (2014). Life feeds on hope. In J. Heath & A. Zahed (Eds.), Children of Afghanistan: The path to peace. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Feldman, R., & Masalha, S. (2007). The role of culture in moderating the links between early ecological risk and young children’s adaptation. Development and Psychopathology, 19(1), 1–21.
Felner, R. D., & DeVries, M. L. (2013). Poverty in childhood and adolescence: A transactional–ecological approach to understanding and enhancing resilience in contexts of disadvantage and developmental risk. In S. Goldstein & R. B. Brooks (Eds.), Handbook of resilience in children (pp. 105–126). New York: Springer.
Hall, P. A., & Lamont, M. (2013). Social resilience in the neoliberal era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Havel, V. (1990). Disturbing the peace. London, UK: Faber and Faber.
Kleinman, A. (2006). What really matters: Living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kohrt, B. A., Jordans, M. J., Tol, W. A., Perera, E., Karki, R., Koirala, S., … Upadhaya, N. (2010). Social ecology of child soldiers: Child, family, and community determinants of mental health, psychosocial well-being, and reintegration in Nepal. Transcultural Psychiatry, 47(5), 727–753.
Luthar, S. S., Cicchetti, D., & Becker, B. (2000). The construct of resilience: A critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. Child Development, 71(3), 543–562.
Masten, A. S. (2011). Resilience in children threatened by extreme adversity: Frameworks for research, practice, and translational synergy. Development and Psychopathology, 23(2), 493–506.
Masten, A. S. (2014). Global perspectives on resilience in children and youth. Child Development, 85(1), 6–20.
McDade, T. W. (2002). Status incongruity in Samoan youth: A biocultural analysis of culture change, stress, and immune function. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 16(2), 123–150.
Miller, K., Omidian, P., Yaqubi, A., Quraishy, A., Naziry, M., Quraishy, N., … Karyar, N. (2006). The Afghan symptom checklist: A culturally grounded approach to mental health assessment in a conflict zone. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 76(4), 423–433.
Nguyen-Gillham, V., Giacaman, R., Naser, G., & Boyce, W. (2008). Normalising the abnormal: Palestinian youth and the contradictions of resilience in protracted conflict. Health & Social Care in the Community, 16(3), 291–298.
Panter-Brick, C. (2014). Health, risk, and resilience: Interdisciplinary concepts and applications. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 431–448.
Panter-Brick, C., & Eggerman, M. (2012). Understanding culture, resilience, and mental health: The production of hope. In M. Ungar (Ed.), The social ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice (pp. 369–386). New York, NY: Springer.
Panter-Brick, C., Eggerman, M., Gonzalez, V., & Safdar, S. (2009). Violence, suffering, and mental health in Afghanistan: A school-based survey. The Lancet, 374(9692), 807–886.
Panter-Brick, C., Eggerman, M., Mojadidi, A., & Mcdade, T. W. (2008). Social stressors, mental health, and physiological stress in an urban elite of young Afghans in Kabul. American Journal of Human Biology, 20(6), 627–641.
Panter-Brick, C., & Leckman, J. F. (2013). Editorial Commentary: Resilience in child development – Interconnected pathways to wellbeing. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54(4), 333–336.
Rutter, M. (2012). Resilience: Causal pathways and social ecology. In M. Ungar (Ed.), The social ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice (pp. 33–42). New York, NY: Springer.
Southwick, S., Litz, B. T., Charney, D. S., & Friedman, M. (2011). Resilience and mental health: Challenges across the lifespan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Springer, K., Stellman, J., & Jordan-Young, R. (2012). Beyond a catalogue of differences: A theoretical frame and good practice guidelines for researching sex/gender in human health. Social Science & Medicine, 74(11), 1817–1824.
Sweet, E. (2010). If your shoes are raggedy you get talked about: Symbolic and material dimensions of adolescent social status and health. Social Science & Medicine, 70(12), 2029–2035.
Sweet, E. (2011). Symbolic capital, consumption, and health inequality. American Journal of Public Health, 101(12), 260–264.
Ungar, M. (2004). A constructionist discourse on resilience: Multiple contexts, multiple realities among at-risk children and youth. Youth & Society, 25(3), 341–365.
Ungar, M. (2008). Resilience across cultures. British Journal of Social Work, 38(2), 218–235.
Ungar, M., & Liebenberg, L. (2011). Assessing resilience across cultures using mixed methods: Construction of the child and youth resilience measure. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 5(2), 126–149. doi:10.1177/1558689811400607.
Walsh, F. (2002). Bouncing forward: Resilience in the aftermath of September 11. Family Process, 41(1), 34–36.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Panter-Brick, C. (2015). Culture and Resilience: Next Steps for Theory and Practice. In: Theron, L., Liebenberg, L., Ungar, M. (eds) Youth Resilience and Culture. Cross-Cultural Advancements in Positive Psychology, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9415-2_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9415-2_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9414-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9415-2
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)