‘Each newcomer brings something new to society’

With recent tensions in the UK around migration, it is important to understand the experiences of migrants. Vladimer Lado Gamsakhurdia is the Professor in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the Tbilisi State University, Georgia, and an associated editor of Springer journals Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Sciences and Trends in Psychology. The interviewer is Daniel Correia, the lead researcher of the first UK study of proculturation and an Assistant Psychologist at the Community Mental Health Service in Shropshire. 

The interview focuses on Lado's theory of proculturation, which attempts to offer a humanistic perspective on how people adapt to different cultures.

I called you Lado, but then I saw it was Vladimer. Do you have a preference?

You can freely call me Lado. My name is also an example of proculturation! Vladimer is a Russian name. It came to Georgia from the Russian Empire, but afterwards Georgia's new version of it was created. It is not a nickname. It's a proper name. So it's a result of proculturation and cultural innovation. It's an example of the creation and transformation into something new beyond previous cultural knowledge and mixture. Thus, you can call me Vladimer or Lado, but I prefer the latter. 

How have your cultural experiences in Georgia informed your interest in cultural psychology?

Georgia is a very multicultural country. There are a lot of ethnic and cultural minorities and migrants here. In Georgia, you don't need to travel abroad to meet a variety of foreign cultural elements, because they're there. So even if you're part of the ethnic majority, you inevitably have intercultural experiences from early childhood. Besides, the topic of migration is in front of you all the time when you are born in Georgia. Migrants' adaptation is a challenge for us because many people migrate from Georgia to Europe. 

I also lived in Western Europe and the Americas. My own experiences inspired me and got me interested in understanding the influence of migration on selfhood. Then I started exploring migrants' adaptation and I eventually arrived at a different conceptualisation and a more person-centred look on the individuals' adaptation to foreign cultures through intercultural experiences. 

I'm curious about your experiences as an immigrant. 

I lived in Spain for two years. Then I had a shorter term in Germany, Sweden, Luxemburg, Denmark. Recently I spent time in Brazil. I am very grateful to my host countries for what I learned. 

One of the most important discoveries personally for me, which is an example of proculturation, was finding that people and cultures are different. We are unique, truly. But when you travel abroad, you find out this difference is not absolute and people living in different countries are much more similar than we often think about them. This is what is important to me. The more I travelled the more I saw that, yes, people are different but there is unity, this universality that lies beyond these differences. 

At a fundamental level, we have the same mental functions. The ways how we construct identities... this brought me a feeling of inner peace. Traveling and migration lead you to a different level of tolerance for and acceptance of differences. For me, this was very important because I found out there are more commonalities in different societies in terms of structural dynamics of cultural self-constructions than I had thought before migrating abroad.

And did this changed your own self-construction?

Well, I became much more open-minded and accepting. I am Georgian, but my identity is even more flexible than it had been before migrating.  I'm more open-minded to new experiences and new knowledge. I mean personally, not talking in scientific thought. My self-reconstruction involved many layers, starting with tasting new food which changed my perception of Georgian food – which is delicious! I suggest if you haven't tried Georgian cuisine you should. So starting with changing my perception of Georgian cuisine, nature, habits and traditions was a path to developing my open-mindedness and expanding my identity until it became broader and more inclusive. For example, in Georgia as children we often hear that our nature is the most beautiful, and I agree it is definitely breathtakingly beautiful, but while traveling I also witnessed some other countries that also have amazing nature which led to the transformation of my emotional relation to my perception of my homelands' nature. I rediscovered my Georgianness in a new way while living abroad. Through personal experiences, we learn, we meet real people, we obtain real experiences, and we understand that they are also people like us. We categorise foreign cultures, foreign people, and foreignness in a more rational way than it was possible before getting immediate experience of migration. 

Migration seems to have affected your sense of self through proculturation.

Another important aspect worth mentioning is that, as research shows, it's not necessary to migrate. If you watch movies, read books, you also proculturate because you engage with foreign cultural ideas. If you watch a movie where you can observe how foreigners welcome guests, it might lead to the re-configuration of your understanding of how to welcome a guest, as simple as that. You reflect on any new ideas coming from foreign cultures in one way or another. You might not make dramatic changes, but at least you reflect on it at a minimal level. 

In your book, A Theory of Proculturation, you state that the purpose is to send a humanistic message. Could you explain this message?

In that book, I attempt to build a human-centred message, which is that the boundless human imagination allows individuals to try to know what they do not know and recreate themselves in the process. It uses examples of Georgian society to explore proculturation, combining psychological sciences with anthropological studies, allowing these fields to merge.

I make emphasis on universal mental features which lead to various forms of diversity (intraindividual, interindividual, and intercultural variety), which is the basis of cultural psychology. I try to elaborate on the theoretical basis of variety through similarity and similarity through diversity. I think it is very important for individuals and different societies to accept the fact that we are constantly changing and other cultures, other ideas, different ideas – otherness in general! Because this is the way to a peaceful communal life with other groups. 

Appreciation of cultural differences and similarities in mental functioning is very important for psychologists to elaborate more phenomenon-centred and culturally sensitive methodological approaches. Quite often, different disciplines focus only on either the diversity or the similarity in mainstream anthropologies and psychology. Besides, it aims to highlight the importance of systemic ethnographic approach and attempts to sue for innovative research methods to understand the subtleties of the historical genesis of identity construction. Generally, I believe that the construction and transformation of higher mental functions require a qualitative and emic look.

Do you think there is any room for quantitative research?

The transformation of identities is fundamentally a qualitative process. In my opinion, identity should not be considered an ontological entity, but rather it is a dynamic and socioculturally coordinated but idiosyncratic construction. It's part of a broader semiotic system that is processual, dynamic and irreversibly developing. However, quantitative methods are useful for understanding lower mental functions and context, such as political, economic, sociological, intercultural and social factors. Thus, we obviously need them in cultural psychological research. 

I'm wondering for people who are not as familiar with cultural psychology, how would you explain proculturation?

In cultural psychology, we take a culturally sensitive stance on how the human mental systems work. Notably, Cultural Psychology is oriented on higher mental functions. I personally follow one of the leading sub-directions, namely the cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics and dialogism. Cultural psychology assumes that individuals and their surrounding environments are systematically organised into a holistic system. Proculturation is coming from a more person-centred psychological perspective. It assumes meaning-making lies in idiosyncratic human subjectivity. It brings focus to the individual and attempts to grasp, unlike Berry-inspired mainstream acculturation studies [John Berry is accredited as conceptualising modern bidimensional models of acculturation], the transformations that happen at an individual level. It is important to understand how they negotiate and make sense of their identities in light of new cultural experiences. Also, proculturation considers individuals and different cultures, not as entities or variables, but as semiotic fields. Not essentialised, but instead rather fluid processes. 

Also, the idea is that we can't totally erase our previous experiences. The past is part of us. For example, Berry's famous acculturation model implicitly implies that you can just maintain or abandon your native culture. However, I believe, and research confirms, that at an individual level this simply does not make sense because a migrant would never stop making references to their native culture one way or another. You cannot erase your background, except through brain damage. I am Georgian and I will never erase my Georgian background whether I want it or not.

Very much bringing that person-centred element like you said. A humanistic view many migrants need at the moment.

One very important aspect of proculturation is to consider migrants as constructive agents, not necessarily a problematic group. For example, there are skilled migrants. But even immigrants without high skills inevitably contribute to and transform local cultures, in one way or another. Quite often, from the view of mainstream acculturation models or governmental policies, migrants are perceived as groups who should learn from the host culture, but that's not exactly what's happening. Each newcomer brings something new to society – they never get purely assimilated, but rather lead to the creation of new cultural mixtures and innovations. You said you're from Portugal. So I'm sure you brought a valuable contribution to the local society and you participated in the transformation of your host society. Whether positive or not, there is always transformation. 

So, from a proculturative perspective, I am interested in how immigrants transform host and global cultural tissue that is always open and dialogical. In the case of proculturation, we don't ask if you accept or reject. Instead, we are interested in how meeting new cultural elements impacts you and your meaning system, your self-understanding and values. How you make sense of it and how this influences your self-perception and your perception of your host society, and also how it affects the perception of your native society.

What do you see is the future of cultural psychology?

Notably, cultural psychology is not a different discipline, but rather it is a theoretical and methodological framework which attempts to build a new transdisciplinary human science assuming views from anywhere. Bringing back the recognition of systemicity, dialogicality and cogenetic basis of the irreversibility of human development is one of the most important tasks for cultural psychology right now.  The main challenge for cultural psychology today is, in the development of its theories, to spread a culturally sensitive and humanistic stance more broadly.

Further reading

Correia, D., & Watkins, M. (2023). Exploring experiences of proculturation in international students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Culture & Psychology, 29(2), 320-335.

Gamsakhurdia, V.L. (2018). Adaptation in a dialogical perspective—From acculturation to proculturation. Culture & Psychology, 24(4), 545-559.

Gamsakhurdia, V.L. (2019). Proculturation: Self-reconstruction by making "fusion cocktails" of alien and familiar meanings. Culture & Psychology, 25(2), 161-177.

Gamsakhurdia, V.L. (2020). Semiotic construction of the self in multicultural societies: A theory of proculturation. Routledge.