ფატალიზმი - ქართული კულტურული მოდელი

The dissertation was performed in the conceptual framework of Contemporary Psychological Anthropology, in particular, we used “Cultural Models  Cultural Consensus  Cultural Consonance” conceptual scheme. The latter addresses two key issues in culture theory. The first is to substantiate the fallacy of the dualistic approach, such as the internal vs external culture, homogeneous vs heterogeneous culture dichotomies. The second is to emphasize the need for cultural-level and individual-level separation not only on a theoretical but also on an empirical phase.
The value of the framework “Cultural Models  Cultural Consensus  Cultural Consonance” was not limited with the theoretical value. At the same time, it enabled to conduct the fruitful empirical research. Fatalism was chosen as the field of study (Cultural Domain), which helps us to explain a wide range of human action, including the important actions for the development of society such as investing economic capital, fighting against unemployment, civic activism, electoral behavior, health-related behavior, and so on.
Thus, due to the relevance of studying fatalism and considering the potential of Psychoanthropology to inquiry this phenomenon, the presented paper aims at identifying and verifying the Georgian cultural model of fatalism. The synthesis of so-called “soft” and “hard” research methods was used for this purpose. The "Cultural analysis" (in particular, The Metaphor analysis) of the discourses, collected through in-depth interviews, revealed the emic components of the Fatalism Cognitive Schema. Those are Personal Control, Deity, Destiny, Helplessness and Luck. For triangulation of the obtained data, the second method of “Cultural analysis” of discourse – “Reasoning analysis” (Reconstructing the “gist propositions”) was used. In addition, the analysis of propositions allowed us to identify the relationships between the components. The specifics of the relationship were described with the changeable/unchangeable dimension. After the identification of the cognitive model, its sharedness was confirmed with the cultural consensus analysis. In addition, as a result of the cultural consensus analysis, the respondents' cultural competence scores (M = .75; SD = .23) and “Cultural Answer Key” were obtained. Based on the latter, the Cultural Consonance (consonance of cultural-level and individual-level) scores (M = 75.82; SD = 13.45) were calculated and compared to the results of the quantitative analysis of cultural competence. According to the results, the theoretical assumptions about different constructs of cultural competence and cultural consonance were empirically verified. Psychological anthropology, with its essence, is an interdisciplinary field at the crossroads of the sciences (humanities, natural sciences, social), and one of its main goals is to overcome the conceptual contradictions, both theoretical and methodological (Surmanidze, 2021). The present paper is another demonstration of how not only the complex theoretical approaches but also the obvious potential of its methodological synthesis makes the field of psychological anthropology such a relevant interdisciplinary research area.