From Representing Culture to Fostering ‘Voice’: Toward a Critical Indigenous Psychology

Abstract

Historically, indigenous psychology has been described as an offshoot of a paradigm shift in social science and psychology. This shift is hinged on providing space to people’s voices that are often denied in the positivist paradigm. It is paradoxical that rather than facilitating the centring of silenced voices, the focus of indigenous or cultural psychologists has often been on imagining a reified indigenous psychology through specific religious conceptions of self and society or collapsing indigenous psychologies with the larger framework of psychological sciences. In this chapter we: (1) examine how culture is defined within indigenous and cross-cultural psychology; (2) provide a critique of mainstream indigenous psychology from within and outside this sub-discipline; and (3) analyze how a politically constituted indigenous psychology that utilizes narrative- and voice-based research approaches could address social justice issues and social problems.