Development Of Indigenous Psychology Research Articles

Why Indigenous Psychology? A Review Article

Indigenous Psychology is an emerging field in psychology (Kim et al., 2006, p.3). It has received great attention in the last 30 years with a number of articles and books been dedicated to the topic. Any discussion on this topic is often surrounded by a dialogue on cultural psychology and cross-cultural psychology. The primary aim of this paper is to understand the purpose behind the origin and development of indigenous psychologies that has been seen in various parts of the world and view it in light of cultural psychology.

Reification of Culture in Indigenous Psychologies: Merit or Mistake?

Professor Allwood (2011, “On the foundation of the indigenous psychologies”, Social Epistemology 25 (1): 3–14) challenges indigenous psychologists by describing their definition of culture as a rather abstract and delimited entity that is too “essentialized” and “reified”, as well as “somewhat old‐fashioned” and “too much influenced by early social anthropological writings” (p. 5). In this article, I make a distinction between the scientific microworld and the lifeworld and argue that it is necessary for social scientists to construct scientific microworlds of theories for the sake of pushing forward the progress of any field in the social sciences. Allwood and J. W. Berry (2006, “Origins and development of indigenous psychologies: An international analysis”, International Journal of Psychology 41 (4): 243–68) also recognized that western mainstream psychology is a kind of indigenous psychology. Therefore, theoretical construction in western psychology also implies a reification of culture. My central question is, then: why is the reification of the western culture of individualism a merit for the progress of psychology, and why the reification of non‐western cultures by indigenous psychologists a mistake?

Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context

Section I Theoretical and Methodological Issues: Contributions To Indigenous And Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context.- The Scientific Foundation of Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: The Transactional Approach.- The Importance of Constructive Realism for The Indigenous Psychologies Approach.- Constructive Realism and Confucian Relationalism: An Epistemological Strategy for the Development of Indigenous Psychology.- From Decolonizing Psychology to the Development of a Cross-Indigenous Perspective in Methodology: The Philippine Experience. - Section II Family and Socialization: Parental Ethnotheories of Child Development: Looking beyond Independence and Individualism in American Belief Systems.- Close Interpersonal Relationships among Japanese: Amae as Distinguished from Attachment and Dependence.- Affect and Early Moral Socialization: Some Insights and Contributions from Indigenous Psychological Studies in Taiwan.- Cultures are Like All Other Cultures, Like Some Other Cultures, Like No Other Culture.- Section III Cognitive Processes: The Mutual Relevance of Indigenous Psychology and Morality.- Native Dialectism and the Tao of Chinese Thought.- Indian Perspectives on Cognition.- Section IV Self and Personality: Indigenous Personality Research: The Chinese Case.- Site Under Construction: An Ethnopsychological Representation of Mexican Self-Concept.- The Chinese Conception of the Self: Towards a Person-making Perspective.- Naive Psychology of Koreans' Interpersonal Mind and Behavior in Close Relationships.- Section V Application: Humanism-Materialism: Century-long Polish Cultural Origins and Twenty Years of Research in Cultural Psychology.- Chinese Conception of Justice and Reward Allocation.- Family, Parent-Child Relationship and Academic Achievement in Korea: Indigenous Psychological Analysis.- Paternalism: Towards Conceptual Refinement andOperationalization.- Creating Indigenous Psychologies: Insights from Empirical Social Studies of the Science of Psychology.- Biographical Sketch.- Index.

Origins and development of indigenous psychologies: An international analysis

This article examines the origin, development, and characteristics of the indigenous psychologies (IPs) initiated in various regions of the world. These IPs arose as a reaction to the mainstream version of psychology and seek to reflect the social, political, and cultural character of peoples around the world. Fifteen contributions from researchers from different parts of the world are presented, replying to four questions that were posed to them. A number of common themes were identified in the contributions. Post‐colonial reactions to mainstream psychology, and the belief that it was not an efficient aid to solving local social problems, were seen as important reasons for developing IPs. IPs were generally seen as attempts to produce a local psychology within a specific cultural context. Different views about what methods are legitimate in IPs were present (from experiments to various more “humanistic” methods). IPs were commonly seen as being able to open up, invigorate, and improve mainstream psychology. The style of theorizing in the IPs was felt by many to be to build theories from the “bottom up” on the basis of local phenomena, findings, and experiences. Some contributors saw the IP as a kind of cultural psychology, and a few noted that IP and cross‐cultural psychology have an interactive mutually enriching relationship. Nearly half of the contributors emphasized the critical reaction to their work on IP by colleagues working more in the line of mainstream psychology. Many contributors felt that IP could contribute to the development of a more general universal psychology. Different indications of heterogeneity in the IPs were found among the contributors, for example, with respect to the role given to religion in the local IP. Sometimes the presence of different IPs within the same country was reported. This also indicates heterogeneity in the IPs.

Indigenous theorizing in a complex world

Indigenization in psychology leads to modes of theorizing based within local knowledge communities and defined in terms of culturally relevant criteria. The present study offers a conceptualization of the social psychology of science in terms of complexity theory. The value of alternative choices in advancing psychological knowledge is shown by a knowledge landscape whose shape depends on the diversity of paradigms within the community. Dominance by a single paradigm (such as a Western world view) leads to a single‐peaked landscape where advances in knowledge are judged using only the criteria of that paradigm. Here, the most effective form of working is incremental step‐by‐step research; but this ignores the historical context of the indigenous community and runs the risk of promoting a kind of psychology that is irrelevant to its values and priorities. Indigenization is presented as a complexification of the knowledge community building on a diversity of world views, leading to a rugged, multiple‐peaked knowledge landscape. Four features of working on rugged landscapes are examined: path dependence, showing the importance of history for shaping the direction of research; fostering research progress through seeding of multiple starting points; the benefits of locally dense networks within knowledge communities; and the role of policy‐makers in tuning knowledge landscapes. Examples are drawn from the development of indigenous psychology within a number of countries.