This article proposes a transdisciplinary human science that integrates psychology and anthropology, moving beyond the reductionistic axioms of mainstream psychology to establish a dialogical and systemic framework. It argues for a culturally sensitive, person-centered approach that recognizes individuals as active agents in meaning making, connecting them to their environments through idiosyncratic yet culturally embedded processes. The proposed framework rests on five key principles: (a) the irreversibility of human development, emphasizing gradual and permanent change across the life course; (b) the self as a complex system of diverse, often contradictory representations shaped by internal and external dialectics; (c) a shift from Cartesian multiculturalism to polyculturalism, viewing cultures as interconnected and identities as negotiated through dynamic, overlapping cultural–semiotic fields; (d) meaning making as an emotional process, where affective semiosis bridges individual and cultural domains; and (e) a systemic approach rooted in irreversible developmentalism, likening the self and culture to a decentralized, interdependent “global cultural blockchain.” This blockchain metaphor illustrates how selves co-construct meaning within a distributed, evolving network. Given the conceptual fragmentation in cultural psychology, the article introduces anthropological psychology as a unifying framework. Positioned closer to psychology but grounded in anthropological contextualization, it emphasizes the irreversibility of development as the foundation for human subjectivity, balancing universal mental regularities with situational uniqueness. Anthropological psychology offers a path toward a transdisciplinary human science that bridges psychology and anthropology while prioritizing cultural sensitivity and systemic interconnectedness.

The article provides an analysis of the causes of the education crisis in Kyrgyzstan and discusses the influence of traditional knowledge and intangible cultural heritage of the Kyrgyz people on the formation of education and upbringing programs. The work analyzes the reasons for the emergence of contradictions in worldview ideas in the concepts of the main approaches to educational philosophy and proposes clarification of the tasks of pedagogical, social and psychological anthropology as scientific knowledge about the natural essence of man. The analysis showed that difficulties in creating qualitatively new pedagogical technologies are due to the lack of unified conceptual positions in the philosophy of education, as a result of which teachers are forced to form their own personal approaches to education and training in each case. In the present research, the attention of educational philosophy is focused on the analysis and consideration of the ethnic resource of folk pedagogy oriented towards youth education. In conclusion, it was concluded that the formation and implementation of innovative educational programs of training and education in Kyrgyzstan will not be effective without taking into account the mentality of the people, their traditional knowledge and features of cultural heritage. The traditional knowledge of the Kyrgyz represents not only a subject of historical value of cultural heritage, but also a didactic resource for fostering social and ecological consciousness. A negative factor hindering the formation and development of effective fundamental educational concepts is the tendency according to which philosophers, teachers and psychologists, when analyzing the causes of the education crisis, do not take into account the features of the Laws of Synharmony and the nature of interaction in society between two realities –objective and subjective.

Abstract Anthropologists in post‐colonial societies have proposed subjectivity as a theory to link national political processes with everyday psychological experiences. The Partition of British India in 1947 led to mass violence that has affected millions of people and created the nation‐states of India and Pakistan. Psychological anthropologists working with hauntology have sought to explore how psychiatrists construct knowledge in response to mass violence and the symbolism of ghosts within the arts. In this paper, I contrast representations of Partition violence among South Asian psychiatrists with popular films. I begin with an ethnographic vignette from an ongoing project that uses theories and methods from psychological anthropology to jumpstart peace negotiations between India and Pakistan, illustrating that Partition violence remains vivid for senior government officials. I show that psychiatric researchers in both countries have reacted to Partition violence with professional silence. In contrast, films depict contact with ghosts and visions as cultural practices through which Partition violence persists in the popular imagination. I discuss divergences in my psychiatric and anthropological training to argue that to understand the psychological dimensions of Partition, we must turn to the arts and social sciences.

Abstract This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting remote research on child‐animal relationships across thirty communities in 17 countries during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It critically assesses remote research as a mode of collaboration informed by decolonial aspirations, highlighting the complexities of navigating temporal and geographical distances, mitigating global inequalities, and addressing political and methodological tensions at the intersection of psychological anthropology and cross‐cultural developmental psychology. By engaging with these challenges, the paper fosters critical dialogue on research ethics and methodologies between anthropology and psychology, advancing a broader intellectual engagement toward translocal equity.

This research is an effort to uncover the cultural values instilled in the character Rani in the Novel Negeri Seribu Bintang by Arie Komalasari through one of the aspects of her personality, namely intellectual. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach with data collection techniques in the form of reading and recording techniques with literature study methods. The source of the data clearly comes from the Novel Negeri Seribu Bintang by Arie Komalasari. The data taken is in the form of explanations related to the role, character, and personality of the character Rani in the novel based on the intellectual aspects possessed by the character. The results of this study will show how the cultural background of this Rani character shapes her intellectual abilities which are presented in the perspective of Psychological Anthropology. The role of Rani's character is also central in supporting the dynamics of the storyline of this novel. In addition to being a character who is described as a charismatic female character, the intellectual side of this character is also a component that supports the storyline of this novel. The intellectual side possessed by Rani's character is inseparable from her cultural background who was born in an environment of educated people who then formed her personality character in building the plot of this novel. This study also seeks to provide a descriptive explanation of what cultural values make Rani's character a figure who has intellectual intelligence.

The article focuses on the phenomenology of jew’s harp music art in traditional and modern cultural practices. The theoretical framework for the research were the works in the field of philosophy of culture, the concept of a symbol as a cognitive memory of culture, musical and psychological anthropology and a comparative approach to the study of cultures. On the basis of the cultural model of ethnomusicological codes, the authors have identified, typologized and analyzed intonation symbols of jew’s harp practices. The intonation-sound level of jew’s harp music art is revealed through the following elements of the symbolic field: the overtone scale as a natural sound invariant; the symbol of support; the symbol of the spiritual vertical; the symbol of prayer. At the visual and plastic level of jew’s harp music art, the following components of meaning formation are revealed: the symbol of the “external vocal cords” as a transcending voice; the symbol of the sound life of nature; the symbol of circularity. Special attention is paid to the understanding of the overtone scale as a comprehensive original musical sphere, concentrated in the sound of the jew’s harp and allowing performers to return to the lost integral connection with culture and nature. The revealed intonation symbols allow us to consider the jew’s harp as a “bridge” between nature and culture, and traditional and modern jew’s harp practices — as forms of transmission and actualization of the intangible cultural heritage of the peoples of Eurasia.

Psychiatric systems, like religious, political, or kinship systems, are culturally constructed. Each mirrors a culturally constructed reality and inseparable entity of being an aspect of human culture. The present study broadly interprets that folk and professional psychiatrists are equally trans-cultural, or ethno-psychiatry, the psychiatric edifices expressive of particular cultures. The term ‘ethno psychiatry’ has been coined in the late 1940s to refer to the local presentation of psychiatric illness, and popularized in the 1950s. Finally, the pertinent area as well as approach to the study of mental illness in the communities through the psychiatric theories and practices at its social and cultural setting is considered as an interdisciplinary concern under the purview of Medical Anthropology. The universal domain of mental illness has also been judged and explored both folk and professional psychiatric practitioners and researchers from numerous cross-cultural studies along with an interface between Medical anthropology Psychology Cognitive anthropology and Psychological Anthropology. The present analyses finally throw light on the mental illness and its own standard of judgments as cultural constracts, ethno-psychology of mental illness, or ethno psychiatrist, featuring local understanding of causes, symptoms, and treatments.

This article reexamines Francis L.K. Hsu’s Under the Ancestors’ Shadow , positioning it as a critical yet underappreciated work that significantly contributes to the decolonization of anthropology. This early work confronts mainstream Eurocentric theories, such as internal other, settler colonialism, Parsonsian structural functionalism, Boasian culture-specific approaches, and the traditional village-specific, primitive society-focused lens of anthropological inquiry. At the same time, Hsu introduced innovative perspectives that hold great potential for cross-cultural comparative studies, including his analyses of borderland China, the culturally integrated Chinese identity, the concept of the dominant dyad, his early-stage exploration of psychological anthropology, and his emphasis on literate civilizations. In today’s context, Hsu’s approach resonates with the growing movement to decolonize anthropology. By critiquing Eurocentric theories, he advocated for a more inclusive, globally relevant framework that addresses broader social structures. His work calls for a rethinking of anthropological methodologies that stresses the integration of both local and global perspectives. Hence, Hsu’s framework offers a forward-looking direction for anthropology and promotes a decolonial method that empowers the comparative study of literate civilized societies. This positions Hsu’s work as essential in reimagining the discipline for the contemporary era.

ABSTRACT The article concerns psychological approaches to the Resurrection of Christ, specifically whether the post-Resurrection Christophanies and angelophanies can be explained naturalistically using a relatively new theory of perception, Predictive Processing (PP). Applied to the angelophanies, a case is made for visual illusions. Explaining the Christophanies on PP as hallucinations is theoretically and practically problematic, and reasons for this are discussed. A case can be made for the phenomenon of Sense of Presence. Along with other newer theories from the psychology of grief and psychological anthropology, PP has the potential to re-invigorate discussion of naturalistic approaches to the Resurrection.

Abstract How do people experience vulnerability, and what can this experience tell us about how states help those living in precarious conditions? According to the Chilean state, people who live in vulnerable encampments do so strictly out of necessity, not choice, and vulnerability is best addressed by demolishing encampments, resettling their communities, and giving the poor opportunities to recover their economic and moral autonomy. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in predominantly migrant informal settlements in Chile's northern border city of Antofagasta, this article shows how the state's project to demolish vulnerable encampments is in tension with migrant women community leaders’ own personal and collective projects of autonomy. Examining one migrant woman community leader's use of the moral concept of “hardness” to express her ethics of autonomy, I attend to ordinary instances where women helping the state resettle their communities instead subtly undermined the state's resettlement plan. This case advances feminist theories of politics and vulnerability that examine how the domain of the political is reconfigured through women's “domestic” work in the everyday. Psychological anthropology, with its recent turn to critical phenomenology, has much to add to this phenomenology of the critical, of politics.

Abstract Expert freediving explores the limits of human endurance, with some divers staying underwater for over 10 min or reaching crushing depths on a single breath. This article explores the enskilment process, especially how freediving training involves a suite of reflexive bodily practices with psychological, neurological, and physiological consequences. Examined closely and over time, skill acquisition is a multi‐dimensional process involving self‐driven adaptations in a cumulative, uneven manner. Because skills combine biological, cultural, and psychological mechanisms, practices are ideal for biocultural analysis in psychological anthropology. This account of the behavioral‐development spiral in freediving enskilment suggests that transformative practices are inherently developmental, with neurological consequences. Theories of practice that ignore the temporal dimension or the variability of skill acquisition, that is, accounts that erase the slow and uncertain accumulation of expertise, fundamentally misrepresent how persistent practice blends biology and culture, and causes transformation, as well as the usefulness of ethnography for studying these processes.

Abstract This article analyzes trauma as an interplay of mass violence connecting imperial occupation in British Hong Kong, and an Anglo‐Chinese family in England. It takes Devereux's concept of countertransference to interrogate how killings in the author's family reverberate as traumatic transferences in fieldwork engaging the transgenerational violence of Partition in postcolonial Pakistan. Routing through transferences, it advances a comparative analysis of colonial trauma; moving from the individual to universal through layerings of traumatic silence, existential struggles, and the unconscious. It asks: what kinds of reflexivity are entailed by the double‐nature of the traumatized subject writing about trauma? Can colonial trauma retain specificity, while speaking to the discordant temporal settlement and relational formation of broader interconnected histories, geographical partitions, and generational loss? Psychological anthropology offers a mode for filling in blanks; privileging the subjectivity of inheritors of colonial trauma for ethnographic theorizations into ways anthropologists might reckon with the psychic violence of colonial pasts.

People's lived experiences of distress are complex, personal, and vary widely across cultures. So, too, do the terms and expressions people use to describe distress. This variation presents an engaging challenge for those doing intercultural work in transcultural psychiatry, global mental health, and psychological anthropology. This article details the findings of a study of common distress terminology among 63 Kannada-speaking Hindu women living in Mysuru, the second largest city in the state of Karnataka, South India. Very little existing scholarship focuses on cultural adaptation for speakers of Dravidian languages like Kannada; this study aims to fill this gap and support greater representation of this linguistic family in research on mental health, idioms of distress, and distress terminology. Between 2018 and 2019, we conducted a 3-phase study consisting of interviews, data reduction, and focus group discussions. The goal was to produce a non-exhaustive list of common Kannada distress terms that could be used in future research and practice to translate and culturally adapt mental health symptom scales or other global mental health tools.

Based on religious differences between couples pose challenges in parenting, so this study aims to find cultural diversity and parenting in families of other religions, psychological impacts and mental health on children from families of different faiths, and the integration of psychological anthropology in the care of children of families of different religions. This qualitative research explores issues or mental problems experienced by children in forming their character. The study found that parenting families of other faiths has a positive value for their children's development. Parenting practices are based on cultural traditions, ethnic values, and family habits passed down from generation to generation, as well as the influence of parenting on the emotional, social, and cognitive development of children who apply parenting strategies such as authoritative, overprotective, and permissive that do not carry elements of their respective religions. In addition, it also found integration in the care of children through practices such as tolerance, politeness, helpfulness, honesty, friendliness, empathy, and sympathy. The impact of mental health on their parenting can be prevented by implementing inclusive parenting that emphasizes the practice of cultural diversity, values, and beliefs in their family environment. Hopefully, these findings can provide an essential understanding of the religious differences that affect the upbringing of children of different faith families, providing insight for anthropology and psychology practitioners on the importance of understanding aspects of religion in supporting child development.

In this article we broadened the categorical framework of systemic anthropological psychology definitions of the development initiative concepts: system, object, element, system analysis, objective analysis, elemental analysis, tonality, intonation and intention. We propose to use the category tonality of development initiative - for systemic description, the category intonation of development initiative – for object description, and the intention of development initiative - for elemental description. The new concepts are supported by the methods: system analysis for systems, objective analysis for objects, and elemental (probabilistic) analysis for elements. The logic of methods of psychological research of a person as an open self-developing system is presented in application to the study of human (individual) potential and interaction potential: system analysis of interaction tonalities, objective (phenomenological) analysis for interaction intonations, and probabilistic (statistical) analysis for interaction intentions. An example of a pilot study of assessing individual potential in a group of first-year students of the Faculty of Psychology is given in order to develop a platform solution for creating an epigenetic educational environment.

The article attempts to trace the connection between the worldview positions and attitudes of Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky and modern scientific ideas in the field of practical psychology. It is noted that a new round of interest in the ideas of the great Russian teacher is due to conceptual changes in domestic education, understanding the problems and priorities of its development, and the search for new models and strategies for pedagogical interaction. The object of the study is the problems of man, dialogue and artistic creativity in the legacy of Ushinsky and in modern psychological practice. The influence of the ideas of Ushinsky is noted both in the course of accumulation and systematization of knowledge about a person, and in the process of building psychological anthropology. It is considered how the problem of the influence of one personality on another in the legacy of Ushinsky develops in the dialogical approach of T.A.Florenskaya, based on the spiritual and moral guidelines that have been established over the centuries and are inextricably linked with the traditions of Russian philosophical thought. Particular attention is paid to dialogue, which is understood as a creative, spiritually transformative communication. The constitutive principles and basic concepts of a spiritually oriented dialogue are considered. The vector of personal development of a person in the conditions of internal dialogue is indicated and the consequences in the situation of its deformation are named. The influence of Ushinsky's idea about the role of artistic creativity on modern art therapy practice, which combines various types of art with therapeutic, correctional and developmental goals, is shown. The reasons why artistic creativity is necessary for the full personal development of the child are listed. It is concluded that the problems of a person, dialogue, artistic creativity, which worried the great Russian teacher, remain the epicenter in the field of modern scientific and practical research. The ideas of the great thinker are not copied, but continue to live, develop, be rethought and creatively transformed.

Abstract This article explores the relationship between schizophrenia, divine encounters, and therapeutics based on ethnographic research in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Contributing to a long history of single‐subject ethnographies in psychological anthropology, this article narrates the events leading up to the diagnosis and the emerging life worlds post‐diagnosis of an interlocutor I call Dhruv. I depart from symbolic constructions of the divine to an affective divine, a kind of force that enters and alters embodied existence. Following scholars who call for theories that move beyond Western metropolitan epistemologies, I draw upon the Bhagavad Gita, a poetic scripture from the Hindu tradition, as a form of psychological theory to contend how an encounter with the divine might be too much to bear, even traumatic. In doing so, the article offers an alternative entry point to the commonly held assumption of the therapeutic efficacy of divine encounters and religious sites in India.

Statistical reconstruction can be applied to psychological tendencies that project themselves as the ontological essence of a theoretical construct. This research featured the theoretical construct of individual cognitive education space. The research objective was to study the operational possibilities of statistical measurement of a theoretical phenomenon. The general scientific principles of systemic anthropological psychology served as the methodological basis of conceptual interpretation. The theoretical construct of individual cognitive education space was reconstructed through temporal, operational, cognitive, and metacognitive dimensions. The statistical methods included correlation analysis, principal component analysis, scree test, and Shapiro – Wilk test. They revealed three components of linear functions from theoretically identified and empirically measured temporal, operational, cognitive, and metacognitive characteristics. The component behind the interrelation of cognitive and metacognitive processes was identified empirically. It included six main metric elements, namely: temporal-cognitive strategies for solving problems of switching between tasks, dynamic components of positional strategies, motivational self-determination, design, forecasting, and structural components of constructive and conceptual levels. The study proved the empirical efficiency of statistical reconstruction applied to theoretical constructs and defined the psychological specifics of individual cognitive education space.

Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as “normal,” which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropology, we argue for the need to attend to interactions and behavior as the necessary basis for anthropological studies of personhood and subjectivity. These foci, which build on a foundation provided by affect theory and disability studies, stand to open up anthropological conceptions of personhood and subjectivity and resituate the process of attribution in making persons and subjects. We articulate a psychotic anthropology that centers atypical forms of consciousness and seeks to unsettle anthropological assumptions about mind, cognition, and consciousness.

Special section: Psychological anthropology