Indigenous and Cultural Psychology

Category       : E-Books

Author          : Uichol Kim, Kuo-Shu Yang, Kwang-Kuo Hwang

Publisher      : Springer

Year              : 2006

Page              : 524

Language      : English

File Type       : Pdf

Size               : 3,144 KB

Review     : INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGY-Indigenous psychology represents the transactional scientific paradigm in which individuals are viewed as agents of their action and collective agents through their culture (Kim, 1999, 2000, 2001). In human sciences, people are both the subject and the object of investigation. Although the objective third-person perspective is necessary in psychology, it is not sufficient. We need to supplement it with the first-person experiential perspective (i.e., agency, meaning, beliefs and intention) and the second-person analysis Scientific Foundation of Indigenous Psychology 33 (e.g., discourse analysis, Harré & Gillet, 1994). We need to obtain an integrated understanding of the first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives in order to obtain a complete picture of human functioning. In everyday life people have phenomenological, episodic, and procedural knowledge of

how to manage their environment but they may not have the analytical skills to describe how it is done. Since most people do not possess the analytical skills, it is the role of the researcher to help participants
articulate their actions analytically. For example, adult native English speakers can freely express their thoughts in English (i.e., procedural knowledge), but they may not know the grammatical syntax or structure (i.e., semantic knowledge). As Wittgenstein points out that, “a description of the grammar of a word is of no use in everyday life; only rarely do we pick up the use of a word by having its use described to us; and although we are trained or encouraged to master the use of the word, we are not taught to describe it” (Budd, 1989, p. 4–5). In human life, both experiential knowledge (e.g., a football player describing his experiences playing a game) and analytical knowledge (e.g., sport commentator providing a play-by-play analysis) are useful information that need to be integrated (e.g., a coach planning strategies for the next game).