Making Sense of Culture for the Psychological Sciences

Abstract

In this article, we examine the place of culture in the human sciences with specific reference to psychology and the cultural histories of India. Despite the depth of scholarly writing on the intimate and inextricable ties between culture and psychological processes, core advancements and definitive positions in psychology have remained elusive. The privileging of a single culturally specific world-view alongside the exclusion of others has seriously hindered the authentic internationalization of psychology. We propose that linkages between culture and psychology need to be visualized as a dialogue between different cultural traditions. In the dialectics between bheda–abheda (difference and non-difference), structural-developmental, dispositional-relational, and social-collective processes will be invoked to develop our arguments for a human-science approach to the study of persons in culture. We argue that it is through the inclusion, rather than suppression, of diverse ideologies that generalizability can be best achieved. This is a call for an audit and reconstruction of psychology and its practices as an international discipline with a roadmap for theory construction and research informed by a cultural psychological approach toward human phenomena.