Cultural Psychology emerged as an interdisciplinary subfield roughly in the 1980s/1990s. With about thirty years of momentum, this discipline has grown from little more than a special interests group to a topic to whi...Cultural Psychology emerged as an interdisciplinary subfield roughly in the 1980s/1990s. With about thirty years of momentum, this discipline has grown from little more than a special interests group to a topic to which multiple institutions and journals have been dedicated. This paper presents an outline of the discipline of Cultural Psychology from an American interdisciplinary perspective. The pitfalls of General Psychology (research methodology, politicization, and an essentialist hermeneutic) and Anthropology (an epistemological gap in the four fields approach, psychophobia, and the role of the researcher in cultural change) are addressed, in turn. Cultural Psychology provides an alternative to these pitfalls by drawing on the strengths of each discipline to address both theoretical and empirical problems. Cultural Psychology urges for a critical reflection on the social structure and history of its own discipline, resulting in a broader academic canon and a more nuanced understanding of interdisciplinary relations within the human sciences.展开更多
文摘Cultural Psychology emerged as an interdisciplinary subfield roughly in the 1980s/1990s. With about thirty years of momentum, this discipline has grown from little more than a special interests group to a topic to which multiple institutions and journals have been dedicated. This paper presents an outline of the discipline of Cultural Psychology from an American interdisciplinary perspective. The pitfalls of General Psychology (research methodology, politicization, and an essentialist hermeneutic) and Anthropology (an epistemological gap in the four fields approach, psychophobia, and the role of the researcher in cultural change) are addressed, in turn. Cultural Psychology provides an alternative to these pitfalls by drawing on the strengths of each discipline to address both theoretical and empirical problems. Cultural Psychology urges for a critical reflection on the social structure and history of its own discipline, resulting in a broader academic canon and a more nuanced understanding of interdisciplinary relations within the human sciences.