ABSTRACT
In a variety of ways, all the contributors to this volume are calling for a fuller and more nuanced understanding of culture and the cultural in psychological research and practice. This book is concerned with a perspective that has become known as the ‘new cultural psychology’ (Shweder, 1990), and sets out to explore this emerging approach in all its diversity. The debates on the ‘new cultural psychology’ revolve around two related but distinct issues: first, the critiques of mainstream psychology as Anglocentric and the advocacy of a more culturally sensitive psychology which is politically engaged (e.g. Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997); and second, calls for a deeper understanding of the relationship between psychology and the cultural domain. This latter aspect of the ‘new cultural psychology’ involves a connection with debates in the humanities and cultural studies, as well as in social anthropology and the new cultural geography (e.g. Pile and Thrift, 1995). In particular, a consideration of the relationship between psychology and the cultural domain involves an engagement with post-modernism(s), post-structuralism(s), feminism(s) and more recent approaches to the practice of ethnography. A major implication of such an engagement for contemporary western psychology concerns the ‘new’ theories of the subject and subjectivity which have emerged from post-structuralism and psychoanalytic perspectives (e.g. Henriques et al., 1984; Walkerdine, 1996), and which are covered in depth elsewhere in this volume. This new approach to subjectivity also involves an engagement with new understandings of ‘difference’, including cultural difference, informed by postmodernism and post-structuralist ideas (Ferguson et al., 1990).
