ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the scientific and political aspects of macro cultural psychology are interdependent – as they are in all social science approaches. The high level achieved by macro cultural psychology on both dimensions makes it an emancipatory psychological science. The chapter explains the main principles and concepts of macro cultural psychology’s science and politics. These are explained not as standalone, given, elements, but rather through a “genetic analysis” of their dynamic, historical, and contemporary engagement with other approaches to cultural psychology.
The other approaches that form the “dialectical other” (or extended self) of macro cultural psychology are traditional cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and micro cultural psychology. Traditional cultural psychology is the closest to macro cultural psychology and will occupy most of the genetic development of macro cultural psychology.
Macro cultural psychology adds power and politics to traditional cultural psychology’s conception of culture and psychology. Power and politics emphasize structural and dynamic features of culture and psychology, such as social class, exploitation, mystification, alienation, commodification, precariousness, and dispossession. Emphasizing these issues in culture and psychology makes macro cultural psychology a critical perspective for social reorganization through political action.
