Conceptualising personhood, agency, and morality for African psychology

Abstract

One of the functions of psychological science is to develop concepts for thinking about people and their well-being. Since its establishment as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century, psychology has developed concepts that are essentially rooted in the specific spatio-temporal context of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. There is a growing ontological and epistemological awareness that psychological science and practices from WEIRD cultural spaces cannot be exclusively representative of the African experience. I draw from interpersonal violence research to discuss the concepts of personhood, agency, and morality from an African perspective and highlight their theoretical and practical utility for psychological science. Based on African communalism, I argue that an understanding of personhood, agency, and morality as culturally contextualised and socially intentioned phenomena is foundational to the advancement of heterogeneous practices of knowledge production in diverse contexts.

Dilemma Tales as African Knowledge Practice: An Example From Research on Obligations of Support

“…On the independent variable side, although our interest is cultural-ecological affordances for modern individualism and embedded interdependence, we did not measure these affordances directly. Instead, we conducted a comparison of existing groups of people who inhabit Ghanaian and U.S. settings that previous work has associated with differences on these dimensions (e.g., Adams and Dzokoto, 2003 ; Adams and Plaut, 2003 ; Adams, 2005 ; Adjei, 2019 ). Moreover, even if observed differences in reactions to dilemmas are a function of affordances for embeddedness and modern individualism, the reliance on existing groups cannot address questions about the distal causes of observed differences in these affordances.…”

Indigenous music learning in contemporary contexts: Nurturing learner identity, agency, and passion

“…Among the Basoga, like other African societies, belonging and relating within community is an ever-present conscious life goal of an individual that is expressed through working in and with members to address existing needs. One is viewed in community and nurses a lifetime objective to be an acceptable member of community by behaving in conformity to society’s norms and values of personhood (Adjei, 2019). This aligns with Elliott and Silverman’s (2015) holistic concept of personhood as “embodied, enactive, social-cultural being” (p. 156).…”

Stigma in African genomics research: Gendered blame, polygamy, ancestry and disease causal beliefs impact on the risk of harm

“…Stigma has also frequently arisen as a concern in African genomics research in cases where the disease under investigation is attributed to spiritual or supernatural causes. One important component of African ontology is the continuity between those who lived in the past, those who are alive today, and those who will live in the future ( Adjei, 2019 ). In this worldview, relations with those that have gone before – the ancestors – are tangible and the belief may be that people are born or fall ill with diseases because the ancestors are upset and need to be appeased ( Mbazima, 2016 ).…”