Subjectivity as Socioculturally Constituted Experience

Beyond the oversocialized conception of the subject in psychology: Desire, conflict, and the problem of social order

“…These theories and theorists are very diverse, but all take as a first premise that social relations and structures, as well as cultural symbols and rituals, form human experience and activity in irreducible ways. A corollary of this premise is that the phenomena psychologists study cannot be fully disentangled from those “contextual” elements (Kirschner, 2010, 2015, 2019b).…”

“…The theoretical and methodological traditions associated with sociocultural psychologies have long been influential in other human science disciplines, such as psychological anthropology and some subfields of sociology (see Kirschner, 2015; Kirschner & Martin, 2010). It is noteworthy that leading architects of sociocultural and critical psychology were prominent among the founders and original editorial board of Theory & Psychology ; many of the board’s current members are also associated with those traditions.…”

“…While I continue to appreciate the value and usefulness of these approaches for studying social life, I also remain concerned about the consequences, for psychological theory and inquiry, of totalizing two intertwined assumptions upon which nearly all of them seem to rest (Kirschner, 2010, 2015, 2019b). First, there is an assumption that individual personhood or subjectivity emerges entirely from social contexts (whether these are described as discursive, linguistic, relational, cultural, historical, and/or political–economic).…”

African psychology and the emergence of the Madiban tradition

“…Western psychology’s tendency to undertake its psychological study of human beings in a mechanized, laboratory-centred, decontextualized condition bereft of a background. In contrast, African psychology, operating from the point of view of the African worldview as depicted in Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), and as highlighted by Nyamnjoh (2017), assumes that “People and things adopt different forms and manifest themselves differently according to context and necessity” (p. 258) and consequently that the “contamination” of context and background must always be taken into account in any psychological study of human beings (Kirschner, 2015).…”

“…Responding in the same way, important critical psychologists and scholars from the African diaspora have mounted a similar challenge against the exclusive domination of Eurocentric psychology (Akbar, 1984; Ani, 1994; Asante, 1998, 2003; Azibo, 1988; Belgrave & Allison, 2006; Guthrie, 1998; Harrell, 1999; Kambon, 1992; Mazama, 2001; Myers, 2012; Myers & Speight, 2010). All of the above critics have consistently emphasized the conviction that traditional (mainstream) Western psychological theories are highly culture-bound and do not have significant cross-cultural validity, generalizability, and applicability (Bhatia & Stam, 2005; Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, & Misra, 1996; Heine & Norenzayan, 2006; Kirschner, 2015; Nwoye, 2017).…”