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What if Discipline Is Not Interdisciplinary? The Case of Social Psychology in India

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Abstract

The present work highlight the missing picture of interdisciplinarity in Indian social psychology from a critical cultural perspective. In India, social psychologists’ tried to inculcate the missing picture of ‘indigenous perspective’ from the cultural vantage point. The idea of this article is to explain the problem with claimed indigenous status without critically handling the reified social categories such as social class, religion, gender, and caste. However, this was handled to some extent in other disciplines but a deeper connection was not observed to be with the social psychology in India. There were divides and differences in the explanation of the same issues and the theoretical and methodological stance of these different disciplines created a further gap in coming up with the meaningful construction.

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Notes

  1. The term interdisciplinarity was coined by Erich Jantsch (1970) which denotes the integration of disciplinary knowledge to understand any phenomenon. Some of the interesting works on the meaning of interdisciplinarity were taken forward critically by the social scientists (e.g. see Julia Klein 1990, 1996, 2014; Jacobs 2013; Kagan 2009).

  2. Franz Fanon was psychiatrist and one of the main critique of the colonial impact on the blackness in the African context. in the context of racism fanon insisted for the psychology and self which is framed by the vocabulary of resistance (see also Hook 2005)

  3. Martin Baro was Jesuit priest and psychiatrist in the Latin America who called for the psychology of liberation from the state sponsored oppression.

  4. Both Fanon and Baro rejected the oppressor’s self and insisted for the de-colonialized approach in the construction of psychological self which advanced for emancipation and liberation. Overall, they looked for the psychology which is self-empowering by rejecting the power and identity of oppressor

  5. Reina Gattuso (2018). Students strike, farmers march, and women rise: this week in India’s social movements. http://feministing.com/2018/03/21/students-strike-farmers-march-and-women-rise-this-week-in-indias-social-movements/

  6. Editorial. (2018). Social Movements in the Global South. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 7 (2) vii–xii.

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  1. O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India

    Chetan Sinha

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Sinha, C. What if Discipline Is Not Interdisciplinary? The Case of Social Psychology in India. Integr. psych. behav. 53, 504–524 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-9473-y

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