Methodology As a Ritualized Eurocentrism: Introduction to the Special Issue

Cultural Psychology and Decolonizing Methodologies Extensive reviews of the field of psychology show its inextricable linkage with socio-cultural history (see Bruner, 1990; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997). Since the end of the 1970s, we have witnessed some interest toward cultural and/or indigenous psychology from mainstream psychologists--the trend that fully emerged in the 1990s (Hwang, 2003; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002; Shweder, 2000). The indigenous movement in psychology was a result of the intellectual anticolonialism, largely triggered by a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape around the world in the aftermath of the Second World War. The changing power structure between Western and non-Western nations was also reflected in the fact that people who traditionally had been the object of study (and therefore powerless) were now increasingly taking up a role as researchers. Hence, they acquired the means to articulate the process of Othering found in many Western academic discourses. As defined by Weedon (2004), "Othering" refers to the process of "constructing another people or group as radically different to oneself or one's own group, usually on the basis of racist and/or ethnocentric discourses" (p. 166). By challenging how the cultural Other was represented in and through academic discourses, minority (in terms of power) scholars offered insights on the clash between images and realities imposed from the outside (etic perspective) and ontological concepts coming from the inside (emic perspective).