The World Looks Like This From Here

Kopano Ratele

Description

Innovative in form and content, The World Looks Like This From Here offers thoughts about the ideas, contestation, urgency and desire around a psychological praxis in Africa for Africans. Setting out a situated, pluralising framework for researching, teaching and practising African psychology, the book urges reflection on and reconsideration of how the discipline is taught and practised on the continent. Writing against the universal application of a Western model of psychology, which is unreflective about its locatedness even as it pushes Africa to the margins, Ratele urges readers to engage and think deeply about new ways of seeing and thinking about the self and others. He asserts that the deliberate attempt to see the world from Africa – to look at everything with the whole self from here – leads to heightened consciousness about ways of being in the world, and enhances the capacity for healing. This lyrical, philosophical and poetic treatise is a cogent and timely response to the call for the decolonisation of social sciences and other disciplines.

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• Psychology
• General

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776143924
• Langue: English

Extrait

The World Looks Like This From Here
The World Looks Like This From Here
Thoughts on African Psychology
Kopano Ratele
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright Kopano Ratele 2019
Published edition Wits University Press 2019
First published 2019
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12019093900
978-1-77614-390-0 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-391-7 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-392-4 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-393-1 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Project manager: Lisa Compton
Copyeditor: Karen Press
Proofreader: Lee Smith
Indexer: Sanet le Roux
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typesetter: MPS
Typeset in 10.5 point Crimson
Contents
Author s note
1 (African)
2 The necessary adjective
3 Disorientation
4 Awake to Africa
5 A way of seeing
6 Off-centre
7 Words are not enough
8 Teaching Africa
9 Psychology is culture
10 Africa internationalised
11 Aiming for redundancy
12 Overlooked perspectives
13 Unselfconscious situatedness
14 Own goal
15 African scholarship
16 Education as ethical responsibility
17 Black children and white dolls
18 Search for Africa in psychology
19 Dethingifying
20 Three problems
21 Fog and friction
22 African enough?
23 Antipathy, apathy
24 Superhuman subhuman
25 Sources of negativity
26 Not all (blacks) think alike
27 Causes of confusion
28 Estrangement
29 The centre
30 Terminology
31 Defining by negation
32 Self-sabotage
33 A welcoming home
34 Defining by affirmation
35 Scholarly extraverts and introverts
36 It s African, except when it s not
37 Points on a continuum
38 Invisible Africa
39 Calls to decolonise
40 We need to talk
41 A heterogeneous terrain
42 It s power, stupid
43 Living with constant resistance
44 A psychological history of struggle
45 Healing potential
46 Porous hegemony
47 An offshore model
48 Only a situated understanding will do
49 Satisfied with alienation
50 A worldwide need
51 Diverse and dynamic orientations
52 Returning to definition
53 A psychology from nowhere
54 A proposal
55 (African) American psychology
56 Mischievous questions
57 Solutions to alienation
58 Conscientisation
59 A new course
60 Complicity
61 The lost self
62 An unacknowledged past
63 In and of the world
64 Origins of (African) psychology
65 Birth of a discipline
66 Paternity claims
67 Fatal intimacy
68 Lineage and authority
69 Being African
70 Interconnectivity
71 Four axioms
72 Above all
73 The past in the present
74 Making space for all
75 Caveat
76 A variegated approach
77 The ultimate goal
78 Real constraints
79 Debates and contests
80 A contingent term
81 Polyvocality
82 Four orientations
83 Notes on Western-oriented African psychology
84 The world as it is
85 Notes on psychological African studies
86 A note on cultural African psychology
87 Traditions and modernities
88 Further notes on cultural African psychology
89 A note on critical African psychology
90 Misperceiving the object
91 Permeable boundaries
92 European archives, African exchanges
93 Continued hopes and frustrations
94 (African) developmental psychology
95 (African) community psychology
96 Awake to yourself
97 Tenets of psychology
98 Psychological freedom
99 Think Africa in the world
100 Always the future

References
Index
Author s note
A decade ago I would not have advised anyone to study psychology. Psychology, I would have said, is bad for your mental health, and were it to turn out that being a psychologist is good for your economic status, the likelihood is that you would be supporting the marginalisation of people who most need psychological help.
Today, I have reassessed my attitude towards psychology. Today, if a student is adamant that he wants to study psychology, having made him aware of the discipline s history and contemporary complicity with coloniality, racism, apartheid and Euroamerican-centricity, and having made sure he understands how many psychologists tend to remain silent in the face of psychological torture and oppression, I will not say, do not study psychology. I will say, do not forget to study how psychology studies people. Do not forget your self. Do not forget the people who need your help but cannot afford the ridiculous fees. Reach beyond what psychology teaches you about healing, for only then will you be able to recognise that the psychological healers themselves, especially those whose colonial and apartheid wounding has not received any attention, need healing. Reach beyond how this field in which you want expertise wants you to study humans, wants you to act towards people, other animals, plants, other living beings and the universe. Study beyond its methods, interpretations, theories and conclusions. Pay attention to its assumptions and do not get entrapped by them: to the way those who call themselves psychologists approach people and the world around them; to how those who call themselves psychotherapists go about trying to heal people and themselves. Most of all, don t be satisfied with American psychology in Africa; search for Africa in psychological theories, build a cultural home for Africans in psychology, which is to say, build a psychology that centres Africa, a conscious, critical, reflective African psychology.
Do not believe anyone who seeks to dismiss your search for a psychology that centres your experience, your knowledge, your cultural connectedness, your being as a person living in an African country.
The idea of African psychology appears to be a simple and straightforward matter. Except that it often is not. The latter situation, where there is confusion more than clarity, is usually the state of affairs.
So here it is: African psychology is not something outside of global psychology. But it goes beyond it.
African psychology is not ethnopsychology. It is not a psychology practised only on Africans, not only a psychology by African psychologists, not only for Africans. Not in my book.
African psychology is not a branch of psychology in the way cognitive psychology is.
African psychology is an integral part of all human psychology. We may even say African psychology is at the beginning of the evolution of human psychology - I am referring not to psychology as a discipline but to the way the human psyche has evolved. But that is not a central argument in this book.
This is a book about one thing, although I hope you will be able to find many useful things in it. That one thing is that African psychology is a way of looking. An orientation. A situatedness in psychology, in African societies and in the world at large. African psychology is a psychology for Africa and Africans that does not exoticise, that disalienates even while centring itself in the world. What I seek to convey in the book is the idea that to be authentic and have a meaningful life as a student of psychology in Africa, a counsellor, or a teacher of psychology, and still be at home in Africa - not only because you may be made to lose the original language of your dreams - you will have to always remind yourself to see with your own eyes, remind yourself that you are entitled to being in the world. That way of looking and seeing and acting comes from challenging the Euroamerican traditions, concepts, approaches and findings that engulf psychology in Africa, into which we, in Africa, are hailed as psychology students, teachers, therapists and researchers.
* * *
Many people have contributed to this book in overt and indirect, seen and indiscernible ways. Life has never been the same since I met the once most famous person in Nate Holland s universe, Ketso Ratele. Dab. I wish to make a note of my appreciation for learning from all of my PhD students in the Transdisciplinary African Psychologies Programme and the Research Unit on Men and Masculinities at the University of South Africa (Unisa), and for all the formal and informal conversations that have contributed to my ongoing thinking on African psychology. For her skill in convening the colloquia series on African psychology, belief in what we are doing, reverse management and overall doggedness, I want to thank Neziswa Titi. Rebecca Helman is not only great as an editor but also as a social advocate, a terrific student, and an enviable collaborator. Thank you for editing the first draft of the manuscript. The conversations, some very long and others in the corridors between our offices, with Refiloe Makama, Nicholas Malherbe, Sarah Day, Zenzile Molo, Josephine Cornell and Sipho Dlamini have urged me to elaborate my thoughts about African psychology. Much of Section 15 was first published as a post on 4 February 2016, in the blog African Psychology ( https://africanpsychology.net/2016/02/04/stop-wasting-time-on-academic-fads-like-postmodern-psychology-and-build-a-world-centred-african-psychology/ ).
In 2016 the folk at the Psychology Department at Rhodes University invited me for a visit and I had the first opportunity to air some of the elements of my orientations framework. I want to thank them for this opportunity. The executive director and president of the Psychological Society of South Africa offered me a space in 2017 and 2018 to test some of my ideas at the Annual Congresses of Psychology and I would like to extend my appreciation. Andr Keet invited me to Nelson Mandela University in 2018, where I had a pleasurable interaction with psychology students: thank you brother. I am appreciative of the financial support for the book provided by the Unisa Institute for Social Health