Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market

This interdisciplinary edited collection addresses issues at the intersection of indigenous psychology, market ideology, values, and technology. The aims of this book arise from the recognition that whereas the unfolding of the agricultural revolution over thousands of years allowed for the gradual co-evolution of values and technology to blossom, the post-industrial technological revolution is so accelerated that there has been little time for the co-evolution of values. To address this, the chapters collected here seek to initiate a conversation that will provide the conceptual space for the evolution of values that can keep pace with contemporary developments in the machine and the market. In this conversation, they argue, indigenous psychologies will necessarily play a central role for two reasons: firstly, as alternative systems of thought they enable a productive interrogation of the rationality of machine and the market; and second, examples of the impact of technology and the market on traditional societies hold lessons for potential future impacts on the society as a whole. This timely work offers fresh insights that will appeal to students and scholars of psychology, cultural and religious studies, anthropology, business and economics, and science and technology studies.

Alvin Dueck is Distinguished Senior Professor of Cultural Psychologies at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, USA. He has served as a consultant to international agencies since 1984 and is actively involved in encouraging indigenous mental health awareness and services in Guatemala, Africa, and China. He is author of A Peaceable Psychology (2009).

Louise Sundararajan received her Ph.D. in History of Religions from Harvard University, and her Ed.D. in Counseling Psychology from Boston University, USA. She is founder and chair of the Task Force on Indigenous Psychology, which has grown to have over two hundred researchers from around the globe. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. She has served as past president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of the American Psychological Association) and is recipient of the Abraham Maslow Award from Division 32 of APA.