From the Field to the Self. Ethnopsychology and the Politics of Culture Contact, 1930–1980

This thesis traces the concept of “culture contact” and its epistemic and political consequences for the human and social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. From the consolidation of acculturation as a research category in American anthropology in the 1930s, through its translation into international social science in the 1950s, and to its reformulation in French debates on applied anthropology and ethnopsychiatry in the 1970s, the thesis follows the biography of a contested idea: How did this formerly colonial and politically charged concept create a supposedly neutral yet highly normative framework and inform both applied and reflexive projects in nascent decolonization? The thesis uses the field of acculturation studies and the discourse of “culture contact” as a lens through which it historicizes a body of knowledge at the intersection of anthropology and the psy-disciplines: ethnopsychology. It does not tell the origin story of a new discipline but argues that the politics of culture contact became – and ceased to be – a privileged forum for the discussion of the use of psychological methods in anthropology and beyond. It demonstrates how subject formation and self-observation came to be seen as resources for the human and social sciences, as they were negotiated across ethical and epistemological registers.