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23 - Psychological Anthropology and Native American Peoples

Recent Ethnographic and Indigenous Scholarship on Psychosocial Well-Being

from Part V - Postcolonial and Political–Economic Interventions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2025

Edward Lowe
Affiliation:
Soka University of America
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Summary

William E. Hartmann and Joseph P. Gone use insights from Beatrice Medicine and Vine Deloria Jr., two luminaries in understanding how anthropology might better serve Indigenous peoples, as an evaluative framework to review five recent ethnographies on psychosocial well-being among Native Americans and three areas of Indigenous scholarship.Hartmann and Gone observe commonalities across areas of Indigenous scholarship and variation among ethnographic works in their degrees of theoretical abstraction, affordances for community control, and attention to relationality in knowledge production. Recommendations related to shifting the ethnographic gaze away from Indigenous peoples toward structures of power that constrain Indigenous self-determination are made in hopes of fostering more reciprocal relations between psychological anthropology and Native American peoples.

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