Rolando Díaz-Loving - Ethnopsychology: Pieces from the Mexican Research Gallery

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In spite of, or perhaps because of, its historical dependence on European philosophy and its geographical closeness to the hub of the twentieth-century psychology, an incessant question has lingered in the loin of Mexican thinkers and theorists as to the roots of the character of its people. At the same time, the ceaseless attempt to describe the Mexican character from a standpoint that would include the psychological mainstream contributions and the cosmovision of a heterogeneous ethnic aggregation of beings has synthesized into the need for an autochthons psychology. The search for universal answers, while existing in an idiosyncratic reality, favored questions about emic and etic phenomena. The emergence of an indigenous psychology was inevitable. An ethnopsychological perspective has enriched our understanding of classic and current research about the most important phenomena and topics in the science of social behavior. This book is intended to reflect this outlook and its structural bases and functional implications. We, as part of a collectivist community, invite the reader to contemplate the theory, the methodology, and the content derived from a Mexican ethnopsychology.

I have been influenced by many. I must acknowledge the imprint of my mentor at the University of Texas at Austin, Richard Archer, as well as other outstanding researchers in the Social Psychology Ph.D. program, among them, Walter Stephan, Janet Spence, Robert Helmreich, Robert Wicklund, and William Swann. Also important was the daily deliberations I had with my fellow students, Peter Gollwitzer, Walter Earl, Roque Mendez, and Mark Davis, among others. I owe to this formation years my attention to internal validity and mainstream psychology. In terms of the socio-cultural context and the attention to external validity, collaborations and interactions with a set of cross-cultural psychologists were central. Among those who influenced me the most are John Adair and John Berry from Canada, Hector Betancourt and Jose Luis Saiz from Chile, Ruben Ardila from Colombia, James Georgas from Greece, Michael Bond from Hong Kong, Ype Poortinga from the Netherlands, Reynaldo Alarcon from Peru, and Uichol Kim from South Korea. However, even before my formative years, an intellectual network had been established in my youth by my father, Rogelio Diaz-Guerrero, and his colleagues. Among the most renowned were Wayne Holtzman, Ira Iscoe, Robert Peck, Charles Osgood, Abraham Maslow, Charles Spielberger, and Harry Triandis.