William Hartmann publishes on psychological anthropology and Native American Peoples

William Hartmann published a chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Psychological Anthropology that compares recent ethnographic and Indigenous scholarship about psychosocial well-being among Native American Peoples.

Taking popular critiques of anthropological research by Beatrice Medicine and Vine Deloria Jr. as an evaluative framework (abstract theory leads to abstract action, community control over research, relational approaches to knowledge production), Hartmann compared five recent ethnographies in Native communities with three emerging areas of Indigenous scholarship. All addressed questions related to the psychosocial well-being of Native American Peoples. However, while the Indigenous scholarship reviewed was well-aligned with critiques by Medicine and Deloria, the ethnographies had a variable and mixed record on different benchmarks. Recommendations are offered for advancing a psychological anthropology for Indigenous Peoples.