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Article ID: CBB001551580

Neglect of the Foreign Invisible: Historiography and the Navigation of Conflicting Sensibilities (2015)

Burman, Jeremy Trevelyan (Author)

History of Psychology
Volume: 18, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 146-169

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This essay is intended first as a contribution to historiography, and only second as a contribution to the history of developmental psychology. It is therefore a discussion---primarily---of the doing of the history of psychology, rather than of its content. Briefly put: American psychology, including its associated approaches to the history of psychology, is not adequately equipped to benefit fully from the contributions of foreign scholars. To make the resulting argument clear, two archive-driven microhistories are reviewed, contrasted, augmented with new archival research, and synthesized: Yeh Hsueh's (2004) examination of the nomination process at Harvard University that led to the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Jean Piaget in 1936, and Marc Ratcliff and Paloma Borella's (2013) examination---just recently published in French---of a similar process that resulted in Piaget's hiring at Geneva in 1929 and his eventual promotion in 1940. Comparing the authors' different approaches to similar content then affords this article's larger argument: we need to broaden our sensibilities so we can see high-quality foreign contributions for what they are. Several interesting insights result if we do. Among them: although Piaget's theory is today mistakenly criticized for being asocial, and this serves as justification for countering his early works with Vygotsky's posthumous critique, it emerges from these archival studies that Piaget may have in fact chosen to present himself and his work as nonsociological (when this was not the case) for reasons unrelated to his intellectual project. Such examples then broaden the discussion of “neglect of the foreign invisible” to include suppression---even censorship (by self or other)---which in turn reflects the primary problem afforded by internationalization: by what standards are we to judge the contributions of “foreigners” into “our” discipline?

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