Article ID: CBB670172565

Picturing Ethnopsychology: A Colonial Psychiatrist’s Struggles to Examine Javanese Minds, 1910–1925 (2019)

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This article explores C. F. Engelhard’s struggles to construct psychometric devices for the Netherlands Indies between 1910 and 1925. A young Dutch psychiatrist, Engelhard moved to the Netherlands Indies in 1916, where he applied his clinical experience to subject Javanese individuals to mental assessment devices. He imagined that basic picture tests and one’s orientation in time provided apt solutions to the cross-cultural challenges facing him. To turn his prototypes into actual tests, Engelhard had to leave his daily work environment and move into the surrounding villages. Aided by local chiefs and his assistant, Soekirman, he managed to set up temporary testing sites, where he examined hundreds of Javanese individuals. Yet despite his attempts to transform Javanese farmers into subjects capable of taking a psychological test, the Javanese remained free to make—or fail to make—meaning out of Engelhard’s images. Even though the psychiatrist went to great lengths in taking into account the particular social and cultural features of psychological practice in a colonial context, a vast chasm remained to exist between him and his test takers. This article examines Engelhard’s practices against the backdrop of his training as a Western psychiatrist, colonial ideology in the Netherlands Indies, and the reception of his research by other colonial scientists with a wide range of attitudes about “the native mind.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)

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Article Hans Pols; Harry Yi-Jui Wu (2019) Psychology and Psychiatry in the Global World: Historical Perspectives. History of Psychology (pp. 219-224). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Pols, Hans
Bergen, Leo van
Hoogte, Arjo Roersch van der
Moon, Suzanne Marie
Pieters, Toine
Crozier, Ivan
Journals
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Technology and Culture
Environment and History
History and Technology
History of Psychiatry
History of Psychology
Publishers
Cambridge University Press
CNWS Publications
Lexington Books
National University of Singapore Press
United Nations University
Vossiuspers UvA - Amsterdam University Press
Concepts
Netherlands, colonies
Colonialism
Medicine
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Agriculture
Technology
People
Kraepelin, Emil
Mohr, Johan Maurits
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
18th century
17th century
Places
Java (Indonesia)
East Indies
Indonesia
Netherlands
Indochina
Japan
Institutions
Dutch East India Company
Rockefeller Foundation
Dutch Red Cross
Red Cross Societies
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