For many centuries, ethnic psychology has attracted the attention of scientists. And this is not surprising for several reasons:
- there are a huge number of ethnic communities in the world and all their representatives have their own psychological peculiarities;
- the majority of states are multinational and therefore the interaction, relationships, and communication of their numerous members are always peculiar and they need to be properly perceived, evaluated and taken into account;
- nowadays, in connection with the course of globalization, there is a heightened sensitivity to the ethnic specificity of people in the world;
- the actual similarity and difference in psychology of the pre-industrial society and the psychology of the pre-industrial society
That is why there are many approaches to understanding the content of the subject of ethnic psychology both within the psychological field of knowledge itself and among different scientists.
The history of the emergence and development of ethnopsychology as a science should be a separate subject of close attention and study. As well as understanding its paradigms, which is the purpose of this article. A paradigm is a set of ideas and views expressed in the form of universally recognized positions and principles of the scientific community in solving the most common tasks and problems of this or that branch of knowledge.
At the same time, it is obvious that in ethnopsychology, which has been formed at the intersection of different disciplines - psychology, sociology, ethnology, anthropology, culturology, etc., it is noteworthy that in the case of ethnopsychology, the most common problems of this or that branch of knowledge have been solved by the scientific community. It is also necessary to take into account the manifestation of its methodological principles, which are:
- the principle of social, ethnic and cultural-psychological complexity and continuity;
- the principle of ethno-psychological causality and influence;
- the principle of the unity of psychological phenomena, environment and activity of people;
- the principle of ethnopsychological (cultural) systemicity;
- the principle of cultural-psychological development;
- the principle of ethnocultural objectivity
The first paradigm of ethnic psychology has the name descriptive and originates from the period of its formation as a science at the end of the XIX century, when it appeared first in Europe and then in the United States. The subject was the ethnic originality of psyche (national and socio-psychological features) of people in general and in particular their character and psychological state, patterns of functioning of national consciousness, stereotypes, a study of problems of ethnic features of worldview, originality of interethnic relations.
As a result, it allowed i to more clearly represent the psychology of personality and society within the framework of intra and interethnic interaction and communication, to correctly assess the behavior of people in different circumstances.
Finally, the descriptive paradigm was formed in the course of field experiments and observations of American scientists in remote regions of the globe and the U.S. in the 40-60s of the XX century - in Russia and the USSR in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, the process of studying national-psychological peculiarities of people through the use of special methods was gradually established and then settled.
The main attention was focused on revealing the peculiarity of manifestation of individual-personal and socio-psychological characteristics of representatives of specific ethnic communities: motivational, intellectual-cognitive, emotional-volitional, communicative-behavioral.
Dominated by the cult of personality of Stalin, when the understanding of the nationally specific was the prerogative of only himself, and resumed only in the early '70s of the XX century, with the support of domestic sociologists and ethnographers.
At the same time, the specificity of this paradigm was manifested in the support of young science for a comprehensive study of the psyche of representatives of one ethnic community without comparison with others, the study of different qualities of the consciousness of the representatives of that or that ethnic group with the support of one side of their manifestation - individual-personal or socio-psychological.
In both cases, little attention was paid to the development of the national-psychological theory (or it did not go beyond psychological generalizations) and methodological interpretations in order to use specific results in the practical activities of specialists.