Focussing on health and management needs, an applied “psychology for development” is emerging in the African literature, and we aimed to explore its wider application to the development of countries in Pacific Asia. “Psychology for development” has made use of some distinctive pathways, from (a) realizing that development policy may contain mistaken assumptions about the psychology of the people involved, to (b) reconstituting, (c) restating, (d) refuting, or (e) rechannelling psychological concepts devised for western conditions. Applied psychological phenomena so far identified include (a) a “pay me!” reaction to aid (recipients demanding money for their participation); (b) “double demotivation” (salary differentials between local and expatriates demotivating both groups); (c) the “pull down” motive (the perception that others will sabotage high self-achievement); (d) “cognitive tolerance” (the ability to value at the same time both modern medical and traditional beliefs about health); and (e) the revitalised importance to health care of concepts such as “source credibility”. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these pathways and applied concepts may have a future in Pacific Asia, and we recommend empirical research to develop awareness of their viability in this region.

At the highest altitude, the issue addressed in this paper has to do with the epistemological status of criticism in Western philosophy. What type of knowledge results from criticism and what is the basis on which criticism may be judged as valid or invalid? It is arguable that criticism as a legitimate attitude toward the intellectual and aesthetic products of a society (including the social system itself) did not exist prior to ancient Greek philosophy. The pre-Socratic philosophers were possibly the first to employ criticism in something like the sense that we use this term today. It is not at all clear that traditional societies, including the remnants of traditional societies that exist today, either tolerated or encouraged criticism of their central beliefs, myths and values, and in the middle ages criticism dropped out of sight altogether, virtually until the enlightenment. Some idea of what happened to would-be critics of Christian societies in the middle-ages can be gained by observing some of the Islamic societies today with their enthusiasm for punishing heretics with death sentences.

In the following paper I discuss a specific model of the human self which, allegedly, has been derived from the Enlightenment tradition. I discuss “communitarian” criticisms of this model which claim that it contains an untenable notion of unengaged, unattached subjectivity. In doing so I touch upon issues of individual rights and the loss of community which are the familiar preoccupations of the “communitarians”. I then indicate “communitarian” implications with respect to a reinterpretation of the moral order and the approach of the human sciences like psychology. Ultimately, I ask whether the supposed truth of “communitarian” analysis renders certain dominant forms of Western psychology irrelevant in the context of both customary Papua New Guinean society and Modern Western society.

Psychologists at U.P.N.G. have for the last year and a half projected a prominent profile on the issue of “child abuse” in P.N.G. It seems that before the discovery of this problem by the psychologists of U.P.N.G., “child abuse” was not an issue in P.N.G. Since this “discovery” there have been: a workshop on “child abuse in P.N.G.” in July of 1994, an editorial in the nation's second national newspaper on this evil, an interview with the chairman of the psychology department, Dr. David Boorer, enlightening us as to the problem, and a one day seminar on Sept 6, 1995, on the topic of “child Abuse and Pornography”. This problem which U.P.N.G. psychologists have allegedly discovered raises a number of questions. First, has sufficient statistical evidence been offered to substantiate that the original problem of noteworthy magnitude, indeed exists. Second, is there any significant evidence offered to substantiate that there exists “growing concern about child abuse” beyond the statements which have been made by members the psychology staff alleging such concern? Third, “child abuse” is a general term which has become current among certain first world professionals in specific first world contexts. Even in this original context it is very loosely (vaguely?) defined to cover a variety of phenomena: physical, sexual, mental and emotional. Have the U.P.N.G. psychologists given sufficient empirical definition to this first world concept so that it is meaningfully behavioural descriptive in the different third world context of P.N.G.?

Suggestions that psychology lacks academic substance are common. Recently, in an article in the Australian newspaper, Emeritus Professor John Sutcliffe described it as a “dicky-shirt” discipline -- all form and no substance (Sutcliffe, 1994). He wrapped his observation into a general attack on the Dawkins education reforms which he correctly blames for eroding the intellectual core of Australian academic life. Many academics share Sutcliffe's concerns.

The Dawkins reforms are an uneasy blend of populism and commercialism aimed at achieving the Labour government's economic goal of a “clever country”. Most conspicuously, they have involved the incorporation of former technical institutes into large multi-campus universities. The result has been the physical extension of a university presence across the country into some improbable rural backwaters. Inevitably these dramatic changes in the size and spread of universities have been accompanied by a change in the definition of the role of universities. Topics of study which were once the domain of lower tier tertiary institutions now find a place in the core academic centres. The result has been a shift in the balance of academic interest from abstract to applied research and teaching.

Feeding into these changes has been what Sutcliffe describes as a “money-driven” ethos. After decades of intervention to redress inequalities and irrationalities stemming from the operation of free markets, Labour governments in various parts of the West have capitulated to historical forces and pre-emptively embraced the free enterprise policies of the traditional right.

The activity of fieldwork, that is research conducted with individuals and groups in a real-life and by implication, real-time setting or living environment rather than research under controlled conditions and specific time-frames, continues to draw strong attention and criticisms. Given the plethora of these schools of thought and their critiques over the past decades including relativism in its intense expressions, emphases on quantification as a sine-qua-non, hermeneutics, praxis, semiotics, deconstructionism and essentially “post-modernist” approaches to enduring questions of objectivity, recording behaviour, methodological rigor, meaning and their epistemological references, it is significant that (1) fieldwork still continues and does so in a variety of disciplines, and (2) most criticisms have been directed essentially at issues of validity, viability and reliability in relation to “data”, rather than some grand meta-disciplinary demise.

There are those who would dearly like to throw baby, bathwater and the entire endeavour out, and such critiques are important: in their confabulations, they evoke enduring and profound issues with trenchancy. Nor have political assaults been slow to enter the battle: fieldwork, especially as perceived via an increasingly hapless anthropology, is seen as an enduring colonial tool, an exploiter of the ethnic domain, a servant of capitalism and product of the western will to power.