Social perspective on disability affirms that a large number of persons with disabilities struggle to lead a normal life because of stereotypical attitudes, social stigma, discrimination and neglect. Various socio-cultural conditions also interact with different types of disability in a complex...

Current understandings of mental illness are rooted in Western paradigms and fail to incorporate indigenous understandings. Swartz (2002) argues that the way certain conditions are labelled in different settings and how they are expressed in different cultures, need to be taken into...

South Asian languages and literature offer many terms for mental retardation (MR), intellectual disability or cognitive impairment, with a range of concepts and meanings through three millennia of history. Responses to mental retardation are illustrated by stories from religious, medical, legal...

Three studies from the Brazilian experience are presented to exemplify particular ways for the researcher to relate with the poor and the living world of poverty. These are: (a) describing ways of living in poverty, (b) evaluating programmes to eradicate poverty and (c) intervening in a poor...

In this article, select theories of self and cognition from the Indian tradition are examined and interpreted in light of contemporary psychology. The affirmation and denial of the self in respectively the Upaniá¹£adic and Buddhist traditions of India are explained and are critically compared...

The article examines the close nexus between disability and poverty that renders the disabled people the poorest among the poor. It discusses psycho-social and environmental impediments which prevent active participation of the poor with disability in developmental programmes. In this context,...

The slow-onset disasters, like drought, consistently deplete farmers’ resources at a faster rate than they can be replenished. Drought has been a recurring phenomenon in the southern regions of Iran and it has repeatedly been a leading cause of declining production and great human...

Shame experienced due to lack of resources shatter the existence of human beings. This article studies the distress shame experiences and coping strategies of farmers who are in financial crisis. The empirical source of the article is based on qualitative information collected from 179 farmers,...

The epistemology of Indian Psychology (IP) is akin to that of Indian Philosophy or in general the Indian world view of knowledge, truth and belief about making sense of the self and the world. In this article, the epistemological and ontological foundations of IP are derived from a verse from...

This article explores the nature of culture and its antecedent value in explaining states of people in poverty. It tries to do it by revisiting the highly critiqued concept of the “culture of povertyâ€. It argues that culture affects the poor and poverty not in the deterministic way...