Shifting Knowledge Ecologies

Psychological Anthropology in a Sea of Anchors

Text by Thomas Stodulka (University of Münster)

Art by Lisa Hannen

Psychological anthropology finds itself on shifting terrain, stretched across multiple disciplines, methods, and geopolitical worlds. This essay takes up these questions by weaving together two strands: a set of disciplinary reflections emerging from the forthcoming Ethos Virtual Issue, Sea of Anchors: Toward Global Psychological Anthropologies, and ethnographic insights from long-term collaborative research on children’s environmental worlds and mental health encounters in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. I suggest that decentering psychological anthropology cannot remain an abstract disciplinary ideal. It must be understood as a situated practice, shaped by infrastructures of collaboration, by uneven conditions of participation, and by the sensory, affective, and moral ecologies in which psychological life unfolds. Thinking with the metaphor of a sea of anchors, this essay invites a reorientation of the field—away from singular centers of authority and toward plural, mobile, and relational forms of psychological anthropological knowledge.

The Shifting Terrain of Psychological Anthropology

Let me begin with the disciplinary landscape. If we ask, “Where is psychological anthropology today?” the answer is not at all straightforward. In some ways, psychological anthropology feels like it is everywhere—deeply embedded in phenomenological approaches, person-centered ethnography, affect theory, sensory anthropology, mental health research, cultural psychology, and, more recently, ecological and multispecies studies. At the same time, it also feels fragmented. We work across institutions that rarely acknowledge one another, across methods that sometimes barely speak to one another, and across regions that are unequally resourced.

We observe a rise in affect and emotion studies in Europe, cultural schemas and cultural psychology in the US, decolonial and Indigenous psychologies in the Global South, and growing multilingual, multimodal, and interspecies approaches emerging from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Some of these currents overlap beautifully; others remain siloed. And they are unevenly funded, unevenly cited, unevenly visible. This fragmentation is not unique to psychological anthropology. Still, our field bears it in particular ways because we sit at the intersection of anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, education studies, neuroscience, and increasingly, environmental humanities.

At this intersection, questions of power, authority, and epistemic legitimacy become especially acute. For example, we can ask: Whose concept of “mind” travels globally? Whose developmental models shape “best practices” in childhood interventions? Whose notions of wellbeing, emotion, or personhood become standardized? And whose ecological knowledge is dismissed as anecdotal, unscientific, or “cultural,” rather than recognized as expertise? These questions shaped the Virtual Issue and shape the examples I’ll discuss later.

Introducing the Metaphor of Anchors

Faced with this uneven landscape, my co-editors, Suzana Jovicic (Universität Wien), Anni Kajanus (Helsingin Yliopisto), and I sought an alternative conceptual language for thinking about decentering. We found the metaphors of “center” and “periphery” inadequate: they reproduce the very hierarchies we aim to critique. They imply a fixed geography of knowledge. They suggest that everything must either move toward the center or remain marginal. But the empirical reality of psychological anthropology today is far more fluid. So, we proposed the metaphor of anchors. What is an anchor? An anchor is a temporary, dynamic point of orientation—a moment or place where ideas, resources, and collaborations condense.

Anchors can be a research network, a workshop, a methodological toolkit, a transregional collaboration, a subfield (such as affect studies or indigenous psychology), or a group of scholars who generate gravitational pull. Anchors are not fixed, permanent structures. They shift. They are mobile. They can appear and disappear as conditions change. An anchor helps with navigation, provides stability in a moving environment, and prevents drift—but not by forcing centralization. Crucially, anchors can be multiplied. A single center is hierarchical. But a sea of anchors allows for multiple points of orientation, plural entry points into the field, recognition of diverse epistemologies, and flexible, low-threshold collaboration, and distributed forms of authority. In such a sea, you no longer need a flagship vessel. You can travel by canoe, kayak, bamboo raft, or whatever vessel your conditions afford.

Decentering as Practice, not Slogan

It is important to emphasize that decentering is not simply a rhetorical gesture. It is not enough to declare that we want to “decolonize psychology/anthropology” or “provincialize Europe.” These statements ring hollow if they are not accompanied by changes in collaboration practices, citation politics, accessibility and logistics, authorship, research funding distribution, teaching and mentorship, conference formats, time-zone considerations, visa issues, translation infrastructures, and, importantly, the practical realities of early-career scholars. These statements ring hollow and hypocritical when considering scholars’ and academics’ silence—if not cowardice—regarding governments’ authoritarianism as they shift national and federal budgets from public education and learning to rearmament, militarization, and war infrastructure. And they ring hollow and unethical even inside an elitist ivory tower when scholars define their scholarship as ‘engaged’ or ‘decolonizing’ as self-aggrandizing scholarly labels when in fact they shy away from speaking out against austerity measures and the increasingly inhumane treatment of colleagues by their peers or superiors occupying positions of temporary power (e.g., deaneries or presidencies) when their academic and economic livelihoods are cancelled or their jobs made redundant.

We can ask, for example, who gets to attend “global” conferences. Who has childcare support, funding, or institutional backing? Who can publish in English-language journals without paying exorbitant fees? Who has the “right” to move freely across borders? Whose ethical frameworks are recognized as legitimate?

These very mundane, bureaucratic, logistical details shape the borders of our discipline far more than abstract theory does. Decentering, therefore, means creating infrastructures that enable participation, rather than merely proclaiming pluralism. And this is where children’s environmental perceptions offer a powerful analogy: children anchor themselves in their environments through sensory, relational, and imaginative practices that are deeply local, yet never isolated from larger ecologies. The same is true for our intellectual practices.

Of Anchors and Ecologies

At this point, let me shift from the disciplinary to the empirical. I want to share insights from our research on children’s perceptions of nature—not as an isolated case study, but as an example of how psychological anthropology can enact decentering through method, theory, and collaboration —and where the main challenges remain to be overcome.

The Research Context: Children’s Perceptions of Nature

The study I will only briefly discuss emerges from long-standing collaborative work in Indonesia and Timor-Leste, where I have lived and worked for many years. Between 2020 and 2023, I also joined the Leipzig Lab on a larger, global, interdisciplinary, and transcultural comparative scale involving, at times, over twenty researchers worldwide (Thajib et al. 2025). This project was motivated by a simple but profound observation: children in different ecological and sociocultural settings perceive “nature” in radically different ways—not only cognitively, but emotionally, ethically, and imaginatively.

Yet global discourses on environmental education, sustainability, and “nature connection” tend to universalize children’s experiences, for example, reproducing Eurocentric assumptions that a forest is always peaceful; nature is something “out there,” separate from humans; play in green spaces promotes wellbeing; or children learn about ecology through curricula designed elsewhere (at colonialist schools, or later on in Eurocentric higher education institutions). But ethnographically, these assumptions fall apart quickly. Our guiding questions aimed at broader, more exploratory, and open-ended themes, such as: What counts as “nature” for children in different contexts? How do local ecologies shape children’s emotional relations to the more-than-human? What role do cultural narratives, family practices, and material environments play? How do children’s drawings, stories, and play express ecological knowledge? And how can such knowledge challenge universalist assumptions built into environmental psychology and child development research? The comparative and collaborative research design included children in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas of Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, in Timor-Leste in ecologies characterized by scarcity, ecological degradation, or climatic uncertainty. Methodologically, we used drawing sessions, conversations, walking conversations, play-based elicitation, collaborative storytelling, and group discussions with children, caregivers, and teachers. These methods were chosen deliberately because they decenter adult expectations and foreground children’s ways of making sense of the world.

Key Findings: Children’s Anchors to Nature

Let me share some key findings—but through the lens of the “anchors” metaphor, because this is where theory and ethnography meet.

Anchors of Fear and Danger. In some communities, nature was not a place of peace or well-being. It was associated with spirits, snakes, hunger, unpredictable weather, economic precarity, or memories of flooding, landslides, or cyclone damage. In these settings, nature was not something to “reconnect” with. Children were already deeply entangled with it—often fearfully, and for different reasons. One child drew the forest as a set of eyes watching him. Another described the sea as “sometimes mother, sometimes monster.” These perceptions are not deficits. They are ecologies of knowledge shaped by lived experience.

Anchors of Care and Responsibility. In other communities, particularly those involved in permaculture or alternative eco-social trainings, children expressed nature through care practices, such as planting, watering, composting, feeding animals, observing insects, or participating in seasonal cycles. Here, nature was not “out there” but part of daily labor, reciprocity, and family economy. Children spoke of plants as “friends who need help” or “siblings who are thirsty”. These anchors emerged through embodied practice and intergenerational learning.

Anchors of Imagination and Wonder. Across all sites, children’s imaginative worlds played a central role: trees had personalities, clouds had moods, animals expressed moral lessons, and rainbows connected human and more-than-human realms. This imaginative ecology is often overlooked in the design of trans- or cross-cultural comparative research projects, which tend to prioritize cognition and quantitative methods based on validated, and more often than not Eurocentric, questionnaires over affect or imagination mined through child-centered ethnographic methods. Yet imagination is one of the anchors through which children orient themselves in ecological systems.

Anchors of Loss and Uncertainty. In rapidly urbanizing environments, children’s anchors were shaped by disappearance: rivers that no longer flow, forest patches replaced by housing, plastic waste where gardens once were, or heat that makes outdoor play impossible. Children expressed sadness, confusion, or longing for landscapes they had been told about but never seen. These emotional registers challenge the assumption that environmental connection is only about presence. It is also about absence—and the stories that fill those absences.

Linking Back

What do these findings tell us? A great deal, I believe, about how to practice decentering in psychological anthropology. Children do not orient themselves around a single “center” of nature. They orient around danger and care, fear and excitement, labor and play, imagination and memory, presence and loss. Their ecological knowledge is multiplex. Their anchors are many. This mirrors precisely the kind of disciplinary ecology we argue for—one where psychological anthropology does not revolve around a single epistemic center but instead fosters multiple points of orientation, multiple forms of expertise, various ways of knowing, and multiple, situated pedagogies. The children we worked with showed us that plurality is not a problem. It is the condition for meaningful orientation.

(Global) Mental Health Encounters

Let me now turn, briefly, to our long-term work on clinical encounters and mental health in Indonesia. This work might seem distant from children’s environmental worlds. Still, it illustrates another central claim: that psychological and, by extension, psychiatric anthropology gains strength by moving across epistemic and methodological terrains without reproducing knowledge and political hierarchies. In Indonesia, mental health encounters unfold at the intersection of biomedical psychiatry, Islamic spiritual healing, Christian counselling, Hindu cleansing rituals, local moral frameworks, family care, and community-based self-help groups. Patients and families rarely adhere to one regimen exclusively. They navigate these landscapes dynamically, often pragmatically.

Led by Florin Cristea and supported by Aryani Putu, Saskia Duchow, Pujo Semedi, and myself, the research team of the Afflicted Minds project has been especially interested in how biomedical categories, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, gain meaning in motion through spiritual idioms, moral concerns about family harmony, ideas of healing, religious obligations, and practices of everyday care (cf, Cristea et al. 2025). Biomedical subjectivities do not replace existing ones; they entangle with them.

I consider these basics in psychological anthropology (yet often overseen in neighboring disciplines) as a helpful complement to the first example: where the children-and-nature project reveals ecological moral worlds, the mental health project reveals moral-therapeutic worlds. Both challenge universalist claims that children everywhere develop environmental awareness in similar ways, or that psychiatric categories travel intact and uncontested across cultures. Both illustrate what becomes possible when psychological anthropology operates from multiple small anchors, schools, clinics, gardens, and community groups, instead of relying on one methodological or disciplinary center.

Interdisciplinarity: Working Between Anthropology and Psychology

Let me address another theme central to decentering psychological anthropology: the labor and difficulty of working across disciplines. Many of us here know the feeling of explaining ethnography to psychologists, explaining psychology to anthropologists, mediating between qualitative and quantitative expectations, translating concepts (like culture, development, or impact) across epistemic worlds, or carrying the burden of interdisciplinarity, often alone. This mediating labor is unevenly distributed. Psychological anthropologists tend to read different streams in psychology far more than psychologists or psychiatrists read psychological anthropology. Yet interdisciplinary engagement is not “sucking up” to psychology. It can be a political act. Why?

Because universalist psychological models, especially those used in medicine, education, or development, both personal and structural-political, often travel globally and impact communities unevenly, sometimes harmfully. By working with, rather than only on/about psychologists, neuroscientists, educators, public health scholars, and environmental scientists, we can intervene rather than merely critique from the sidelines. The children-and-nature project is a good example where different disciplinary aspirations were brought into scholarly and political conversations. Psychologists expected children everywhere to draw “peaceful” nature, anthropologists predicted local variation, environmental educators wanted policy recommendations, and teachers wanted practical tools. By creating a collaborative anchor, we produced both knowledge and learning initiatives that none of these fields could have generated on their own. I believe that this is the promise of interdisciplinary anchoring.

Toward a Sea of Anchors: Practical Commitments

What would it mean, concretely, to build a sea of anchors in psychological anthropology?

It would mean recognizing that anchors do not drift into the sea on their own. They are picked up, carried, weighted, and thrown—sometimes carefully, sometimes urgently—by situated actors who decide where to stand, whom to stand with, and what risks to take. Building a sea of anchors, then, is not primarily about artefacts or infrastructures as such, but about the ethical and political labor of anchoring: about who has the capacity and the courage to anchor knowledge, care, and collaboration in particular places, and whose anchors are allowed to hold.

It means committing to low-threshold research infrastructures, multilingual publication spaces, co-authorship with community researchers, shared leadership between scholars in the Global South and Global North, flexible conference formats, transregional mentorship, collaborative ethics—not extractive ones, multimodal outputs accessible to children, families, and practitioners—not only academics, teaching methods that are multimodal, experiential, and place-based, and acknowledging that universal models of mind, development, or emotion travel with epistemic and sometimes (epistemologically) violent baggage.

It also means acknowledging that the most durable anchors are often small and locally forged: a school garden, a community workshop, a WhatsApp group, a podcast, a village storytelling night, a permaculture training site, an Indigenous-led research collective. These anchors matter not because they promise scale or stability, but because they hold in rough waters. Together, they form the canoes and rafts that make a field seaworthy—not by eliminating movement, but by enabling forms of drift, attachment, and care that are accountable to those who live with their consequences. In this sense, a sea of anchors is not a map for where psychological anthropology should arrive. It is a practice of deciding, again and again, where to cast our weight—and of staying with the relations that form once the anchor touches the ground.

Closing Reflections

In listening closely to children’s stories of forests, seas, animals, loss, and care—and to patients’ and families’ negotiations of mental health and healing—we are reminded that psychological life is never oriented around a single center. It is held together through multiple anchors: fear and responsibility, imagination and memory, presence and absence, care and uncertainty. This, I suggest, offers a powerful lesson for psychological anthropology itself. Rather than striving for coherence through centralization, the field might cultivate coherence through relation—by sustaining a sea of anchors that enables diverse ways of knowing, collaborating, and caring. Such an orientation does not promise stability in the conventional sense. But it does promise a discipline that is more attuned to the worlds it studies, and more capable of imagining futures otherwise.

References

Cristea F., P. Aryani, S. Duchow, P. Semedi, and T. Stodulka. “Research on severe mental illness in Indonesia: A scoping review.” Transcultural Psychiatry, published online 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634615251342638

Stodulka, T., Jovicic, S., and A. Kajanus. “Sea of Anchors: Toward Global Psychological Anthropologies”, Ethos, Virtual Issue, forthcoming in 2026.

Thajib, F.,  T. Stodulka,  P. Kanngiesser,  D. Haun,  J. Sunderarajan,  M. Junker,  T. Meng,  W. Sun,  Z. Zhang,  S. Masaquiza,  M. Swastyastu,  D. J. Taek,  A. Abis,  D. Tjizao,  D. Shishala,  L. Petrović,  B. Striegler,  J. Weyrowitz,  B. Arroyo-Garcia and  K. Liebal.  2025. “Combining remote and collaborative research: A critical reflection on large-scale, comparative, and interdisciplinary research in times of a global crisis.” Ethos, 53: e70016. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.70016

Related Material

Stodulka, T. December 15, 2025. “Decentering Psychology and Decolonizing Anthropology?” Public lecture, Universität zu Köln. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Pzg9E4M2s&list=PLkCg3e67djg7cuqESxAKoNTpm2TAVKpXr&index=4.