Economic knowledge of a group of adults from the Ashaninka and Shipibo-Konibo indigenous peoples

Abstract

This psychological study explores the level of economic thought among 16 adults from the Shipibo-Konibo and Asháninka Amazonian indigenous groups, in Peru. A constructivist-informed qualitative interview based on the Psychogenesis Model of Economic Thought (Denegri, 1995) was used in this study. Following the Piagetian cognitive stages, this interview proposes a three-level model for the psychogenesis of economic thought to account for the process of construction of explanations of the economic world. The results show the participants' particular modes of using formal logic tools to formulate a systematic understanding of economic processes, which possibly compromise their ability to make adaptive economic decisions and may encourage irrational economic behaviors such as thoughtless consumption and over-indebtedness. None of the participants displayed Level III inferential economic thinking, which requires the use of formal logic to understand economic processes in a systematic way. We discuss the implications of these findings for the development and fulfillment of indigenous people’s rights, especially the right to achieve human development that responds to their own complex cultural characteristics.