Indigenous Psychology

Abstract

Indigenous psychology is an intellectual worldwide movement against the hegemony of Eurocentric psychologies, in their reflected or unreflected missionary path of promoting Eurocentric tradition under a scientific appearance. The core teaching and learning objectives in indigenous psychology includes the understanding that colonialism produced threatening impacts to indigenous peoples around the world. The core contents and topics of indigenous psychology involves three main set of contents: (1) to understand, from the history and philosophy of psychology, the predicate of psychological theories and systems in its articulation with specific sociocultural contexts, through ontological reflection; (2) to understand possibilities and limits of dialogues between distinct traditions of knowledge construction, approaching socio-historical distances between psychological communities and indigenous communities, through indigenous and ethnographic approaches focusing concrete communities; (3) to understand that the theoretical and document-based works about indigenous issues are distinct from the concrete work with indigenous peoples – demanding the development of expertise in social dialogue, availability to participate in indigenous communities’ life and support their struggles. The approaches and strategies for teaching, learning, and assessment in indigenous psychology involve two main dimensions, (1) reading and discussion of pertinent bibliography concerning the core contents and topics and (2) engaging the students in co-authored works with concrete indigenous peoples and communities. The integration of both dimensions depends on supervised dialogues at the indigenous communities and at the university. We argue that distinct social and personal realities are constructed, grounded in the rites and myths people learn and transform from their relation with the sociocultural environment. The learned and transformed rites and myths guide perceptions, imaginations, and human actions within each tradition. Besides, there is a border of unknown between the predication of the distinct traditions, demanding the assessment of limits and the creation of conditions for equitable dialogues, bringing ontological reflections to the process of psychological knowledge construction.KeywordsEpistemologyOntologyEthicsTraditionPredicationDialogicality