Colonialism, subjectivity, and psychology in Latin America.

Abstract

The present article critically addresses the colonial character of the dominant psychological approaches to subjective experience in the Latin American context. These approaches are described as imbued with objectivism, dualism, individualism, and disciplinaryism, and are compared with Mesoamerican indigenous conceptions of subjectivity. It is assumed that what we usually call "psychology" is a cultural-historical manifestation of European capitalist modernity that was introduced in America by colonization. This assumption allows a problematization of the decolonial psychological project by suggesting that decolonization demands a break with psychology. Although decolonization is always unfinished and the colonial-postcolonial condition makes subjective experience always already psychologized, subjectivity is also always still resistant to its psychologization for the same reason that it still resists its complete Europeanization. Instead of the notions of hybridism and cultural miscegenation, the article asserts a conflictive coexistence of the colonizing and the colonized in the subjective sphere of Latin American societies and stresses the need to give an anticolonial and, inevitably, antipsychological orientation to decolonial and postcolonial perspectives in psychology. Public Significance StatementThis article discusses the relationships between colonialism and psychology in Latin America, the contradiction between Western psychological ideas and nonpsychological indigenous Mesoamerican conceptions of subjectivity, and the need for an anticolonial struggle to depsychologize and thus decolonize subjectivity.

From Latin America to refugees from Myanmar: Dialogue and disclosing subjectivities of domination, fetish, and care.

“…Pavón-Cuéllar’s (2023) disclosure of the potential reproduction resonates with other research even though it comes from a Latin American context. Norsworthy and Khuankaew note that the government of Myanmar has “one of the worst human rights records in the world” (2004, p. 262) insofar as its military targets civilians’ homes and villages, using rape and torture in addition to conventional military weapons.…”

“…Pavón-Cuéllar (2023) argues that decolonial psychology is an oxymoron because it is easy to reproduce coloniality in psychology even in an attempt at resistance. The author claims that, as a discipline dominated by North American and Western European thinking, psychologists often focus on the objectification and neutralization of the subject as a mere object.…”

“…The contributors to the special issue, Decolonization in Latin American Contexts, present important work. Pavón-Cuéllar’s (2023) efforts reveal Eurocentric and the pernicious quality of colonialism in psychology. Guimaraes’ (in press) work on anthropophagy highlights the potentiality for sympathetic co-experience and resistance to technocratic modes that alienate people.…”

“…That is, I will realize this purpose through a dialogue among the articles in the special issue, theory, and ethnographic work, which a strategy that enables dialogue and disclosure about the refugees with whom we worked. Engaging with Pavón-Cuéllar (2023), I address the automatic application of Eurocentric ideas that initially emerged among the students and myself. A discussion about Guimaraes’ (in press) work on anthropophagy blends with Bakhtin’s discussion of language to show how voice entails sociolinguistically constituted realities that are experientially compelling.…”

Working Through the Politics of Indigeneity: Decolonising Psychology by Way of a Dialectical Approach

“…Second, by way of engaging in critical psychoanalysis of culture for reconstruction and restoration of suppressed pasts, invalidated epistemologies, disavowed self and subjugated subjectivities. For accomplishing substantive decolonisation, we may need to disengage from the discourse of modernity (including the discourse of psychology itself) as such discourse also appears to be fashioned by the language of civilisation, development and capitalism dictated again by the former colonial powers (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2022).…”