Re-living a Common Future in the Face of Ecological Disaster: Exploring (Elements of) Guarani and Kaiowá Collective Memories, Political Imagination, and Critiques

Abstract

How to re-member a fragmented world while climate change escalates, and green growth models reproduce coloniality, particularly in Indigenous territories? What can be the concrete contributions from different scholarly disciplines to a broader decolonial project? These questions are debated by decolonial scholars who call to re-think our practices within academic institutions and in the fields that we study. This article contributes with a decolonial perspective to sociocultural psychology and studies on Indigenous knowledges about climate change. Through ethnographic methods and individual and group interviews, I engage with indigenous Guarani and Kaiowá participants’ knowledges and practices of resilience opposing green growth models in the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul. Their collective memory of a different past, enacted through narratives, rituals, and social practices, was fundamental to imagine different possible futures, which put in motion transformation processes. Their example opens a reflection about the possibilities in connecting sociocultural psychology’s work on collective memory and political imagination to the broader decolonial project, in supporting people’s processes of re-membering in contexts of adverse conditions caused by coloniality and ecological disaster.

Auf der Suche nach einer globalen Psychologie

“…But the capitalistic competitive system of research funding itself deeply politically influences science inside and outside academia (Barnes 2019 ). Psychology is still reluctant to conduct research with (rather than about ) communities, to be held accountable, and to be truly participative in the construction of knowledge (Normann 2021 ).…”

Racism and Indifference in Brazil: Anti-indigenous Text, Action, and Sensibility

“…ethnic university quotas, minimum income to families facing extreme poverty, recognition of the rights of women, children and the elderly, support to local food production and distribution schemes, national sovereignty over vast oil and gas reserves), the last decade has been marked by renewed forms of intolerance, the militarisation of public policies, ferocious protection of private rural property (regardless of its legality and legitimacy) and explicit political manipulation based on religious and moralist preconceptions (Salem & Bertelsen, 2020). At the centre of those disturbing tendencies, there is the oldest and most embarrassing of all national questions: the genocidal treatment of its native population (Normann, 2022). For more than five centuries, since the early days of the Portuguese invasion, national building has been an elitist and colonialist project against indigenous peoples, as well as against enslaved Africans and workers of all ethnic origins.…”