Decolonial, countercolonial, yet to come Psychology?

Abstract

Objective

Think about Psychology, as a field of knowledge and care practice, despite its rich polyphony, diversity, and multiplicity, kowing that it is originally linked to dualism, individualism, subjectivism, scientism, Eurocentrism, and professionalism. On the other hand, there are undeniable contributions of Brazilian indigenous peoples. With over three hundred surviving peoples, they offer a vast ethnosociobiodiversity. They bring forth knowledge and practices of care and health based on diverse yet convergent Cosmopolitical references, which are integral, integrative, relational, communal, collective, ritualistic, sacralized, ancestral, intuitive, reciprocal, and undisciplinary, as they do not recognize the fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines, nor do they serve the “disciplining of life”.

Method

This is a scoping review based on the production of contemporary Brazilian indigenous thinkers, bringing their contributions that can and should be recognized by the field of psychology as significant interlocutors in the process of fertilizing and reframing the field towards a psychology that may be decolonial, anticolonial, and yet to come.

Results

These contributions to help us to think another psychology from the Cosmopolitical reference of Brazil’s indigenous peoples.

Conclusion

We see a turning point, a shift within the psychological field itself, advancing from a decolonial Psychology, countercolonial Psychology, to a possible yet to come Psychology.

Keywords
Cultural diversity; Psychology; Traditional indigenous medicine of the américas

Resumo

Objetivo

Pensar a Psicologia, enquanto campo de saber e prática de cuidado, ainda que com sua rica polifonia, diversidade e multiplicidade, sabendo que encontra-se vinculada originalmente ao dualismo, ao individualismo, ao subjetivismo, ao cientificismo, ao eurocentrismo e ao profissionalismo. Por outro lado, trazer as contribuições inegáveis dos povos indígenas brasileiros, em sua imensa etnosociobiodiversidade de mais de 300 povos ainda sobreviventes, que apresentam saberes e práticas de cuidado e saúde a partir de seus diversos mas convergentes referenciais cosmopolíticos, integrais, integrativos, relacionais, comunitários, coletivos, ritualísticos, sacralizados, ancestrais, intuitivos, recíprocos e indisciplinares, pois tanto não reconhecem a fragmentação dos saberes em disciplinas, quanto não se colocam a serviço da “disciplinarização da vida”.

Método

Trata-se de uma revisão de escopo a partir da vasta produção realizada por pensadores indígenas brasileiros da atualidade, trazendo suas contribuições que, definitivamente, podem e devem ser reconhecidas pelo campo da psicologia como provenientes de grandes interlocutores nesse processo de fecundar e refundar o campo de uma psicologia que possa ser decolonial, anticolonial e por vir.

Resultados

Essas contribuições nos levaram a pensarmos em uma outra Psicologia a partir do referencial cosmopolítico dos povos originários do Brasil.

Conclusão

Vislumbrarmos uma virada do próprio campo psicológico, avançando desde uma Psicologia decolonial, contracolonial, até uma possível Psicologia por vir.

Palavras-chave
Diversidade cultural; Medicina tradicional indígena das américas; Psicologia

Psychology, since the “Invention of the Psychological” (Figueiredo, 1994) until the present day, within an extremely well-known context of the Enlightenment, rationalism, scientism, Eurocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, is therefore grounded in conceptions that, throughout its centuries of existence, have not consider the knowledge of indigenous Amerindian peoples as valid and/or equivalent.

Although psychology, as a field of knowledge and care practice, has advanced in many directions seeking to overcome limits imposed by the epistemological colonization that underpins and sustains it, most methodologies of the “psychological” still equate it with the “mental”. This view, however, disregards, for the most part, the mind-body, human-nonhuman integration, and the inseparability between humans and other living beings that comprise the Earth (including animals, plants, and other visible and invisible agents), as non-corporeal, non-physical, nor metaphysical.

The various facets of the processes of colonization of subjectivities, including within academic realms, drawn within the particular universalistic perspective of Western science, have always disregarded other ethnic or communal forms through which indigenous peoples construct their knowledge, practices, their “sciences”. This has led several authors, when researching the subjectivities of indigenous peoples from the global south, to always position them as the researched and never as authentic producers of theory and research.

This modus operandi continually reaffirms the privileges of the so-called First World, but almost never considers other peoples and modes of knowledge production, as an effort to deny a “subjective sphere” to these peoples, configuring “psychological self-awareness” as a privilege of European civilization and its American extension (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2022).

In the epistemic realm concerning the history of psychology, we have seen how this discipline, in its colonial heritage, weaves a narrative that attributes its emergence to the Greeks, disregarding its ancestry in shamanism, while simultaneously systematically appropriating different techniques historically used by shamans to manage states of consciousness, affects, and attention (Barreto, 2021).

The so-called double fracture in modernity, colonial and environmental, can be understood as the basis of this issue and the central problem of today’s ecological crisis: the colonizer, their history, desires, and values are at the top of the hierarchy, and subordinated to them are the lives, lands, bodies, and ideas of the colonized or former colonized. The colonial fracture, sustained by various racist forms of Eurocentrism (religious, cultural, ethnic), manifests in the enslavement of indigenous peoples and in other multiple crimes against humanity; while the environmental fracture, which opposes nature and culture, environment, and society, hierarchically establishing humans above nature, creates conditions for continuous attacks on the so-called “environment” and all lives inhabiting it (Ferdinand, 2022).

As a result of this double fracture, the complex diffuse crisis of contemporaneity - encompassing simultaneous environmental, climatic, cultural, sanitary, economic, and civilizational crisis -, ultimately places everyone before the urgent need to overcome the so-called Anthropocene, as a fundamental split between human and non-human, a split that has allowed and justified domination, predatory exploitation, submission, and devastation of everything that is not human.

It is important to emphasize that this dividing line is itself historically and politically constructed, implying that not all of us will be permanently included in this select club of humans.

In the field called “psy”, which is grounded in the fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines or areas of knowledge, and sustains psychological practice based on the logic of professions, these recent dialogues, generated even by theorists outside the Eurocentric circuit or the United States, partly driven by the presence of indigenous people in psychology and psychology professionals working with indigenous populations, produce increasing tensions.

Tensions that simultaneously propose a discursive capture for legitimacy and legitimization of contextualized professional action; but also generate the counterpoint of colonization of the so-called “mental health”, introducing this “novelty” to cultures that previously did not have this fragmented view of health, this dichotomous view of body/mental health.

It is necessary to consider, obviously, that the so-called “indigenous psychology” has existed for half a century in the Asian continent, that African psychology also has a long history, that in Latin America the ancestral indigenous Colombian psychology also has its recognition, but it is significant that the indigenization of Latin American psychology is still more marginal and minority, compared to other continents, an undeniable impact of the historical-social process of colonization.

In Brazil, the resurgence of ancestral knowledge from different indigenous peoples, especially Brazilian indigenous and quilombola knowledge, particularly in the field of health, has been the guide to navigating through nearby seas. Highlighting the role of the Conselho Federal de Psicologia (Federal Council of Psychology) with the publication of the document Technical References for the work of psychologists with Indigenous Peoples, produced within the scope of the Technical Reference Center in Psychology and Public Policies, published in 2022 (Conselho Federal de Psicologia [CFP], 2022), two years after the “Technical references for the work of psychologists with traditional peoples”, published in 2019, as an effort to demarcate the commitments of Psychology “in guaranteeing decent living conditions for all peoples that constitute Brazilian society” (CFP, 2019, p. 7), but still without expanding this debate to the possible consequences of these knowledge encounters to rethink psychological practices as a whole, and not just psychological practices specifically with indigenous or traditional peoples.

In other words, epistemological problematizations and the recognition of the limitations imposed by colonizing worldviews and cosmologies on this field have not yet been sufficient. Nevertheless, it constitutes a significant advancement to consider the explicit need to “decolonize psychology itself”, recognizing its unfortunate contribution to the ethnocentric civilizing project that built a psychological subject in “convergence with Eurocentric rationality, in a process of subjective colonization that imposes on the other, said to be different, the model of the dominator in the way of understanding and characterizing oneself” (CFP, 2019, p. 58).

In this sense, thinking/acting from the standpoint of a psychology also cosmopolitically referenced from the indigenous peoples of Brazil requires a shift in the psychological field itself, advancing from a decolonial, countercolonial Psychology, to a potential Yet to Come Psychology, which effectively contributes to the construction of other knowledge and practices, in a transdisciplinary or undisciplinary manner.

This article aims to reflect on some possible contributions of knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples of Brazil, starting from some of the most important Brazilian indigenous thinkers.

At the same time, the authors of this article declare themselves to be strongly stimulated, influenced by the fruitful direct interaction in recent years with different indigenous peoples of Brazil.

Method

This is a scoping review based on the production of contemporary Brazilian indigenous thinkers, bringing their contributions that can and should be recognized by the field of psychology as significant interlocutors in the process of fertilizing and reframing the field towards a psychology that may be decolonial, anticolonial, and yet to come.

In addition to the indigenous thinkers central to this article, there are some authors who engage in important dialogue and conversation with them, assisting in elucidating the ideas or original theoretical contributions of the indigenous thinkers.

Participants

The written and published production of Brazilian indigenous authors has grown enormously. However, for the purposes intended here, we have selected only authors who extensively address the issue of self-care and care for others/territory/planet, deconstructing the premise of separation between self-care and care for alterity, also overcoming this split, dichotomy, in the direction of integrative care.

We have thus selected important contemporary indigenous thinkers and interlocutors who are nationally and internationally recognized for their theoretical contributions. Among them is Ailton Krenak, possibly the greatest current indigenous thinker. Krenak was recently admitted as the first indigenous member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) and the Academy of Letters of Minas Gerais. He has also received Honorary Doctorate titles from several universities.

We also include Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, whose theoretical production has revitalized the field of anthropological thought. Admitted as the first indigenous member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, he is acknowledged, as stated on the academy’s website, for “making significant contributions to debates on the recognition of indigenous knowledge to reflect and act on the environmental and human crisis faced by the contemporary world” (https://www.gov.br/int/pt-br/assuntos/int-na-midia/davi-kopenawa-e-eleito-membro-da-academia-brasileira-de-ciencias).

Further included is João Paulo Lima Barreto Tukano, whose thesis titled Kumuã na kahtiroti-ukuse: uma ‘teoria’ sobre o corpo e o conhecimento-prático dos especialistas indígenas do Alto Rio Negro (Kumuã na kahtiroti-ukuse: a ‘theory’ of the body and the knowledge-practice of indigenous specialists of the Upper Rio Negro) was awarded the best thesis in Anthropology and Archaeology in 2022 by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel). He is also the founder of the innovative and pioneering “Bahserikowi – Indigenous Medicine Center”, open to the general public in the city of Manaus.

The reasons for restricting the scope to these three authors are as follows: first, due to the importance and breadth of the contributions they bring, already configuring a wide framework of challenges to the field of psychology, demanding a true reinvention; second, because they are notable references for their own peers, continuously cited by other authors, thinkers, and indigenous leaders in various contexts; third, because they are recognized by the hegemonic official science, Brazilian Academy of Letters, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, as well as various national and international universities; fourth, due to their recognized trajectory of engagement and advocacy for the recognition, by non-indigenous peoples, of indigenous ancestral knowledge, practices, and sciences.

Thus, we consider that the authors selected here have already demonstrated sufficient representativeness to outline the relevance and breadth of the contributions of Brazilian indigenous thought to rethink psychology.

Procedures

Based on the oral theoretical production from numerous seminars, debates, etc., as well as the written production of the selected indigenous thinkers, key concepts were constructed that subsequently unfold into some possible concrete proposals that can potentially incorporate indigenous modes of producing care into psychological care practices, creating a possible field of hybridism and mestizaje.

At the same time, this theoretical reflection is nourished and fecundated by authors who dialogue and elucidate some of the concepts or core ideas brought by the indigenous thinkers listed here.

Results

The first juxtaposition that emerges as a key differential concept in indigenous modes of care production is the relevance of fragmented health: physical or bodily health on one hand, and mental health on the other, indicating a dualism indebted to Cartesian thinking. A dualism that does not align with the integrative perspective of indigenous peoples. Ailton Krenak, in his participation in the 5th Forum on Human Rights and Mental Health, held from September 3 to 7, 2021, at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, states:

The idea of mental health is almost foreign to the thought of indigenous peoples because our natural state is one of health. [...] This idea that the West has instituted, that coloniality has instituted, of a sick body, the idea of a sick body, so entrenched in the culture of white Westerners, it is not natural, and it is not perceived by us as something inherent to the social experience, to the experience of living. Life is meant to be experienced as fruition; the experience of life is understood as a cosmic dance; it does not occur in fragments, in pieces, in stages; it unfolds as a wide movement of energy that includes fire, earth, water, and wind; all are healing elements, we resort to them. Plants, baths, breaths are health practices that we have always engaged in. We recognize ourselves in this context as producers of vital states. Our body does not produce illness, our body produces life, and the idea of a sick world only began for us with the event of colonization. [...] For us, for the majority of the native peoples, here in the country and on the continent, the idea of imbalance, this idea of malaise in the body, is always related to some magical event; you only get sick because someone external to your body has sent something to you that would cause this discomfort. We don’t need to constantly resort to all kinds of therapeutic resources to be healthy. It is an experience that seems very different from the idea that was presented here by Dr. Adalberto, where communities had their lives ravaged by violence, segregation, racism, and impoverishment; this experience of leaving behind the company of the land, abundance, prosperity, and living in a world of scarcity is sickening. This world of scarcity has been the environment for billions of people on the planet, disconnected from the idea that they are children of the earth, living an experience of alienation. The experience of alienation from culture, the experience of alienation from oneself, this absence of identity, it causes illness. [...] People, then, become ill because they are disconnected from their own notion of personhood, identity, belonging, culture. For most of our relatives who have survived all colonial violence, there are still many resources specific to each culture, each community, including Drugs, Remedies, Medicines: so what does education have to do with this? These resources go from using power plants to establish, from an early age, a being capable of facing the everyday difficulties of life, to treat it in a way that does not make the being sick. The idea of mental health is a modern idea, and it is an idea deeply implicated with the urban experience, because for people who live in the forest, who live in their territories, who eat healthy foods, who live a ritualized daily experience, healing comes from all of this environment; it comes from a deep ecology, where the body and the earth, the territory, harmonize and constantly seek experiences of balance and not of dissociation. It seems that the very idea of mental health was only perceived or noticed when human communities began to experience this displacement, migrations, and even the loss of their sensible connection with their territories. [...] What mobilizes our peoples is a sensible idea of remaining alive, in a living body, in a living land. [...]. These peoples have managed so far to prevail in their cultures and in their own practices with little dependence on this medicated world.

(Krenak, 43:44’-54:59’, 2021)

Here and in many other debates, a juxtaposition with the dualistic view between body and mind, to which psychology itself is largely indebted, becomes explicit. What is at issue here is nothing less than the division between the physical, bodily health, and another health, corresponding to mental health. This division is surpassed by an integrative and holistic view, with health being seen as necessarily integral, definitively overcoming psychology’s eternal dilemma, wavering between psychogenesis and neurogenesis, between the cerebral and the properly mental field.

We also find this mind/body integration in the indigenous perspective described by João Paulo Lima Barreto (2022, p. 71):

All these forces or elements of the body are called Kahtise, essential to the proper functioning and balance of the person. Their imbalance can generate disturbances or even lead the person to death. For this reason, caring for the body is very important for well-being, and its care is done by equalizing the immaterial elements that make up the body. For prevention, protection, alleviation of pain, and healing, bahsese is performed to enhance the immaterial elements that constitute the body. [...] Among the six kahtise that constitute the body that will be addressed in this topic, the mahsã kahtiro (human/life), as we will see, is a metaphysical dimension that qualifies human/person/people as agents capable of handling and manipulating other elements. Its qualities are taken as instruments of attack, defense, and as sutiro to perform certain activities. This ability is what differentiates it from the other six types of kahtise; that is, its presence is fundamental to differentiate a body.

This passage from Lima Barreto’s important work highlights how the “body” in the indigenous perspective encompasses the whole person, with its immaterial, including metaphysical, elements. It is an integrated way of thinking about body/person/life and respective care without fragmentation or division, completely losing the sense of a dualistic, dichotomous split between mental care and other bodily care.

The first contribution of indigenous knowledge to a yet to come psychology then appears as an extreme categorical challenge: mental health does not exist; mental illness does not exist. Just as there is no such thing as a specifically bodily or cerebral health or illness. Overcoming this dualism points to its historical, social, cultural, and ethnic invention. Making it possible to envision a health/illness process that is integral, indivisible, and inseparable.

But other challenges also arise in the aforementioned speech by Ailton Krenak, which are extensively developed in the theoretical production Ideias para Adiar o fim do Mundo (Ideas to Postpone the End of the World) (Krenak, 2019, pp. 10-24), one of them being the challenge of overcoming the division established by the invention of a humanity:

[…] how we have, over the last two or three thousand years, built the idea of humanity. And how that very idea of humanity might lie at the heart of our worst decisions, justifying a great deal of violence.

For a long time, we have been alienated from the organism to which we belong — the earth. So much so that we began to think of Earth and Humanity as two separate entities. I can’t see anything on Earth that is not Earth. Everything I can think of is a part of nature.

In the meantime, humanity is being extricated from this organism we call Earth. The idea that we, humanity, should peel ourselves off the earth to live in a civilizing abstraction is absurd. The notion suppresses all diversity, denies the plurality of forms of life, of existence and habits. It serves up a one-size-fits-all menu, dress code, and, if possible, language.

To paraphrase the Portuguese legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos, knowledge ecology should be an integral part of our everyday experience, inspiring our choices about where we want to live and the experience we want as a community. We need to be critical of this plasmatic idea of a homogeneous humanity that has long replaced what we once called citizenship.

Here we have the need to overcome the very division that establishes the “club” of humanity, as this division is intimately related to the perspective of a servile world, a world of “natural resources”, a world at the disposal, in the service of this humanity outside the world, outside of nature, out of context, transcendent humanity, which could freely and with impunity plunder the world, nature. Everything that is not humanity would be at the service of the latter.

Thus, we can characterize the inseparable integration of man/world as a second decisive contribution of ancestral knowledge, to think of a yet to come psychology that is not founded on and tributary to the idea of the human.

A psychology that can expand its own worldview, considering the inseparable relationship between all that exists, a perspective that, while deconstructing the human, also deconstructs the natural, nature.

Therefore, a yet to come psychology that is absolutely relational, where nothing is specifically human, nor natural, a psychology that is not founded on the “human species”, in which the concept of species itself disappears, a concept that underpins the traditionally scientific categorization of the world.

Is it possible to think of a psychology for “surpassing man”? “Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants? Lo, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth” (Nietzsche, 2007. p.36).

And in this surpassing of the human, we rediscover lost connections, which is what appears next in Ideas for Postponing the End of the World (Krenak, 2019, pp. 26-57):

The times we’re living in are expert at creating absences: sapping the meaning of life from society and the meaning of experience from life. This absence of meaning generates stringent intolerance toward anyone still capable of taking pleasure from simply being alive, from dancing, from singing. There’s still a whole constellation of little groups of people who dance, sing, make it rain. The kind of zombie humanity we’re being asked to join can’t bear so much pleasure, so much fruition in life.

We resisted by expanding our subjectivity, not accepting this idea that we are all the same. There are still approximately 250 ethnic groups in Brazil that want to be different from each other, that speak more than 150 languages and dialects.

Hanging the sky broadens our horizons; not in a prospective sense, but existentially. It enriches our subjectivities (our dreams and imaginations), which are precisely what the times we live in want to consume, hijack, exploit as merchandise. If there is such a hunger to consume nature, there is a similar hankering to gobble up subjectivities — our subjectivities. So let’s live them with all the freedom we can generate; let’s not put them on a supermarket shelf. And seeing as nature is being attacked in so indefensible a manner, at least let’s keep our subjectivities alive, our visions, our poetics of existence.

Krenak is the legacy of our forebears, the memory of our origins, which we identify as our “headland,” as a humanity that cannot understand itself without this connection, this deep-set communion with the earth. Not the earth in the sense of a property, but as the place we share and from which we, the Krenak, feel increasingly disconnected. I’m speaking of the earth as this place that has always been sacred to us, but which our neighbours are ashamed to admit could ever be seen in such terms.

Perhaps we’re too conditioned to a certain idea of the human being and a single type of existence. Perhaps breaking that standard would send our minds into collapse, as if we were being swallowed by an abyss. And who says we can’t be? Who can say we haven’t already been?.

In Ailton Krenak’s work, we find a strong ethical-aesthetic-political stance towards the experience of being alive, of enjoying life, based on difference, diversity, multiplicity, inventiveness, and the infinite capacity to create and recreate authentic, innovative, and unsuspected ways of living. This reflects life’s own creative power, the continuous autopoeitic metamorphosis of life in reinventing itself in each body, in recreating and experiencing itself in new forms, modes, and possibilities.

The continual construction of existential territory, more than just identity, more than space-time-relation, but a construction of belonging, sharing, and inhabiting vital time, in the sense of ritualizing life as a strategy for dwelling in time.

Here we have a strong proposal for repositioning oneself in relation to the understanding of humanity, for revising this fundamental assumption of separation, of subjective split between humanity on one hand, and everything else on the other. Moreover, this proposal advances the invocation of a transvaluation of all values, to use Nietzsche’s classic expression (2007), a repositioning of the entire scale of values currently based on the exploitation of the world, of life, and of course, the other. Grounded in the empire of commodity and economy.

These same themes continue to be developed in the book A Vida Não é Útil (Life Is Not Useful) (Krenak, 2020), whose title itself is a provocation, a confrontation of the idea of utilitarianism, so dear to much of a certain behavioral psychology.

The title is already a certain play on words with the term heavily used for all kinds of merchandise: the shelf life of each utensil we buy, use, discard.

Utensils, shelf life, utilities, the very meaning of using and discarding, what serves us, what can serve us, useful life as the operative maxim of the commodity empire: life that can serve us.

Instead of life as a commodity, of useful life, we find in Krenak the advocacy that life exists for itself, by itself, as the fruition of the joy of living, not in service to anything, except for the continuum of life itself extensively and intensively, a pulsating, proliferating biosphere. Where nothing exists as a servant to the human.

Throughout history, humans, or rather, this select exclusive club of humanity - which is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the protocols of institutions - have been devastating everything around them. It’s as if they had elected a caste, humanity, and everyone outside it is sub-humanity. Not only the caiçaras, quilombolas, and indigenous peoples, but all life that we deliberately place on the sidelines. And the path is progress: this prospective idea that we are headed somewhere. There is a horizon, we are headed there, and along the way, we discard everything that doesn’t matter, what remains, the sub-humanity - some of us are part of it.

If some of us think we can colonize another planet, it means they still haven’t learned anything from the experience here on Earth. I wonder how many Earths these people need to consume before they understand that they are on the wrong path.

It was there that I realized that there was something in the perspective of indigenous peoples, in our way of observing and thinking, that could open a crack of understanding in this environment that is the world of knowledge.

This experience of collective consciousness is what guides my choices. It is a way of preserving our integrity, our cosmic connection. We are walking here on Earth, but we walk through other places as well. Most indigenous relatives do that. All you have to do is to look at the production of the youngest ones who are interacting with the field of art and culture, publishing, speaking. You can see this collective perspective in them. I don’t know any individual from any of our peoples who has gone out into the world alone. We walk in constellations.

The Krenak’s view of the human creature is precarious. Human beings are not certified; they could go wrong. This notion that humanity is predestined is nonsense. [...] The Krenak mistrust this human destiny, which is why we affiliate ourselves with the river, the stone, the plants, and other beings with whom we have affinity. It was this point of observation that led me to assert that we are not the humanity we think we are.

Some peoples have an understanding that our bodies are related to all life, that the cycles of the Earth are also the cycles of our bodies. We observe the earth, the sky, and feel that we are not dissociated from other beings.

(Krenak, pp. 9-41, 2020)

In his latest book, Futuro Ancestral (Ancestral Future) (Krenak, 2022), Ailton continues to advance the project launched by his previous titles, starting from Ideias Para Adiar o Fim do Mundo (Ideas to Postpone the End of the World) (Krenak, 2019) and (Life is Not Useful) (Krenak, 2020).

The author continues his monumental effort to revisit and question the foundations that sustain our Western voracious way of life.

The essays in this book, whose name already points to a circularity of time, as in the future lies ancestry, revolve around our relationship with temporality, insisting on the need to overcome the idea of the linearity of time.

In the first essay, Saudações aos Rios (Greetings to the Rivers), Ailton Krenak already correlates our relationship with temporality as determinative of our relationship with spatiality, determinative of our relationship with alterity, of our relationship with everything that surrounds us, of our relationship with life itself. Right from the start, he states: “The rivers, these beings that have always inhabited the worlds in different forms, suggest to me that if there is a future to be considered, that future is ancestral, because it was already here” (Krenak, 2022, p. 10).

Here, we have, from the outset, a precious parallel between our relationship with time and our relationship with the waters.

Yes, the waters flow uninterruptedly, perhaps infinitely, and although it may seem, from a restricted and limited point of view, that they flow linearly, in reality, we know that the same waters have circulated the planet for billions of years, in a circular manner, passing through the same point countless times.

Indeed, past waters move all mills, because all present waters are past and future waters.

Still, Western ways of living relate to water in a linear logic; we pollute the waters, turn rivers into sewers, with the certainty and tranquility that they won’t turn back on our own heads.

Daily, we use water as if it were a mere tool, a product, a “natural resource” at the service of humanity, and not the pulsating lifeblood of Gaia herself.

Krenak correlates this with our relationship with time. Time, too, the substance of which life itself is made and becomes, also seemingly slipping through our fingers, also seemingly linear, a linearity that ensures the past will not return; time, too, also circular, we pretend to ignore.

This Western relationship with a presumed temporal linearity seems to be linked to the absolute Western disregard for ancestry, related to the Western futuristic zeal, to the fetish of progress, to the disregard for Nietzsche’s eternal return:

Everything goes, everything returns; eternally rolls the wheel of existence. Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again; eternally runs on the year of existence. Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; eternally builds itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remains the ring of existence. Every moment begins existence, around every ‘Here’ rolls the ball ‘There’. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.

(Nietzsche, 2007. p. 259)

Our blindness to the circularity of water and time manifests in a similar way. Krenak’s essay seems to suggest that perhaps by perceiving the circularity of water, perhaps by remaking our relationship with the sensible, or with “the distribution of the sensible”, in the words of Rancière (2009), with the water that not only surrounds us in every imaginable way, including when we breathe but also constitutes us internally and entirely in a predominant way, perhaps through this route, we can remake our own relationship with temporality. Or, conversely, perhaps only when we can then break our temporal linearity, only then can we awaken to a loving, generous, and respectful relationship with water; only then will we see that life itself is made of that which flows and ebbs: water and time.

Waters tend to flow continuously, but endeavors of all kinds dam, fragment, suck, drain, store, attempt to retain, paralyze, attempt to extract from the waters their hydroelectric energy essence.

Also, with fragmented, accounted-for, utilitarianized time, they try to extract from time itself its accounting essence.

The book concludes with a wager, the need for a transition to another distribution of the sensible. A transition to another relationship with time and with the sensible. A transition that can move toward tuning the heart with the rhythm of the earth. And this necessary and urgent transition can occur above all in childhood, a privileged vital space-time-moment for the acceptance and exercise of a new sensibility.

And who will be the children in trance-transition-transcreation?

Moving forward in the temporal circularity, it can be any of us, provided we desire it, since our childhood, like ancestry, also exists in the future, as well as in the present and the past; the childhood we are yet to experience beckons us joyfully, the time will come to play with time, in its waters, and play with the waters, in its time, rediscovering in our next new childhood, other, more fluid ways of being and living.

In this way, we have here a third substantial contribution from indigenous thought to a yet to come psychology, a psychology that considers a relationship with time that is not linear, but capable of envisioning temporal circularity at a personal and collective level, including concerning Childhood. Additionally, a psychology that can consider a ritualization of life that constructs the habitability of time.

Similar and equivalent considerations to those presented by Ailton Krenak, we also find in Davi Kopenawa Yanomami:

What the white people call “nature” is Urihi a, the forest-land, but also its image, which can only be seen by the shamans and which we call Urihinari, the spirit of the forest. It is thanks to this image that the trees are alive. So what we call the spirit of the forest consists of the innumerable images of the trees, of the leaves that are their hair, and of the vines. It is also those of the game and the fish, the bees, the turtles, the lizards, the worms, and even the warama aka snails.

(Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 475, emphasis added)

Here, in the magnificent cosmopoetics presented by Kopenawa, we have the inseparability of everything that lives, in a conception that closely resembles the “innumerable states of being”, a contribution brought by Nise da Silveira to the approach to mental health from the writings of Antonin Artaud, constituting almost a motto of Nise da Silveira’s work, even being the title of the exhibitions at the Museum of the Unconscious, established by her.

In the forest, we human beings are the “ecology.” But it is equally the xapiri, the game, the trees, the rivers, the fish, the sky, the rain, the wind, and the sun! It is everything that came into being in the forest, far from the white people: everything that isn’t surrounded by fences yet. The words of “ecology” are our ancient words, those Omama gave our ancestors at the beginning of time. The xapiri have defended the forest since it first came into being.

(Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 480, emphasis added)

Here, too, with regard to the reference to fences, in the cosmological time of “everything that isn’t surrounded by fences yet”, it is worth remembering, in particular, the conceptual and disciplinary fences, the progressive fragmentation of knowledge; which ancestral knowledge attempts to remedy, mend, restore to a state of integrated and integrative knowledge.

Kopenawa and Albert (2015, p. 76, emphasis added) continues in his sharp criticism of the white way of seeing the world:

By lending an ear to them [to the words of Omama], white people may stop believing we are stupid. Maybe they will understand that it is their own minds that are confused and darkened, for in the city they only listen to the sound of their planes, their cars, their radios, their televisions, and their machines. So their thought is most often obstructed and full of smoke. They sleep without dreams, like axes abandoned on a house’s floor. Meanwhile, in the silence of the forest, we shamans drink the powder of the yãkoana hi trees, which is the xapiri spirits’ food. Then they take our image into the time of dream. This is why we can hear their songs and contemplate their presentation dances during our sleep. This is our school to really know things.

There is, first and foremost, a true paradigmatic dispute between the “white” knowledge produced in the confluence and confusion of technology, but also technocentric, on the one hand. And, on the other hand, ancestral knowledge, produced in dreams, but also in the vivid dreams of yãkoana, lucid dreams, awake, of connectivity, of extraordinary states of consciousness, made possible by trance, the interworld transit, between humans and non-humans. Another vegetal transhuman technology.

But there is also an epistemic dispute, the one over the production of ancestral knowledge from the affirmation “this is our school to really know things”, not only as a pedagogical resource, as the active interactive interconnecting pedagogy of the forest, but also as the extrapolation of truth and veridiction criteria themselves.

Pointing thus, to the validation of ancestral knowledge, traditional knowledge, of the original ways of seeing beyond the innumerable worlds that inhabit being/time/territory.

The implication of these worldviews for knowledge and practices regarding the production and reproduction of subjectivities and subjectivations is directly proportional to the diversification of the modes of re-existence that it opens, reveals, invents, welcomes, and recognizes.

Discussion

Firstly, recognizing a field of work and mental, psychosocial, integral care production based on the experiences, knowledge, technologies, strategies, productions, and ways of life of indigenous peoples south of the equator.

To do so, it is necessary to consider the knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples as valid, legitimate, and meaningful, undoing a whole process of erasure and historical disqualification of this knowledge, considering it in light of a sociology of absences:

The sociology of absences is a research that aims to show that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as non-existent, that is to say as an unbelievable alternative to what is supposed to exist. Its empirical object is considered impossible in the light of conventional social sciences, so its mere formulation already represents a rupture with them. The aim of the sociology of absences is to transform impossible objects into possible ones, absent objects into present ones.

There is no univocal way of not existing. There are several logics and processes through which hegemonic criteria of rationality and efficacy produce the non-existence of what does not fit into them. There is a production of non-existence whenever a given entity is disqualified and made invisible, unintelligible, or disposable in an irreversible way. What unites the different logics of the production of non-existence is that they are all manifestations of the same rational monoculture. I distinguish five logics or modes of production of non-existence.

(Santos, 2005, p. 21)

Therefore, recognizing a possibility of originality in psychosocial formation and work that simultaneously, in an anthropophagic manner, considers all global production, but also considers local productions and originalities, thus trying to reduce the asymmetry sustained by the colonialist thought of invalidation and erasure of that which is local production.

From there, recognize and give visibility to the practices, knowledge, and therapeutic resources developed by indigenous peoples, reinvesting and positivizing the classic disregard of “wild therapy”, “wild interpretation”, “wild psychoanalysis”, which was always pointed out whenever there was an unwarranted intervention, or did not possess proper foundation.

Returning to the multiplicity and sociobiodiversity of wild thought, of wild life, of the possibilities of being anchored in ways of life that are close to this.

It means bringing to the therapeutic scene the logic that:

Firstly, collective ways of being, living, coexisting, and therefore also treating, are valid and possible because life is necessarily plural and, in the plural, necessarily networked.

Secondly, the very opportunity for living a communal life, generating belonging and cultural and existential recognition, is therapeutic, absolutely reinventing the conception of what a “therapeutic community” is, pointing to the knowledge that: community life is therapeutic, life in collectivity, in common, can be therapeutic; isolation is not, individualism is not, because life is necessarily solidary, cooperative.

Thirdly, that the therapeutic is always integral and systemic (Capra & Luisi, 2014), always considering the continuum of life, not fragmenting, not separating, but recognizing life in its entirety and continuity, including temporally and spatially, undoing borders, overcoming limits and separations, whether conceptual, professional, epistemological, political, and social, because life is necessarily systemic, comprehensive, open to complexity.

Fourthly, that the therapeutic recovers and resumes the ritualization and sacralization of life and the world, constructing what Byung-Chul Han (Han, 2021) considered as a habitability of time, an architecture of temporality. Thus, breaking with the intensification of the fragmentation of time-space, which constrains and assaults the continuum of life, being that life is necessarily continuous.

Fifthly, that the therapeutic considers the territory not only as space, not only as a “setting”, not only as a context, not only as a component of “health determinants”, not only as a factor of the multifactorial, but the very experience and existential connection with worlds, worlds being plural, because life is necessarily interconnected and territorially anchored.

Sixthly, that the therapeutic recognizes the incessant and pulsating creativity of life, that nothing is ready and finished, that nothing is immutable, that everything solid and structural eventually dissolves in the air, because life is necessarily creative and autopoietic.

Seventhly, that the therapeutic recognizes the therapeutic potentialities and capacities inherent in each individual and collective, their power to restore and recover, because life is necessarily regenerative.

Eighthly, that the therapeutic can often make use of allies and alliances with components, vegetal entities, and the like, but not as something to remedy, or as a substance, much less a commodity, but as a link, an encounter, an interaction of coexistence and mutual respect, because life is necessarily interdependent and multi-connected.

Ninthly, that the therapeutic can also bring to the stage, among these vegetal allies, those recognized as dialogical, vegetal ambassadors, which establish a much more intensive dialogue with their human interlocutors, plants that have been used for millennia for purposes of reconnection with oneself and with the worlds, worlds being plural, because life is necessarily communicative, dialogical, multi-cognitive.

These are nine lines that intertwine in the sewing or weaving of what may come to be an approach that we can call Psychotropicalist, in a possible yet to come psychology.

We introduce the term Psychotropicalist because we are considering here not a psychology for indigenous peoples, not only the recognition that indigenous peoples have developed and continue to develop their technologies and knowledge of care production, including for what we call mental or psy, but above all, that these knowledge and practices can advance the field of psychology as a whole, from an anthropophagic attitude.

At the same time, we recognize that ancestral knowledge and practices also constantly update and reinvent themselves when confronted with new challenges that arise every day; therefore, they are not frozen, static knowledge, but dynamic, creative, and in constant anthropophagy.

In this sense, we envision the construction of hybrid, mestizo, symmetrical knowledge, at the confluence of indigenous knowledge, ancestral knowledge with scientific knowledge, in the possibility of fertilizing the latter.

Thus, we can envision an anthropophagic process of knowledge that can mutually fertilize, from mutual recognition, rather than the annulment of local, regional, traditional knowledge.

This constitutes a resumption of the idea, of the ethical-aesthetic-political reference of tropicalism for the field of psy.

Tropicalism emerges as a vast cauldron of mestizaje and anthropophagic hybridity, enabling unsuspected creations, inventions, translations, and transcreations that surpass the canons and barriers of Eurocentric culture.

In the words of Haroldo de Campos (2015. p. 199):

Translation as transgressive appropriation and hybridity (or mestizaje) as dialogical practice and the ability to speak the other and speak oneself through the other, under the guise of difference [...]. The “Anthropophagic Manifesto” (1928), by Oswald de Andrade, revisited by its author at the end of his life, in the late 1950s, in the essay revising Marxist dogmatism “The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy”, is nothing more than the expression of the need for a dialogical and dialectical relationship between the national and the universal. Its motto, not by chance, is a phonetic usurpation, a mistranslation by homophony, of Shakespeare’s famous dilemma: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Oswald reformulates this verse by replacing the verb “to be” with the word “tupi” (the name designating the general language of the Brazilian indigenous peoples at the time of discovery) and proclaims: “Tupi or not tupi, that is que question”.

Anthropophagy, in response to this ironic equation of the problem of origin, is a kind of brutalist deconstructionism: the critical devouring of the universal cultural legacy, carried out not from the submissive and reconciled perspective of the “good savage”, but from the disillusioned viewpoint of the “bad savage”, devourer of whites, anthropophagite.

Therefore, a Psychotropicalism that can bring to the universal and universalist legacy of Psychology a dehierarchized, unsubmissive devouring of knowledge that also allows the psychological field to transition from “to be” to Tupi, as an equally relevant question.

This considers, at the same time, that the place of indigenous peoples, their representatives, their thinkers, their knowledge, is no longer, in any way, a place of research object, nor a submissive, passive, or compassionate place, but the anthropophagic collective place, of reciprocal devouring, of continuous sharing, of self-reinvention in the face of the infinity of enigmas, of the subversion of the founding psy-sphinx, with the new equation: devour me and I decipher you.

Conclusion

In this article, we present some considerations, preliminary reflections, lines of flight for a psychology that can depart from a decolonial cosmopolitical position towards a possible yet to come psychology. A psychology that is outlined and reinvented based on the real epistemic validation of the knowledge of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, considering the theoretical production of some of their most representative leaders today.

The challenges for the construction of this yet to come psychology are immense, as it involves renegotiating the very foundation and theoretical underpinning of psychology as traditionally or hegemonically understood.

It also involves navigating the difficult and arid epistemic field towards a paradigm that can be ethically, aesthetically, and politically grounded.

We venture here to point out some conceptual clues for this psychological journey of self-reinvention as a field of knowledge and practices of care, including among them:

That “The Earth is Therapeutic” is a decolonial cosmopolitical categorical imperative equivalent to what the motto “Freedom is Therapeutic” was for the Antipsychiatry movement.

Thus, this yet to come psychology will need to consider territories as an inseparable existential production, territory far beyond the setting and the social determinants of health. Without disregarding the importance of social determinants, the yet to come psychology considers the territory also as a relational field of self-production, such as the “Tekoha” of Guarani wisdom, as the indivisibility and belonging to the territory, the territory as necessarily existential, constructing perspectivism that forms different ways of building worlds.

The invasion of territories and the destruction of territories is the invasion and destruction of the very subjectivities and modes of subjectivation.

Similarly, the entire indigenous movement of “reclaiming”, to use this term so dear to indigenous peoples, their traditional territories, is also a reclaiming of the very possibilities of ancestral subjectivities and subjectivations, including their identity emergences, with the “becoming forest and becoming forest citizenship”, often pointed out by Ailton Krenak in public speeches.

That collectivity is the privileged and possible field of intervention and therapy, and that any individualistic and individualizing approach will be limited and limiting.

That the ritualization of life is a powerful tool for negotiating with time, for a new temporality that is not linear. Such habitability of time allows for a relationship of less intimidation and constraint in the face of time. The redefinition of the relationship with time is part of a transvaluation of all values, shared at present.

That the deconstruction of humanity itself, in its dichotomy with nature, in its distancing from the world, requires us to consider a transhuman psychology, or beyond the human, in reconnection with everything that is typically considered less than human.

That all health practices need to be considered in an integral way, moving away from the mind/body dichotomy, deconstructing the very idea of mental health as a specific field of action, but at the same time, equally moving away from the trap of everything being merely bodily, or biological, biochemical, biomechanical, genetic, or cerebral. Reinvesting in and revaluing the very idea of life, beyond bios or zoo.

That ethnosociobiodiversity constructs a plurality of worlds with an infinity of knowledge and ways of living, demanding a perspectivism that can be, simultaneously, as comprehensive as possible, but without falling into relativism or empty nihilism. In this sense, we have the anthropophagic challenge of building a symmetrical health, conceived in the mold of symmetrical anthropology.

That the emergence of ethnosociobiodiversities, that the emergence of unsubmissive knowledge, seems to flow mainly from the south of the world.

• How to cite this article: Moebus, R. L. N., Barreto, A. F., & Moraes, M. M. (2024). Decolonial, countercolonial, yet to come Psychology?. Estudos de Psicologia (Campinas), 41, e230087. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-0275202441e230087en

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Edited by

Editor

Danilo Silva Guimarães

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 June 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  31 July 2023
• Reviewed
  25 Jan 2024
• Accepted
  15 Mar 2024