Concepts, language, and early socialization in the indigenous Wichi perspective: toward a relational-ecological paradigm

PADILLA, MIGDALIA; TAVERNA, ANDREA; BAIOCCHI, MARIA CELESTE; FERNÁNDEZ RUIZ, MATÍAS

Cognitive Science and Education in Non-WEIRD Populations: A Latin American Perspective

Springer Nature

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2022; p. 75 - 97

One of the crucial problems in most current approaches in developmental psychology has been the identifcation of the factors that explain development. This is an intellectual strategy originated in modern thought?the Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic worldview (Lakatos, 1978)?which sharply separates processes considered internal to the mind (innate dispositions, representations, etc.) from the external world (e.g., social determinations). As a result, ?Cartesian psychology? is still facing unsolvable dichotomies such as nature versus nurture, development separated from evolution, child-centrism separated from culture, etc. At the same time, there has been a rising movement toward an integrative developmental science based on relational thinking (Lerner, 2006, 2011; Lerner & Overton, 2008; Overton, 2006, 2010, 2012; Overton & Lerner, 2012). Generally speaking, this relational?ecological paradigm understands development in terms of the organism?environment econiche, encouraging attention to system-level dynamics rather than focusing on components in isolation. Centrally, the different theoretical versions within Relationism attribute the source of the change to the interactions of the system in question at those different dynamic levels, confrming its self-movement (Castorina, 2002). By focusing on development of interdependent elements as part of a system, this movement leads to the healing of the classic fundamental antinomies (e.g., subject?object, mind?body, nature?nurture, culture?individual) providing concepts that are inclusive and represented, not as pure forms, but as forms that fow across fuzzy boundaries (Overton, 2013a, b). Within the framework of this relationshipism, an alternative paradigm to Cartesian psychology?relational?ecological psychology?is opening up, in which a coalition of different perspectives and theoretical initiatives coexist, such as Developmental Ecological Psychology (Szokolszky & Read, 2018), Developmental Systems Theory (Oyama et al., 2001), Dynamic Systems Approaches (e.g., Lewis, 2010; Thelen & Smith, 2006), Sociocultural and Ecobehavioral Perspectives (e.g., Cole, 1996; Gauvain et al., 2011; Heft, 2001; Nelson, 1996; Rogoff, 2014; Valsiner, 1998), and Approaches on Embodied Intersubjectivity (e.g., Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2016; Gallagher, 2005) (see Szokolszky & Read, 2018, for a detailed description). We agree that ecological?relational psychology reveals strong possibilities for addressing the problems that the splitting Cartesian psychology has presented to the feld of developmental science, in particular, the excessive focus on the causal factors that ?explain or cause? development resulting in an individual child split from their context/culture. However, despite this important contribution, Cartesian rationality tracks are still found in developmental perspectives. The frst is the overrepresentation of only one cultural group: children of middle-class European?American descendants (e.g., Gauvain et al., 2011). Second, even among the cross-cultural approaches, a bulk of studies often treat culture as a variable that infuences, but is not constitutive of, the individual and development (see Mistry et al., 2013; Overton, 2013a, b). In this chapter, we argue that these limitations, both methodological and epistemological, can be addressed bidirectionally: under the umbrella of the relational paradigm (Overton, 2013a, b) on the one hand and from evidence other than dominant populations?such as indigenous communities?on the other, populations that often happen to exhibit epistemological orientations aligned with the foundations of relational thinking. Different contributions from both Psychology and Anthropology have described indigenous epistemological orientations, that is, their way of knowing, as ?relational epistemologies? (Bird-David, 1999; Medin et al., 1997, 2002, 2006, 2013, 2015; Pierotti, 2011). Briefy, these epistemologies are about knowing the world by focusing primarily on relatedness, developing the skills of being-inthe-world with other things (Bird-David, 1999). In this work, we focus on two crucial developmental processes?concepts and language?from the Wichi perspective, an indigenous group living in the Chaco region in South America. First, we will describe their ways of knowing, attention to, and interaction with the world, identifying what aspects of their orientations make them relational epistemologies. Second, we will reconsider the Wichi relationality in light of our psychological evidence from two perspectives: (a) how Wichi children and adults conceptualize and reason about their environment, particularly about the hunhat lheley (inhabitants of the earth), and (b) how Wichi infants become native speakers and competent social participants of their culture. Finally, based on this evidence, which, as we shall see, is well aligned with relational thinking, we will describe the emerging ecological?relational paradigm, which brings the relationshipism front and center.