Concepts, Language, and Early Socialization in the Indigenous Wichi Perspective: Toward a Relational–Ecological Paradigm

ANDREA TAVERNA; MIGDALIA I. PADILLA COLÓN; MATÍAS FERNÁNDEZ RUIZ; BAIOCCHI, MARÍA CELESTE

Cognitive Science in Education in Non-Weird Populations

Springer Nature

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2022; p. 75 - 98

The so called Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic paradigm has presented two pervasive limitations to the field of developmental science: a) the predominant focus on the individual child splited from their context/culture, and b) the over-representation of only one cultural group: Anglo-speaking children of middle-class European-American descendants. This chapter formulates a bidirectionally epistemological-methodological strategy to address these gaps: under the umbrella of the relational paradigm on the one hand and from population evidence - indigenous evidence- which often happen to exhibit epistemological orientations aligned with the foundations of relational thinking, on the other. To accomplish this, first we present cognitive and language development patterns from the Wichi, an indigenous group living in the Chaco region in South America. Secondly, and based on this evidence, we describe the ecological-relational paradigm, which bring relationshipism front and center. By focusing on developmental evidence coming from non-dominant populations, such as the indigenous Wichi, we expect to contribute to enlarge the agenda of the ecological-relational paradigm as a comprehensive conceptual framework in developmental science.