Psicologia e povos indígenas: reflexões a partir do contato com os Yepa Mahsã no Projeto Rios e Redes

Abstract

The Psychology studies focused on native people in the Brazilian context, even if growing gradually, still lack references that allow the comprehension of many psychological phenomena within their cultural specificities. It becomes important the construct of psychologies relevant to the context that they propose to study, breaking with the epistemological dominance of Western and Eurocentric approaches. Thus, the purpose of this work is to make a psychosocial analysis of the the Tukano person – Yepa Mahsã – through the Kihti Ukuse, Bahsese and Bahsamori. In this work, the Kihti Ukuse is understood as the narratives. The Bahsese is understood as the mediator of the relationship between Yepa Mahsã with the Wai Mahsã, with their demiurges, as well as the agent instrument of the relationships and classifications of the surroundings. And the Bahsamori is understood here as a set of collective rituals (Poose) that happen in different moments, following a calendar of constellations and environmental phenomena. This research was done with the Amazonian Indigenous Research Nucleus (NEAI), that has been developing knowledge together with the Indigenous group of the Tukano, from the “Rivers and Nets Project”, anthropologically addressing the indigenous concepts about the different senses of the society/nature relationship. Composing the team of indigenous and non-indigenous anthropological researches, we had the purpose of contributing with the psychosocial readings, showing the interrelationships between individual and social context. Our research was qualitative, utilizing: a) secondary data (transcriptions of symposiums, reports of activities and textual material produced during the project); b) written memories of the researchers teams formal group meetings; c) information from field journals, from informal conversations that happened between the team. Therefore, we build knowledge not like a participant researcher nor a distant observer, but like a researchers in the everyday that helped both in the construction of the anthropological discourse about the three Tukano concepts, and in the elaboration of the textual materials. The data was analyzed by content analysis. The first chapter will bring a discussion about the context of the Psychology research and Native people, both nationally and internationally. In the second chapter, it will be addressed the record of epistemologies of the psychology, that study the culture, as well as the fundamentals of the “Indigenous Psychologies”, and also of the Macro-cultural Psychology; the third chapter will present how the three concepts Kihti Ukuse, Bahsese and Bahsamori help the constitution of the Yepa Mahsã person, using the readings of the Macro Cultural Psychology; in the final considerations it will be addressed that the “psychosocial” element, inherent to the Yepa Mahsã, comprises social relationships that are established in different levels of existence, as well as a relation with the environment that isn’t inert, but alive and relational.