Psychology In Difference

Latin America And Afro-Brazilian Perspectives

Abstract

This article is based on a critique of the knowledge traditionally disseminated and taught in Psychology courses, which is based on knowledge produced in Western Europe and the United States and reflects the vision of the human coined in Western modernity, of an individualistic nature, supposedly universal, objective and neutral. From this perspective, the knowledge produced in Africa and Latin America has been historically denied or erased. To understand the connection between the traditional knowledge of psychological science and the vision of man that it carries, a historical recovery of the constitution of the universal “Other”, the white man, in opposition to the dehumanized “others”, is carried out, starting from the European invasions of the African and American continents. Based on the critique of colonized psychological knowledge, which carries a eugenicist and exclusionary perspective, other possibilities for understanding the human being are pointed out, especially from the African and Afro-Brazilian perspective, presenting as an alternative to the individual subject, the collective subject and community connectivity as organizing principles of knowledge. Some Afrocentric contributions to Psychology and two examples of the production of know-how from a decolonial and Afro-referenced perspective are presented.