Repensar la “locura” desde una comunidad indígena

Reflexión sobre un proceso de investigación en psicología social

Abstract

To investigate about insanity in a native community necessarily forces to carry out a revision of psi disciplines: psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology and ethnopsychiatry, in order to elaborate a social psychology work that was considering subjects in their singular processes in permanent interaction with their sociocultural context, for what was necessary anthropological methods such as a ethnography and participant observation as well as group devices. The investigation aims to explore local categories about “insanity” in a context which is foreign to the origin context and gives sense to western episteme of mental insanity, stimulating the exploration of local categories and contrasting them both. Adjustments and contrasts that opens the possibility of a methodological reflection about the investigation process and the role that plays the researcher in constructing de knowledge by confronting his own power position, among thorough knowledge and practice, in front of a native community.