How coloniality shapes the making of Latin American psychologists: ethnographic evidence from Ecuador

Abstract

This paper provides ethnographic evidence on how coloniality shapes the making of Latin American psychologists. A critical ethnography was conducted at a psychology training institution in Ecuador, consisting of twelve months of participant observation; forty-one semi-structured interviews; and analysis of academic discourse, photos, videos and relevant social media content. The research was guided by the tradition of Critical Psychology – specifically Liberation Psychology – and Critical Discourse Analysis. Findings suggest the pervasiveness of coloniality in the making of Ecuadorian psychologists and, hypothetically, of others in Latin America and the wider Global South. Interpretations also highlight the non-essentialist, non-dichotomist, ‘messy’ nature of such processes, a consideration which may advance current ethical and analytical debates on decolonisation. Echoing ongoing critical arguments, authors suggest that a ‘help-as-war’ metaphor is a category with potential value to contribute to such advancement, an approach that has important theoretical and pragmatic implications for researchers and practitioners.

Keywords:

• Professional identity
• psychology
• global mental health
• critical ethnography
• critical discourse analysis
• Latin America
• Ecuador
• Global South
• colonial
• metaphor

Acknowledgements

The authors are extremely grateful to all informants for their help during the course of this ethnographic enquiry. The authors also wish to thank Joanna Moncrieff – secondary supervisor for Manuel Capella’s PhD – and David Goldberg, whose scholarly input helped us refine some of the ideas presented in this paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interests. The first author was funded from a PhD grant by SENESCYT/IFTH (2014-2017). The second author supervised this research. Details on the reported data have been anonymised due to ethical requirement. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper This research was approved by UCL Research Ethics Committee and by the local training institution where the ethnography was conducted.

Notes

1 This and other quotes from Spanish sources had been translated by the first author.