Mesoamerican conceptions of subjectivity and its critical potential before dominant psychology: Mesoamerican conceptions of subjectivity and its critical potential against dominant psychology

Abstract

This article is situated in the tradition of indigenous and ancestral psychological perspectives. It exposes eight subjective aspects threatened by capitalist modernity and ignored by Western mainstream psychology, but still considered and safeguarded by the indigenous people of Mesoamerica, namely, variability, multiplicity, extimacy, openness, inessentiality, historicity, individualization and uniqueness. These aspects are reconstituted from information provided by the words of the indigenous people themselves or those who have known how to listen to them, such as religious of the colonial period or chroniclers, historians, anthropologists and ethnologists who have worked in the last centuries in Mexico and Central America. The analysis of the collected information allows us, on the one hand, to appreciate what we are ignoring and losing in Latin-American modern societies, and, on the other hand, to grasp why we fail to recognize or preserve it. This is how the knowledge of the native people can constitute an effective means when relating critically with capitalism, with its psychological device and with what they have turned us into and continue to make us. This article is part of a broader research framed in critical psychology and dedicated to the reconstruction of Mesoamerican conceptions of subjectivity.