Is everybody human? The relationship between humanity and animality in Western and Amerindian myth narratives
Is everybody human? The relationship between humanity and animality in Western and Amerindian myth narratives
复制标题
每个人都是人吗？
作者：
D. Kawaguchi;D. Guimarães
本研究的一般问题是观察到，在西方文化中，人类占据着中心地位，并与宇宙整体性相一致-这是一种世界观，与世界范围内对动物的大规模虐待和我们今天目睹的环境灾难的范式相一致。本文从这个问题出发，提出并讨论了上述西方观念，并将其与雅诺马马土著人关于人类在宇宙中的地位的观念进行了比较。我们使用心理学中的符号文化建构主义的对话方法，通过分析两个创世神话：《创世纪》，希伯来-基督教圣经的第一本书;和《坠落的天空：雅诺玛米萨满的话》，土著领袖戴维·科本纳瓦的一套叙述，关注两种文化中“人”和非人类动物之间的关系。结果表明，西方和美洲印第安人的叙述中，大多数是相反的概念之间的关系，“人类”和“动物”的含义有本质的区别。从它与印第安人宇宙观的紧张关系及其与非人类动物的关系出发，我们对西方心理学自诞生以来就存在的种族中心主义提出了质疑。鉴于心理学建立在一种世界观的基础上，这种世界观假定自然和人类之间存在严格的分裂（假设，例如，我们的“自然”欲望的冲动与“文化”强加的规则和禁令之间存在不可逾越的不相容性），本研究的目的在于提醒人们注意这样一个事实，即自然主义本体论不是自我建构的先验条件，也不是必要条件，世界上的身份。然而，这种预设的人类“异化”的性质仍然被认为是理所当然的霸权的理论方法论的心理学反思，我们讨论的局限性，欧洲中心的心理学研究及其在对话认识论的影响。
The general problem this research approaches is the observation that, in Western cultures, Human occupies a central place and is identified with the cosmological wholeness—a worldview which is in tune with the paradigm of massive abuses that are practiced against animals who1 are exploited by industry worldwide and with the environmental catastrophe we witness nowadays. Departing from that problem, this paper presents and discusses the Western notion indicated above, comparing it with the notion of Yanomami indigenous people about human’s place in the universe. We use a dialogical methodology pertinent to semiotic-cultural constructivism in psychology, focusing on the relationship between “human” and non-human animal in the two mentioned cultures, through the analysis of two creation myths: The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew-Christian Bible; and The Falling Sky: Words from a Yanomami Shaman, a set of narratives from indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa. Results show that Western and Amerindian narratives present mostly opposite conceptions concerning the relationships between “humanity” and animality and that meanings for “human” and “animal” differ essentially in both. From the tension with Amerindian cosmology and its relationship with nonhuman animal, we call into question the ethno-anthropocentrism that is present in Western psychology since its birth. Given that psychology lays its foundations on a worldview that presupposes a strict split between nature and Humanity (assuming, e.g. an insurmountable incompatibility between the impulse of our “natural” desires and the regulation and prohibitions imposed by “culture”), this research intends to draw attention to the fact that the naturalist ontology is not an a priori nor a necessary condition for the construction of self-identity in the world. Whereas this presupposed Human “alienation” from nature remains taken for granted in the hegemonic theoretical–methodological reflections in psychology, we discuss the limits of Eurocentered psychology research and its implications in a dialogical epistemology.