Concepts, Language, and Early Socialization in the Indigenous Wichi Perspective: Toward a Relational–Ecological Paradigm

Abstract

The Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic framework has worked as the standard Epistemic Paradigm within developmental science. However, two pervasive limitations have been pointed out: (a) the predominant focus on the individual child split from their context/culture, and (b) the over-representation of only one cultural group: Anglo-speaking children of middle-class European–American descendants. This chapter formulates a bidirectionally epistemological–methodological strategy to address these gaps: under the umbrella of the relational paradigm on the one hand and from population evidence—indigenous evidence—which often happen to exhibit epistemological orientations aligned with the foundations of relational thinking, on the other. To accomplish this, first we present cognitive and language development patterns from the Wichi, an indigenous group living in the Chaco region in South America. Second, and based on this evidence, we describe the ecological–relational paradigm, which brings relationshipism front and center. By focusing on developmental evidence coming from non-dominant populations, such as the indigenous Wichi, we expect to contribute to enlarging the agenda of the ecological–relational paradigm as a comprehensive conceptual framework in developmental science.