Amerindian Perspectivism and Critical Psychology

What if psychology could see through more than one body, and confront its own crisis by listening to worlds its tradition has never truly heard?

In Amerindian Perspectivism and Critical Psychology, Christian Dunker presents perspectivism not as an ethnographic curiosity but as a rigorous, transformative critical philosophy. Drawing on Amazonian thought and the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Tânia Stolze Lima, he recasts the concepts psychology takes for granted: identity becomes a position rather than an essence, nature becomes many rather than one, and the boundary between human and non-human turns into a space of negotiation.

This shift unsettles the foundations of Western psychology, its individualism, its universalism, its assumptions about pathology and cure, and opens fresh ways of thinking about gender, race, class, mourning, mental health and the politics of care. Weaving together Indigenous knowledges, psychoanalytic critique and decolonial thought, it also offers concrete clinical tools, such as controlled equivocation, for research and practice.

Accessible, concise and deeply grounded, it is a singular bridge between anthropology and psychology. It offers an invitation to rethink the discipline on a planet of many natures, where the relation to the Other precedes identity.