La construcción del indio domesticado como categoría social y cognitiva entre los ticuna: para una psicología social de las relaciones de dominación en el alto Amazonas

Abstract

This paper explores the reciprocal perceptions of «the other» that Indians and Westerners developed during the historical process of colonial domination. The Ticuna accepted domination and internalized the stereotypical image of the Indian as an inferior creature, which was created by the Western culture, adapting it to their own native worldview. This generated among the Indians a complex of subordination that in turn made the Western superiority prophecy come true and functioned as a mechanism of indirect social control, allowing a small elite of colonial masters to govern over a great number of Indians without resorting constantly to the onerous exercise of physical coertion. Subordination was reinterpreted in terms of the supernatural and the Ticuna therefore could only understand deliverance in terms of the supernatural. Thus, political or military resistance movements never occurred whereas Ticuna history is sprinkled with millenarianist movements.