Thompson and Atkins (2010) write about how technology has both helped and hindered in human mobility. One issue they discuss is how there are no negative impacts towards brain drain due to Information and Communication Technologies, but rather, that it provides people who do move from their home countries to share knowledge and skills back home that they gain abroad. While I believe in many cases this may be true, I believe that it is also equally possible that people abroad do not share knowledge and skills back to their home countries, and continue the cycle of brain drain from deprived areas. One way to address this is to promote acculturation services worldwide which advocate an integration model, encouraging people to acculture to their new country, but also to value their home cultures. This may assist people in continuing to want to find ways to support and assist their countries of origin, even if it is no longer feasible for them to continue to live there. Corporations and educational institutions who host migrated workers could, in the global interest, provide incentives for these people to share, or to bring back after a period of time, knowledge and skills to their home countries. IPs can help to advocate and research these scenarios to create a win-win-win situation, with both countries, the organization, and the individual gaining something of value from doing this.
In his 2003 TED talk, Wade Davis shares several points of importance to indigenous people’s rights and to International Psychology. His data is staggering on the amount of language, and with it, cultural knowledge, that is lost every day. He stressed the importance of how knowledge is relative to culture and the environment, using the example of how there are 17 varieties of ayahuasca, but “modern” Westernized eyes can’t distinguish between the individual plants. However, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon know the difference because each plant sings in a different key in the moonlight. In this instance, not only can we not distinguish the plants, but our entire method of understanding differences between plants is upturned. Our worldview does not permit such methods of identification as scientific, and therefore it is discredited. But yet, these people have this knowledge, and they have gained it through their own means. This type of scenario could be difficult when International Psychologists must significantly challenge their worldview. Davis also talks about how change and new technology don’t inherently threaten the ethnosphere – cultures change and adapt and develop new technologies all the time, but that doesn’t necessarily destroy the culture itself. What DOES threaten it, however, is the force of power and domination by some cultures over others. This is expressed politically, through genocide, through ethnocide, loss of environmental resources and homelands such as through aggressive deforestation or forced relocation of peoples (ie. Native Americans onto reservations), and other means. Ethnocide can be accomplished by strategically killing off key members of a culture, or also through the forced assimilation and marginalization of a people into the dominant culture (ie. Aborigine children separated from their families and forced into English schools and forbidden to speak their native tongue or practice any aboriginal traditions). IPs can also help to address these types of issues by preserving knowledge and culture through researching lesser known cultures or minority peoples, and advocating for their rights both directly, and indirectly through increasing awareness of the culture among the mainstream dominant cultures.
While there are quite a few organizations and people working diligently to assist people who have suffered from human rights violations, I believe there is still a long way to go in this area, and I believe this is one of the most important functions we as IPs can help to improve.
References
Cooke, M. (2002). The effects of personal characteristics on migration from prairie cities to first nations. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 34(2), 40-62.
Thompson, L. F., & Atkins, S. G. (2010). Technology, mobility, and poverty reduction. In The psychology of global mobility (pp. 301-322). Springer, New York, NY.
Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures. TED2003. http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html