The Construction of Indigenous Counseling in the Perspective of Tobelo’s Culture

Abstract

Counseling practice should be adaptive to the culture in which counseling is implemented. Counseling practice that grows and develops according to the local culture is called indigenous counseling practice. That means indigenous counseling originated from the local people is developed by the locals, and used by the locals, however it has a definite or right purpose for developing counseling in general. The cultural potential of Tobelo contributes to strengthening the existence of professional counseling practices. With this knowledge and understanding, indigenous counseling is constructed in the Tobelo cultural perspective, which is needed to serve counselees with a Tobelo cultural background. To construct indigenous counseling from the standpoint of Tabelo's culture, qualitative method is used in this research, and the data is obtained with participative observatory, interviews and document analysis. Based on the results of data analysis, indigenous counselling is constructed in the Tobelo cultural perspective which contains the counselor's personal development, the function and role of the counselor, the relationship between counselor and counselee, the purpose and meaning of therapy, and the development of counseling techniques that can be used in the counseling process. This research produces different theoretical concepts with professional counseling derived from a Western cultural perspective.