Hacia una antropología de la universidad. Crítica decolonial de sus dispositivos cotidianos de poder

Abstract

The university as a modern social phenomenon needs to be transformed in order to confront the long centuries of colonialism in Latin America and its enormous ethnic-cultural diversity. This article aims to contribute to such evolvement, by proposing an anthropologist analysis of the University Institution concept, showing its capitalist and ethnocentric structure and its connection with liberal professions as devices of power of the State. This proposal is part of the results of a doctoral research carried out in San Cristóbal de las Casas with professors from the Intercultural University of Chiapas, where an institutional ethnography, a biographical-narrative method, and a participant observation were developed during the years 2019-2021. The paper invites engagement and discussion of a pluriverse paradigm to view and to perceive “University” and its pedagogical praxis from a decolonial perspective instead of the well-known and outdated established occidental universalism.

Keywords

• epistemologies of the South
• epistemological decolonization
• nation-state
• coloniality of knowledge
• university reform