Abstract

DELGADILLO CELY, Ingrid Sissy. Ixil University in Guatemala: Beyond the Monoculture of Western Reason. Enunciación [online]. 2023, vol.28, n.2, pp.254-268.  Epub Apr 21, 2024. ISSN 0122-6339.  https://doi.org/10.14483/22486798.20406.

The modern-colonial paradigm based on knowledge/power practices has positioned the monoculture of Western reason as the only valid source of knowledge, from which the diversity of ways to provide meaning to and inhabit the world has been historically ignored and invisibilized. Nevertheless, there are various experiences of atavistic knowledge that, anchored in the practice of language, in being in a language, have survived as the political proposal employed by the Ixil Maya University of Guatemala in their communities, through the study and practice of the Tichajil, or the indigenous good living, and its commitment to the care of memory, land, and life. This article provides visibility to this experience and recognizes it as a valuable epistemic reference to stress the production of knowledge in universities, as well as its relevance for the present time. The conclusions highlight the power of communality, of the link with land and nature, of the richness of its ecologies, which transgress capital-centric-colonial conventionality, as inputs for the construction of a counter-hegemonic education that enables an epistemic and existential turn.

Keywords : community; pedagogy; university; Western reason; decolonial; good living.

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