Presentation at the Fifth Nordic Conference on Adult Learning in Reykjavik Iceland 5-6 March 2013: http://fifth.ncoal.org/wiki/session-h/

1. Educating for decolonization:
Interculturality in the Andes
Robert Aman
PhD Candidate, Linköping University
Visiting Research Fellow, University of Oxford

2. Background
 Evo Morales: ‘500 years of indigenous resistance […] have not
been in vain. We have achieved power to end the injustice, the
inequality and oppression that we have lived under. The
original indigenous movement, as well as our ancestors,
dreamt about recovering the territory.’
 ‘Broken are the ties to their ancient cultures, dead are their
gods as well as their cities’ – Octavio Paz
 The undesired component on society’s body; marginalized to
sceneries in the colonial texts, silenced in the national
chronicles – together with their engraved histories, knowledges
and memories.
 The Morales government sketched out a proposal for
intercultural education centered on the objectives of
multilingualism and decolonization.
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3. Background
 Interculturality as concept has come to dominate the
educational debate in recent years among, on the one hand,
supranational bodies such as the European Union and
UNESCO; on the other, among indigenous movements in the
Andes.
 The EU identifies the potential for interculturality in it’s ‘rich
cultural and linguistic diversity, which is inspiring and has
inspired many countries across the world’ and ‘to develop
active inter-cultural dialogue with all countries and all regions,
taking advantage of for example of Europe’s language links
with many countries’ (2007, 10).
 Echoes an imperial order that interculturality in other parts of
the world marks an attempt to overcome.
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4. Aim
 Given the apparent mismatch in appropriations of
interculturality between supranational organizations and local
social movements, the aim in this essay is to study how
interculturality, as a path to decolonization, is being translated
among indigenous alliances in the Andean region.
 Indigenous movements have failed to attract any substantial
interest in the West (cf. Patrinos 2000), not even within
postcolonial studies (Young, 2012)
 Engage in a discussion about the proposition for interculturality
to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary –
modernization, progress, salvation – as it lingers on in official
memory; and, simultaneously, problematize the universalizing
claims implicitly embedded in supranational bodies’
articulations of the concept.
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5. Acts of Resistance
 Depart from the proposition that the practical significance of
interculturality is as an act of resistance to colonialist vestiges
with the purpose to delink.
 Delinking, says Mignolo (2007, 463), ‘shall be thought out and
projected as a delinking from the rhetoric of modernity and the
logic of coloniality.’
 The rhetoric of modernity (invocations of progress, salvation
and development) is merged into the logic of coloniality that
operates through the domains of capitalist economy
(appropriation of land); politics (control of authority); epistemic
and personal (control of knowledge and subjectivity) (Mignolo
2005).
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6. Acts of Resistance
 My approach operates on two interrelated levels:
 On an abstract level, I place emphasis on symptom formations
of modernity/coloniality in the interviewees’ statements from
which interculturality is conceptualized as an attempt to delink.
 On a more practical level, my readings set out to map principles
of knowledge and being and ways of life articulated in
confrontation with deemed western frameworks.
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7. Empirical material
 A course on interculturality provided by an indigenous
organization that spreads over the Andean region of Bolivia,
Ecuador and Peru.
 Aim of the course: to retrieve and construct knowledge in direct
relation to Andean culture and identity, in local languages and
terminology, based upon indigenous methodology.
Acknowledged are both the heterogeneity of aspects
encapsulated by the term ‘Andean’ and the common
experience of negated identities, ways of thinking and
interpretations of the world.
 Interviews were individually conducted with 3 teachers and 8
the students from the course, focusing specifically on
definitions of interculturality and its practical significance.
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8. In Lost Territory
 Life become inseparable from
‘What we’ve been fighting for since territory, cosmology and
always is the issue of political language.
decisions of the territory. The base  The modern nation-state is a
of life is in the territory and it is also mono-cultural – one territory, one
language, one religion – entity
the way of living and to conserve that suffocates ways of life
life itself and this one express in modeled within another
our own languages. The major framework are suffocated.
problem has been one culture’s  Emphasizes contradictions in the
negation of all other cultures and imagination of the state discourse
and dress their ideological
this is what has happened here positions in identical terms – x is
with the construction of the state.’ our language, x is our territory, x
is our religion – for cultural
recognition as a political entity.
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9. Lost Languages
 Indigenous face, Spanish voice,
‘Interculturality offers tools to lost identity.
recognize in my memory what my  The same weapon of negation as
grandparents had: the language, used by Europe against the
the forms, the traditions. Thus, to colonies is here appropriated by
its victims.
live my reality and accept me a
little bit more for whom I am and  The trice of negativity determines
identity by establishing deviation
not try to copy ways of life that are from what the subject is not – I
outside of our reality. I think that am x since I am not y – where the
this is interculturality, to accept us very national chronicles from
which indigenous presence have
as we are.’ been out written becomes the
confirmation for the particularity of
indigenous groupings – We are x
since we are not y (the y we were
never allowed to be).
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10. ’Other’ paradigms of Knowledges
 A view of territory that opposes
‘In the big world (el mundo mayor) the dominant paradigm of
the territory is valued as an object modernity that, in providing
for merchandise (objeto de capitalist logic of exploitation
legitimacy, regards nature as
mercancía). In the Andean world it mechanistic and lifeless – the
isn’t, rather we care for it with common western binary between
respect, as something that gives us nature and human is
untranslatable within an Andean
life (como algo que nos da vida), tradition.
that is part of… like a person more  More ecologically balanced than
(como una persona más).’ the modernistic logic of capitalism
that confronts nature as
exploitable and marketable and
has, consequently, found its way
into western debates on global
sustainability (cf. Dussel 2012).
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11. Conclusions
 The general thrust of the argument developed here has been that
there are radical differences in how interculturality is translated
between supranational bodies and local movements.
 Contrary to aspirations as formulated by the EU and UNESCO on
universally shared values and cohesion between overlapping cultures,
indigenous movements in the Andes embrace interculturality as an
resistant maneuver toward delinking from the experiences of negated
identities, ways of thinking and interpretations of the world as a
consequence of coloniality.
 The significance of Evo Morales speech on the necessity to recover
the territory is wider than ownership: includes recovering – better yet, a
redefinition – of concealed histories, repressed subjectivities,
subalternized knowleges and silenced languages. Interculturality, then,
can be summarized as a derivative response to the rhetoric of
modernity and the logic of coloniality articulated from the perspective of
Quechua, Aymara, and other languages subjugated to Spanish, led by
indigenous needs and principles of knowledge.
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