“Buen Vivir”, relationality and discipline from the Lewis Gordon and Martin Nakata thought. Epistemics decolonials clues for higher education

• Main Author: José E. Juncosa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Politécnica Salesiana 2014-06-01
• Series: Alteridad : Revista de Educación
• Subjects: “Buen Vivir” epistemic relationality, black existence, discipline, cultural interface, disciplinal inscriptions, inter and transdisciplinarity, epistetic, intercultural university.
• Online Access: http://alteridad.ups.edu.ec/documents/1999102/6261395/Alt_v9n1_Juncosa.pdf

This article explores the epistemic connotations of “Buen Vivir”; for which one of its main characteristics is relationality, contributes to show the main feature that denies it: disciplinarity. From the perspective of (inter)cultural studies, we look at Lewis R. Gordon’s and Martin Nakata’s inputs to explore the roots and consequences of disciplinarity—in the existence of indigenous groups and African diaspora, and its possible implications for higher education. For Gordon, the relationality of alive thought favors the linkage of ontological, epistemological, teleological and actional aspects that enable the existence and emergence of black people’s groups, which the disciplinal decadence overshadows. Nakata, in turn, from a cultural interface concept point of view, sheds light on the consequences of disciplinary knowledge’s inscriptions on Melanesian indigenous groups to deny their characteristic of active subjects in constant transformation and decisionmakers around coloniality. The article concludes with a conceptual discussion on two proposals that seek to overcome disciplinarity: the inter and transdisciplinarity (Edgar Morin), and the epistetic (Roman De La Campa) and takes on some characteristics from the university of “Buen Vivir”, intercultural and interepistemic by definition.