Re-ethnicity and decolonization: epistemic resistances in the intercultural curriculum in the Los Lagos region, Chile

Abstract

The emergence of intercultural bilingual education in Mapuche-Williche communities of southern Chile is implying, among other processes of socio-political significance, activation of the collective and historical memory, allowing to incorporate flows of symbolic interaction between the community and school, legitimation dynamics of their culture and societal projects. These dynamics, however, are stressed by the conceptions of multiculturalism that promotes the state through school and the perspectives that the communities built from sociopolitical leaderships. In the context of these tensions, the article explores the ways in which the construction of intercultural curriculum reveals asymmetries that, within pedagogical legitimation devices exist between the Mapuche and the modern-western-school epistemes. Also, emphasis is placed on the activation of the memory and the conflict of rationalities that have conducted communities, still in a disaggregated way, to start a re-ethnicity process and consider their own political-educational projects.