The Living Interculturality of Chiapas to Recreate the Modern University Towards Sustainability Horizons

Abstract

Naturalizing modernity has enslaved our thinking, our imagination, our actions and our proposals, subjecting them to their univocal rationality. Regions like Chiapas are essential to imagine and build sustainable realities and horizons for Humanity due to the biocultural diversity of its peoples and its powerful expressions of life, dignity, hope and intercultural dialogue. This paper does not present a research report but the epistemic construction achieved by the team of the Environmental Education and Sustainability Laboratory of the University of Sciences and Arts of Chiapas during the journey with native and mestizo peoples oriented towards community sustainability between 1996 and 2017. Throughout this time, different modern theoretical and methodological positions were assumed and confronted with local realities, discovering their insufficiency to understand the space-time-symbolic complexity of human communities and their global-local biocultural processes, and to propose strategies of sustainability. We have observed that the disciplinary and rationalist epistemic framework does not correspond to the complex, intercultural, diverse, spiritual, loving and deeply alive universes of the Chiapas peoples. In their cosmogonies, gnoseologies, territories and social models we recognize fundamental references for the construction of a sustainable Humanity: respectful identities with life, solidarity, intercultural dialogue, understanding and loving understanding with the Earth and with the peoples, life. With this learning, we propose strategic lines towards the recovery of the University as a fundamental institution for the civilizational construction, in the key of sustainability.