98
Subjectivity, otherness and intercultural
ethos in Colombian education
Alexander Benavides-Franco1
To reference this article / Cómo citar este artículo / Para citar
este artigo: Benavides-Franco, A. (2024). Subjetivity, otherness and
intercultural ethos in Colombian education. Revista UNIMAR, 42(2),
98-111. https://doi.org/10.31948/ru.v42i2.3583
Reception date: September 24, 2023
Review date: March 12, 2024
Approval date: April 20, 2024
Abstract
The hypothesis of this paper is that the processes of generation of subjectivities
and national identity carried out by the state through the school and its
educational policies have not abandoned the Eurocentric model of the colonizing
subject. As a result, they have contributed to the continuity and naturalization
of the rationality that feeds the conict, instead of resisting and overcoming
it. In this sense, it is proposed to approach this issue from an intercultural
perspective, in dialogue with the Levinasian perspective of otherness. Thus, it
examines some tools that critical intercultural thinking can oer to Colombian
educational policies in order to promote processes of subjectivation in the school
that allow the conguration of an ‘intercultural ethos’.
Keywords: subjectivity; otherness; intercultural ethos; community; citizenship
1 Doctor in Education from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil); Master in Philosophy from the Universidad de
Los Andes (Colombia). Professor at the Faculty of Education of the Universidad Antonio Nariño, and member of the research group
Conciencia. E-mail: abenavida@gmail.com
Article derived from the reections developed in the doctoral thesis Educating citizens for peace: a critical look at political subjectivity
in the discourses of citizenship training and the peace chair in Colombia, developed between August 2016 and August 2020, in Porto
Alegre, Brazil.
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99
Subjetividad, alteridad y ethos intercultural en la
educación colombiana
Resumen
La hipótesis de este trabajo es que los procesos de generación de subjetividades
e identidad nacional llevados a cabo por el Estado, a través de la escuela y sus
políticas educativas, no han abandonado el modelo eurocéntrico del sujeto
colonizador. Como resultado, han contribuido a la continuidad y naturalización
de la racionalidad que alimenta el conicto, en lugar de resistirla y superarla.
En este sentido, se propone abordar esta problemática desde una perspectiva
intercultural, en diálogo con la perspectiva levinasiana de la alteridad. Así,
se examinan algunas herramientas que el pensamiento intercultural crítico
puede ofrecer a las políticas educativas colombianas, con el n de promover
procesos de subjetivación en la escuela que permitan la conguración de un
‘ethos intercultural’.
Palabras clave: subjetividad; alteridad; ethos intercultural; comunidad;
ciudadanía
Subjetividade, alteridade e ethos intercultural na
educação colombiana
Resumo
A hipótese deste artigo é que os processos de geração de subjetividades
e identidade nacional realizados pelo Estado por meio da escola e de suas
políticas educacionais não abandonaram o modelo eurocêntrico do sujeito
colonizador. Como resultado, eles contribuíram para a continuidade e a
naturalização da racionalidade que alimenta o conito, em vez de resistir
e superá-lo. Nesse sentido, propõe-se abordar essa questão a partir de
uma perspectiva intercultural, em diálogo com a perspectiva levinasiana da
alteridade. Assim, são examinadas algumas ferramentas que o pensamento
intercultural crítico pode oferecer às políticas educacionais colombianas, a m
de promover processos de subjetivação na escola que permitam a conguração
de um ‘ethos intercultural’.
Palavras-chave: subjetividade; alteridade; ethos intercultural; comunidade;
cidadania
Introduction
Since its inception, the school has maintained a close relationship with the project of modernity
and a commitment to the conguration of the corresponding type of subject. That is to say, the
school, understood as the institution responsible for the formation of the type of subject necessary
for the conguration of the emerging nation-states of the eighteenth century, has responded to the
demands of the project of modernity. Thus, the imagination of the nation-state and of the social
Revista Unimar Julio-Diciembre 2024
e-ISSN: 2216-0116 ISSN: 0120-4327 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31948/rev.unimar
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and political community was mainly derived
from this notion of the subject promoted by
the Enlightenment and the colonialist project.
In other words, by contributing to the creation
of an idea of what this new community should
be, the school congured a type of subject
that followed this idea, and vice versa, to the
extent that it sought to construct a certain
subjectivity and, at the same time, contributed
to the construction of a convinced imaginary of
political community.
As we all know, Colombia has been experiencing
a social and armed conict for more than
half a century. Given this fact, it is necessary
to ask what role this commitment between
education and the modern subject has played
in the conguration of a society crossed by a
violent conict that we have not yet been able
to overcome. Therefore, it seems relevant to
raise the question of the role that education
has played so far in the context of the armed
conict in Colombia, especially with regard to
the type of national identity and subjectivities
that state policies have sought to congure
through formal education, understood as a
means of subjectivation.
Given that the Colombian population is ethnically
and culturally heterogeneous —which implies
the coexistence within the national territory
of a diversity of groups with dierentiated
socio-cultural patterns (Moreno, 2022)— and
that, to this extent, as recognized by the 1991
Constitution, Colombia is a multiethnic and
multicultural country, it is extremely important
to ask whether these subjectivities congured
by Colombian educational policies recognize
otherness as a fundamental principle of any
ethical relationship and whether they are imbued
with what could be called an ‘intercultural ethos’.
However, although the 1991 Constitution would
imply the possibility of a displacement from a
homogeneous nation paradigm to a diverse and
multicultural nation paradigm (Carvajal, 2014),
this has not materialized in practice. On the
one hand, there is constitutional recognition of
ethnic and multicultural diversity; on the other,
we continue to witness acts of violence that
are generated in these communities, in many
cases as a result of the armed conict and the
dispossession of their territories by transnational
megaprojects (Carvajal, 2014).
According to Berche et al. (2006), Indigenous
and Afro-descendant peoples have denounced
the ethnocide or genocide perpetrated against
their populations and leaders, which threatens
both the rights they have won and their political,
cultural, and territorial integrity and autonomy;
all of this shows that Colombia is still far from
becoming a truly multicultural nation.
This paper hypothesizes that the processes
of generation of subjectivities and national
identities carried out by the State through
the school and its educational policies have
not abandoned the Eurocentric model of the
colonizing subject and, as a result, have
contributed to the continuity and naturalization
of the rationality that feeds the conict, instead
of resisting and overcoming it. In this sense,
it is proposed to address this issue from an
intercultural perspective in dialogue with the
Levinasian perspective of otherness.
To this end, the question of cultural identity,
as conceived by the modern subject, will be
addressed rst. Next, the question of otherness
and the so-called ‘invention of the other’ is
analyzed from the perspective of Latin American
social sciences. Finally, it briey examines the
tools that critical intercultural thinking can oer
to Colombian educational policies to promote
subjectivation processes in the school that allow
the conguration of an ‘intercultural ethos’.
The subject of modernity
Salas (2006) emphasizes the importance
of utopia, arguing that ethics is necessarily
based on the hope of the emergence of new
congurations of reason, especially those
that practical reason assumes in situations of
conict to generate the possibilities of dialogue
necessary for coexistence. Faced with the
question of the possibility of an authentically
human life in a multiethnic world permeated
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by diverse perspectives and values, the author
believes that a rst step would be taken if we
could interculturally identify those processes that
hinder communication and lead to the solipsistic
isolation of individuals and communities with
regard to their ethical systems.
Therefore, this paper attempts to show that
one of these processes, perhaps one of the
most important and decisive, is related to the
production of a certain type of subjectivity
resulting from modernity in multicultural and
multiethnic contexts, such as the case of Latin
American peoples.
Particularly in Colombia, the conguration of a
type of political subjectivity that is linked to the
consolidation of colonialism and that ignores
the important issue of emerging subjectivities
seems to contribute to the consolidation of
the political and social conict that Colombian
society has experienced for more than half a
century. In this sense, a decolonial educational
perspective becomes necessary, which implies
an epistemological pluralism that leads
to a new way of understanding education
in multicultural contexts; an education
that stimulates the full socio-educational
development of subjects and questions their
assimilationist work (Muñoz, 2021).
It is important to analyze this logic of hegemonic
universalization, as described by Salas (2006),
which seems to be inherent to this subject of
modernity. Levinas (1982)2 problematizes it
by relating it to an idea of totality, «in which
consciousness embraces the world, leaving
nothing outside, and thus becomes an absolute
thought» (p. 67). What is questioned in this
Levinasian problematization is, ultimately, the
question of the subject. It is a critique of that
subjectivity which is anchored in the metaphysics
of being, insofar as it presupposes a monadic
existence, that is to say, without relation.
In this sense, Levinas wants to think of a way
of relating to the other that breaks with the
model of the subject relating to the other as
if the other were an object. Indeed, in terms
of knowledge, for Levinas «it is a relation with
2 The quotations from Levinas used in this article are taken from
a Portuguese edition entitled ‘Ética e innito’, translated by the
author.
that whose otherness is suspended, with that
which becomes immanent because it is on my
measure and my scale» (p. 52). Arguably, the
main problem derived from modern subjectivity
that the Lithuanian philosopher seems to
identify is the problem of the intersubjective
relation. Thus, he attributes to the subjectivity
congured under a logic of totality the idea
of a total and additional society (Levinas,
1982). A society that is tragically constructed
in profound ignorance of the question of
otherness, thus denying the possibility of
recognizing emergent subjectivities.
From the above, it is possible to point out some
of the dangers of insisting on the formation
of a subject that conforms to the discourse
of Enlightenment logic, since, in the words of
Castro-Gómez (2000), modernity could be
considered a «machine that generates alterities
that, in the name of reason and humanism,
excludes from its imaginary the hybridity,
multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency of
concrete forms of life» (p. 88).
In this sense, two aspects of the illuminist
subject can be highlighted that favor and
promote situations of social conict, such as
the one experienced in Colombia: rst, modern
subjectivity is a conceptual device that rejects
and excludes dierence and otherness;
second, as a consequence, it is a device that
generates an image of community that leads
to the impossibility of building a political
community crossed by dierence and the
recognition of otherness. This implies that the
school, and especially the Colombian school
in the current social and political situation,
must rethink its ideal of the subject, to allow
the conguration of a new subjectivity open to
dialogue with dierence.
Therefore, the rst problematic aspect pointed
out in this work is that the political subjectivity
constructed by the Colombian school from the
second half of the twentieth century was related
to an ideal of citizen that ignored its own social
and cultural reality. That is to say, it was a
political subjectivity that did not consider the
existence of the dierences and particularities
of the numerous social and cultural groups
living in Colombia. It was an uncritical political
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subjectivity that ignored the possibility of
political dissent.
According to a study conducted by Ortega et
al. (2015), during the period between 1964
and 2011, the regulatory framework that
established and dened educational policy
in Colombia showed a lack of initiatives and
measures regarding the teaching of recent
history; moreover, it sought the formation of
abstract citizenship, oblivious to the historical
dynamics of the internal armed conict and its
impact on the Colombian population3.
Although science currently shows signicant
advances and achievements in the recognition
of human and cultural diversity in terms of
descriptive ethical constructs, the reality is
that society in general seems to maintain an
imaginary based on a univocal sense of the
reality of nations, a perception that implies
logics of social, educational, political, cultural
and economic development that would
assume standardized procedures for all,
without questioning what would be a certain
homogeneous unity among the individuals that
make up a given society (Echeverry, 2021).
Thus, in the Colombian case, it could be said
that the type of subjectivity that Colombian
educational policies have tried to form in recent
decades has not been conducive to overcoming
social and political conicts, since it has not
contributed to questioning and deepening the
important issues of otherness and conict
inherent in living together in a multicultural
context and the interaction with the other that
this implies.
The social sciences and the ‘invention
of the other’
For Levinas, the book Le Temps et L’Autre is an
attempt to escape the isolation that ontology
3 I do not intend to demonstrate here, through the particular
example of the teaching of history, that Colombia has not been
educated critically; I am interested in emphasizing the worrying
fact that, for a considerable period of time, Colombian education
made the reality of the armed conict invisible, by not addressing
it as part of the teaching of recent history. This would have
contributed, to some extent, to the conguration of a political
subjectivity abstracted from the historical and political conditions
of the Colombian reality and, in this way, to the formation of an
uncritical citizenship.
imposes on the subject. According to the
author himself, his eort in this book is to show
that knowledge cannot be considered as an
authentic exit from the world, since in reality
it is an immanence in which the other becomes
thematic and is considered as a known object
(Levinas, 1982). For the Lithuanian philosopher,
knowledge is nothing more than a form of
relationship «with that whose otherness is
suspended» (p. 52), because it is embraced
and becomes immanent and, and therefore,
according to him, knowledge can always be
interpreted as assimilation. More precisely,
Esterman (2009) refers to ‘assimilation’ as a
colonial and neocolonial strategy that seeks
to subsume the other under a hegemonic and
monocultural project that ends up annihilating
otherness. Through this strategy, the Other
must conform to the standards of European
humanity in order to become part of universal
humanity.
In this sense, “only he who could adapt to the
Semitic-Greek ideal of the adult Indo-Germanic
white male scholar could be called fully ‘human’”
(Esterman, 2009, p. 62). Furthermore, the
author reminds us that «this Western ideal
of the ‘human’, dominates to this day what is
considered the ‘humanities’ and mental schemas
of superiority and whiteness» (p. 62). It is
essential to take this last aspect into account
since the humanities will be the fundamental tool
that the school will use to teach and reproduce
the schemas mentioned above.
The American social philosopher Immanuel
Wallerstein (as cited in Castro-Gómez, 2000)
showed that the humanities and social sciences
had become a fundamental element in the
formation of nation-states. According to him,
the emergence of the social sciences was not
simply an additive phenomenon to the processes
of political organization required by the nation-
state, but a constitutive phenomenon of those
very processes. In other words, the modern
state needed a window of scientic observation
of the social world it sought to govern. It was
precisely through the social sciences that the
incipient nation-state could establish collective
goals, build a cultural identity, and assign it to
its citizens.
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Thus, according to Castro-Gómez (2000), the
knowledge provided by the social sciences
dened and legitimized the norms that made
it possible to link citizens to the production
processes inherent to the ‘modernization’ of the
new states. And, in turn, this attempt to create
forms of subjectivity coordinated by the state
gave rise to what the Colombian author calls the
‘invention of the other’.
This ‘invention’ refers to the knowledge/power
devices out of which representations of others
are constructed. It is a process of material and
symbolic production in which Western societies
have been engaged since the sixteenth century
(Castro-Gómez, 2000). According to Castro-
Gómez (2000), the social sciences gave
scientic legitimacy to the regulatory policies
of the state and favored those processes of
material and symbolic production through
which cultural identities were consolidated; but
the representation of one’s own cultural identity
was constructed on the basis of, and in contrast
to, the representation of an ‘abject other’.
As Castro-Gómez said, the social sciences have
been imbued from the outset with a Eurocentric
imaginary that leads them to present the
process of rationalization as the result of the
development of qualities inherent to Western
societies. Thus, according to Fornet-Betancourt
(2004), the constellation of knowledge in which
we move today is fundamentally a product of
the West; it contains a guideline that prescribes
what the dierent disciplinary elds must know
in order to congure the reality of the West.
The phenomenon of colonialism would have
meant the beginning of a tortuous but inevitable
path of development and modernization for the
Latin American peoples, to mention just one
example. Paradoxically, these peoples had to
follow this path in order to distance themselves
from this ‘abject other’ as they saw themselves.
As we have seen, according to Fornet-Betancourt
(2004) and Castro Gómez (2000), this colonial
imaginary has traditionally been reproduced by
the social sciences and philosophy, even in Latin
American societies. According to them, not only
has the colonial imaginary permeated the social
sciences since their inception, but they have
never made an epistemological break with it.
But how does the invention of the other work
in this imaginary? Well, the human species
would have gone through dierent stages
of perfection until it reached the maturity
that European societies would have reached.
Therefore, Latin American indigenous societies
would represent the lowest stage in the scale
of human development. The last stage of
this development, represented by European
societies, is constructed as the absolute
opposite of the rst and in contrast to them.
In this way, the analytical models of the social
sciences are impregnated with binary concepts
such as barbarism and civilization, tradition and
modernity, poverty and development, etc.
Castro-Gómez (2000) concludes that the
social sciences structurally functioned as an
ideological apparatus that legitimized the
exclusion and discipline of those people who
did not t the subjectivity proles that the
state needed to implement its modernization
policies. Thus, the Constitution of 1886 said
nothing about the reality of the peoples
who inhabited the national territory and
who, despite countless vicissitudes, played
a fundamental role in the formation of the
nascent republic. However, they were legally
‘non-existent’, although they did not cease to
exist as a labor force or as a reserve for armies
and indoctrinators (Rojas, 2019).
The Colombian authors Herrera et al. (2003)
analyzed the imaginaries constructed by
social science textbooks in the rst half of the
twentieth century in Colombia. According to
them, the national identity presented in these
texts was a model imposed by the Colombian
elites, referring to an ideal citizen who was
unaware of his or her own social and cultural
reality and who was guided by doctrinaire and
closed instruments whose written structure did
not allow questioning the existing social order.
In other words, the process of constructing
national identity was directly articulated with the
construction of the political project of the nation-
state, understood as a project of the elites, which
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would have left aside cultural diversity and the
plurality of cultural and political expressions in
the country, making these expressions invisible
and silencing them.
Thus, the process of transformation of social
science education in Colombia, which cannot
be described in detail here, functions as a
body of knowledge traversed by multiple
demands and the actions of numerous actors.
According to the aforementioned authors, the
conictive character of this tradition implies
the recognition of defeated and invisible
perspectives and values: the perspectives and
values of emerging subjectivities.
Education in Colombia would have been
particularly focused on the formation of
nationalist subjects with a high sense of civic
and moral responsibility, competitive, and
productive, according to the imperatives of the
global capitalist economic and political context
(Ortega et al., 2015). The problem is that this
model of citizenship ignored the social reality
of peasants, blacks, indigenous peoples and, in
general, the so-called ethnic minorities, resulting
in the conguration of a type of subjectivity
that ignored the historical and political causes
of the country’s internal armed conict. In this
way, the reality of the conict was dangerously
simplied, and the imaginary of community
implied the elimination of dierences and the
normalization of what was dierent.
Citizenship and the impossible
community
In light of the panorama described above, it
seems appropriate to raise the question of how
to think through education, the construction of a
political community that, in a context of conict
such as the Colombian one, is capable of dealing
constructively with the enormous cultural,
social, and political diversity and plurality of
the country. The problem is that as long as
Colombian education is unable to problematize
with sucient radicalism the kind of subjectivity
that seems to dominate educational discourses
and practices and that, as has been shown,
derives from the Eurocentric hegemonic project
of modernity, the construction of a community
capable of overcoming the social and political
conict that aicts the country seems to be
a task doomed to failure. From a Levinasian
perspective, the problem lies in the impossibility
of thinking sociality from the ontology of the
modern subject. For Levinas (1982), it is clear
that «the social is beyond ontology» (p. 50).
For Levinas (1982), the sphere of commonality
that any synthesis presupposes is not present in
the relations between human beings; therefore,
the Lithuanian philosopher tries to conceive a
sociality dierent from what he calls ‘total and
additional sociality’. The latter derives from the
ontology of the modern subject and allows us
to speak of an objectied society permeated by
a supposed common element «by which man
resembles things and is individualized as a
thing» (p. 70).
In particular, the total and additional society
that Levinas questions, which is related to our
conventional notion of society, seems to start
from the assumption that the principle of a
sociality that would be originally conictive
must be limited. On the basis of this conception,
the Western paradigm of civilization seeks to
solve the problem of the sociality of nation-
states by eliminating dierences and everything
that represents a possibility of dissent. To
achieve this, the project of European modernity
implements the strategy of incorporation, which,
according to Esterman (2009), constitutes the
nal act of the elimination of otherness, whose
main variant would be the practice of inclusion.
This practice, according to the author, is based
on a fundamental premise of asymmetry
and domination, in which an active subject is
assumed to be included and a passive object
to be included: «The goal of this process is
a society based on an exogenous project of
‘development’, ‘civilization’, and ‘welfare’,
currently translated in terms of ‘modernity’,
‘technology’, ‘participation’, and ‘consumption’»
(Esterman, 2009, p. 63). In other words, it
is included to impose a project and a vision
of the world, so that no one is left out of this
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imposed order. It is included, ultimately, to
deny dierence and otherness and to congure
sociality according to the logic of totality.
Thus, according to Fornet-Betancourt (2004),
there are currently inclusive societies, but
they are systematically and structurally
discriminatory; it is not simply a matter of
including, for example, indigenous peoples and
their traditional knowledge in a dominant order,
but of restructuring the rights of all within that
order. For him, the intercultural strategy, in
order not to become ‘inclusivist’ in this sense,
must open up the framework of rights; that is,
it is a matter of decentering and restructuring
those rights, rather than including others within
the existing law.
An example of this inclusion in current law,
according to the author, is the concept of
citizenship, which often becomes an instrument
of exclusion in the legal framework. In fact, he
states that «in the nation-states, the concept of
citizenship is used as an instrument of exclusion;
it is rather a means of institutionalizing
exclusion» (Fornet-Betancourt, 2004, p. 48).
In other words, the strategy of incorporation
and inclusion that operates in the concept of
citizenship is nothing more than the subtle
imposition of a hegemonic project that ends
up denying otherness. It could be said that
the acquisition of citizenship becomes a lter
through which only people whose prole ts the
requirements of the Enlightenment project can
pass: male, white, Catholic, property-owning,
educated, and heterosexual. Therefore, those
individuals who do not t this prole, that is,
what Ricardo Salas (2006) calls ‘emerging
subjectivities’ -women, blacks, indigenous
people, illiterates, homosexuals, etc.- would
remain in the sphere of illegality, under the
surveillance and punishment of the law that
excludes them.
As Castro-Gómez (2000) points out, pedagogy
would be responsible for materializing this
desirable type of modern subjectivity, and thus
the school became the place where the type
of subject required by the regulatory ideals of
the constitutions was formed. It was there that
children were to acquire the knowledge, skills,
values, and cultural models that would enable
them to play a productive role in society. In
this way, the school taught how to be a ‘good
citizen’, but not how to be a good peasant, a
good native, or a good black, since all of these
human types were considered part of the sphere
of barbarism.
Fornet-Betancourt (2004) criticizes education
as an instrument of the nation-state because
it is incapable of dealing with Latin America’s
diversity; he considers it important to «hold
ourselves accountable for the damage caused
by the nation-state, with its homogeneous way
of educating for a uniform life that ignores
the diversity of historical memories of this
continent» (p. 50). In fact, the educational
system not only coordinates knowledge, but also
acts as a lter and a mechanism of exclusion of
other knowledge. In this way, «the educational
system is in reality the knowledge apparatus
through and by which the members of the elite
of a given cultural, political, etc., community tell
the members of that society what they should
learn» (pp. 21-22).
It could be said that the process of inventing
citizenship and the process of inventing the
other are genetically related, in that the creation
of the identity of the modern Latin American
citizen implies the creation of a counterpart
from which this identity could be armed.
Thus, paradoxically, the creation of the Latin
American citizen implies a process of exclusion
and denial of dierence and otherness, resulting
in what we could call the impossibility of
community. That is, by denying, in the name of
an ideal or imagined community, the plurality of
expressions that would make possible a ‘factual’
community, that is, a community that does not
deny conict as something inherent to itself, the
very possibility of community is denied. In this
sense, Fornet-Betancourt (2004) invites us to
consider, from an intercultural perspective, that
dissent is at the heart of the social biography of
a culture:
[It is important] to suspect that the image
that a culture currently presents to us is an
image that is supported by the consensus of
the totality of its members. We can and should
assume that there has always been someone
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who has protested, and the problem, of
course, is how a culture treats the minority
that produces dissent. (p. 31)
In the same vein, Salas (2006) argues that ours
is a polycentric society that increasingly allows
for cultural heterogeneity. This cultural diversity,
in turn, «is not problematic if one assumes that
human life is intimately bound up with conict»
(p. 26). It is not a question of arming that the
identity logic of the modern subject is the only
and true cause of the internal social and armed
conict in Colombia, but it is possible to think
that this logic is at the root of the problem and
that it favors it. The idea of peace, according to
this logic, would have to do with the absence of
all conict: a kind of earthly paradise in which
dissent disappears and all dierences are leveled
under the gure of an ideal national identity.
But how can a culture of peace be built in a
social and cultural reality based on the non-
recognition of dierence and otherness? From
the logic of identity derived from modernity,
it seems that the conict inherent in the
conguration of any community is a problem
that must be solved by eliminating dierences,
if necessary violently (Grupo Memoria Histórica
[GMH], 2013). Moreover, in the name of an
ideal of community, not only does it seek to
eliminate the conict that results from the
coexistence of dierences by denying and
destroying them, but, above all, through the
school, it seems to promote ignorance of this
violence and, therefore, of the greater polemic
that results from this dangerous solution.
Thus, the aforementioned study by Ortega et
al. (2015), after a documentary review of the
Colombian regulatory framework between 1964
and 2011, highlights the absence of initiatives
and proposals related to the teaching of the
recent history of violent conict in Colombia. On
the contrary, the teaching of history in particular
and social sciences in general has been diluted in
an education based on abstract citizenship skills,
far from the historical dynamics of the internal
armed conict and its impact on the population.
These authors even arm that during this period,
the internal social, political and armed conict,
as well as its causes, actors and dynamics, were
not mentioned under any name. As a result,
they are deprived of a pedagogical approach
by the national education policy. According to
Colombian researchers, education in Colombia
has been instrumentalized to construct a
type of subjectivity that corresponds to the
perspectives and interests of one of the actors
in the conict: the economic and political elites
with their hegemonic nation-state projects.
Ideas for intercultural education in
conict contexts
In the world and, of course, in Latin America,
there has been a remarkable interest in directing
educational reforms towards more diverse
curricula that allow the inclusion of the dierent
types of subjects that make up societies (Muñoz
and Saiz, 2022). Thus, since the approval of the
1991 Constitution, national governments have
made signicant eorts to promote dialogue with
these communities and to inuence educational
policies aimed at interculturality and the training
of ethno-educators (Moreno, 2022).
The multicultural model and the holistic
model became key aspects in the generation
of intervention strategies in school spaces
intersected by cultural diversity (Castro, 2019).
In addition, it began to be recognized that the
quality of education goes beyond the economic
investment in the education sector. Therefore,
the training of teachers in inclusive and
intercultural processes is necessary if the school
is to become an emancipatory space where the
conuence of plural and democratic positions
is possible (Lalinde and Arroyave, 2022).
However, although the education of indigenous
and Afro-descendant peoples appears in the
planning horizon of the Colombian state, this
horizon does not cease to adapt to the logics
of development and, as a result, there are
often encounters and disagreements between
the visions of the communities regarding the
management of their institutions and national
educational policies (Moreno, 2022).
Subjectivity, otherness and intercultural ethos in Colombian education
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As Rojas (2019) states, «it is one thing to name
cultural diversity as a fact of reality and quite
another to assume it» (p. 18). This means
understanding that it is the result of a social and
historical process and, as such, does not escape
the enormous variety of cultural representations
that exist around diversity and what it implies.
Thus, it would be necessary to problematize the
rapid transition from a «dominant hegemonic
society» to «coexistence on equal terms and with
mutual respect», as if in eight years Colombian
society had magically eliminated the conditions
of inferiority, subordination, and marginalization
to which the ‘indigenous’ and ‘Afro-Colombian’
minorities are subjected.
In addition, the fact that so-called intercultural
education has been proposed exclusively for
‘ethnic groups’, for which ‘ethno-education’
has been formulated, should be problematized.
So far, it has been assumed that intercultural
education is only for indigenous or minority
groups. However, since the Constitution (1991)
clearly recognizes the multicultural character
of the country, education should be in line with
these postulates: «This means that intercultural
education should be oered to all Colombians,
whether they belong to a minority group or not»
(Rojas, 1999, p. 57).
This implies aiming at the formation of a type of
subjectivity that leads to the construction of what
could be called a multicultural society, to allude
to the diversity of cultures that seek to solve
similar individual needs within a society; to do so,
they should have the same opportunities (Ávila-
Dávalos, 2022). The fundamental challenge of
such societies would be the inclusion of minority
groups and the recognition of their identity
(Guzmán-Marín, 2018; Rodríguez, 2020),
for which it is necessary to form a society of
subjects open to this recognition.
In the reections that Fornet-Betancourt
(2004) oers on the concept of interculturality,
he poses the following question: «What does
pedagogy mean, what does it mean to teach
in the context of a society that does not
want to be reductionist and accepts dierent
educational processes» (p. 48). Much of the
answer has to do with the central problem that,
according to the author, interculturality poses:
not only recognizing diversity on a theoretical
level, but also recognizing the right to ‘make
the world dierently’.
Here, the question of the ideal of education
must be considered: «What ideal of education
is behind what we teach, what is ultimately
important: to preserve this knowledge or to
achieve a society made up of people who really
make their lives» (Fornet-Betancourt, 2004, p.
49). These are questions that, posed from a
concern for the conguration of an intercultural
world, help to broaden the horizon to rethink
the ideal of what we want to teach. And, as
has been explained throughout this text, the
broadening of this horizon must necessarily
imply the problematization of the type of
subjectivity that the school forms, especially,
but not exclusively, in conictual contexts such
as the Colombian one.
In this context, it is necessary to consider
other ways of thinking about subjectivity that
allow for the conguration of another form of
sociality, dierent from the ‘additional and total’
sociality that Levinas problematizes. In this way,
it seems necessary to begin to take much more
seriously the possibility of a subject congured
on the basis of openness to otherness and the
recognition of dierence.
Similarly, Salas (2006) argues that interculturality
implies a new awareness that all cultures are
in the process of gestating their own universes
of meaning and that the absolute subordination
of the other to my own system of interpreting
reality is not really possible. According to this
author, interculturality introduces a discussion
that must of course be considered in education:
the forms of recognition of cultural identities
and the mutual recognition of cultures that have
lived in asymmetry throughout history.
For Salas (2006), the notion of interculturality is
fundamentally ethical and points to a new space
that must be constructed to coexist. As the author
warns, this new space cannot be conceived
as something that is always accepted by all,
since there are divergent interests both inside
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Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 2 pp. 98-111
and outside the world of life, but the process
of mutual recognition can lead to the creation
of a new relationship between oneself and the
other: «a relationship that, although currently
asymmetrical, can give rise to symmetrical
relationships in which the in-communication
and excommunication that currently exist can
be overcome for the sake of a new exercise of
intercultural dialogue» (pp. 81-82).
The school must stop being seen as an
instrument of a colonizing project associated
with modernity and begin to be seen as one of
the fundamental vehicles of polycentric societies,
such as Colombian society, for the construction
of this new space that allows the generation of
common paths of recognition, «if we want to
avoid falling into the abyss of fundamentalism
and cultural closure that leads to the exclusion
of the other» (Salas, 2006, p. 82).
However, according to Esterman (2009), the
discourse of interculturality ceases to be simply
an intentional and interpersonal discourse if it
is not imbued with a critical reection on the
process of decolonization; he points out that
this process is not limited to simply eradicating
all traces of colonial power from a culture, since
critical intercultural philosophy considers that
all cultures are the result of a complex process
of ‘inter-trans-culturation’ and rejects any
notion of cultural purism. For the author, the
perspective of profound decolonization implies
becoming aware of the coloniality of structures,
power relations, values, internalizations, mental
schemes, and legal systems.
Therefore, from Esterman’s (2009) perspective,
critical intercultural thinking must start from
the «recognition of an asymmetry between
cultures, of the hegemony of certain cultures
over others [...], of power relations within
cultures, and of the asymmetry of gender
relations within and between cultures» (pp. 63-
64). Thus, the school, in order not to become a
mere tool of this hegemonic power and of this
dominant culture, has the responsibility of being
the space par excellence where the recognition
of the situation of power and asymmetry of a
given culture takes place.
On the other hand, the recognition of
asymmetries and power relations within
cultures implies the need to face the conict
inherent in the processes of cultural and social
conguration and transformation. In this sense,
Salas (2006) highlights the relevance of the
notion of conict as a fundamental category in
intercultural reection. Nevertheless, the idea of
conict he proposes does not refer to the bipolar
logic of class society, but to a reality inherent to
human societies, related to a dynamic process
of agreements and disagreements that occur
at dierent levels of deliberation and human
coexistence, whose socio-political implications
must be recognized.
In his theory, conict appears as a constitutive
element of intercultural dialogue and, in this
sense, it must be understood as an intrinsic
element of a contextualized action; thus, with
regard to the situation of Latin America, Salas
emphasizes that, according to Kusch, «one
could say that the problem of America is, in
part, that of tolerating, if possible, dierent
rationalities, perhaps to nd a rationality that is
deeper or better, closer to our conicts» (p. 33);
therefore, the conguration of an intercultural
ethos, for Salas, implies a theory of conicts
that is built through the search for common
spaces of self and hetero-recognition within the
cultural context itself, but also outside of it; that
is, in contact with other cultures.
Conclusions
Levinas’ reections seem to show other ways
of thinking about subjectivity. Levinas (1982)
questions modern subjectivity and proposes a
plural subjectivity, a subjectivity that includes
the other because it is constructed on the
basis of sociality: «It is in ethics, understood
as responsibility, that the knot of the subjective
is given» (p. 87). This subjectivity traversed
by otherness seems to be the fundamental
principle of a critical intercultural understanding.
It rejects, according to Esterman (2009), any
essentialism or cultural purism and defends that
all cultures are the result of a complex and long
process of ‘inter-trans-culturation’.
Subjectivity, otherness and intercultural ethos in Colombian education
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Rev. Unimar Vol. 42 No. 2 pp. 98-111
In intercultural thinking, culture, like the
Levinasian subject, is traversed by otherness,
by dialogue with other cultures. The relationship
between cultures is prior to any idea of an
uncontaminated cultural essence. This means
that there is no state prior to culture, but that
each culture in its present state is the result
of innumerable processes of dialogue and
interaction with dierent traditions (inter) and
historical transformations (trans) within the
same culture (Esterman, 2009).
Consequently, thinking about intercultural
education in a context of political and social
conict such as the Colombian one seems to
be an important task. This task must begin by
questioning the single paradigm of Eurocentric
rational subjectivity and begin to observe these
opaque, singular, and diverse subjects that
interact in everyday life.
Thinking about education from an intercultural
perspective would mean considering that
education must be pluralized and that it is
necessary to abandon the idea that it is an
instrument of national states and a producer
of a more or less homogeneous nation.
An intercultural pedagogy should begin by
broadening our vision of ourselves and taking
responsibility for who we are. This implies, of
course, taking responsibility for educational
policies with the aim of building a society in
which the voices of others, of those who are
dierent, of those who have not been heard or
recognized, are heard.
Conict of interest
The author of this article declares that he has
no conict of interest in the work presented.
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Contribution
The author prepared, read and approved the
manuscript.
