Basis for an ontology of Latin American man

Abstract

Ontoanthropology, a research program proposed by the Unilibrista [Libre University] School of Thought, is interested in readdressing the question of man’s existence. This question is addressed, first of all, in a generic, universal sense, and then transferred to the historical conditions of a society, a culture, or an individual. This paper is an attempt to make progress towards an understanding of our reality in Latin America, based on its principal ontological category: racial blending. What is the fate of these peoples whose inclusion in history is the result, not of a meeting of cultures, but rather of the imposition of a concept of the world that was foreign to their origins and to their ancestral links with nature? This is the question whose answer has been long in coming due to the heavy burden of Christianity and the submission of our intellectual elite to Western thought. This article takes, as its point of reference, the proposal for a new anthropological vision based on ontology; in other words, an understanding of human actions and social phenomena based on the original constituents of human nature. It then examines the event that resulted in the incorporation of the American continent into the history of the Western world. It discusses the views of some thinkers who have set themselves the task of deciphering the most relevant aspects of the idiosyncrasy of peoples who forged their destiny in the hazy and contradictory framework of a collective, native, naturalistic, and animistic psychology that has been by dominated and ruined by an adverse religion in the past as well as by today’s social and political institutions determined by liberal individualism and a push for modernization, endowed with rationality but lacking a sense of community-based self-assertion.