Ontological dissertations: decolonizing the self by re-signifying and directing our intellectual endeavors with ancestral knowledge

Abstract

This article is a reflection on what delves into the expression think-us in reference to what we are being in the perspective of ontologies of the present, in terms of ancestral knowledge, but which are the very root of the knowledge that protects life and its multiple ways of being and inhabiting the world. We start from the question: What are the survival and persistence of the ancestral in the agro-alimentary practices of peasant life as ontologies of the present? These concerns are framed in the research line epistemic differences and ontological subjectivities and worked from the compilation and listening to the life stories of women who remember the peasant ways of life, concentrated in three referents: epistemological, methodological and political, in terms of meanings of sense. We arrive at a closing opening in which it is affirmed that the relations and tensions that appear as socio-environmental conflicts between the inherited polyculture and the installed monoculture are a consequence of sharing spaces and activities within the same territory, but with totally different interests for life, so that an action of a production system affects with multiple impacts both ancestral peoples and life itself and the environment, thus summoning to make theory or "own science" from Latin America.