We Are What We Learn, So What Were We Taught? An Analysis of Discursive Practices and Our Identity

Abstract

One of the axes that seems to have shaped the basis of our relations in the social and political field is the question of discourse. In all spheres of everyday life, whether public or private, discourses have become an undeniable social practice when analyzing the historical processes of our local, national, and regional reality.

Discourses constitute an apparatus of capture that shapes our way of being and existing in the world. For this reason, it becomes necessary to know and understand those discursive practices that we learned or were taught, since they shape and “control” our behavior, our opinions, our ways of relating to the Other, and our forms of participation in the social and political life of our peoples.

The objective is to analyze the mechanisms of discursive practices in the construction of our Latin American identity, taking as a basis the methodological process of certain Latin American projects that propose a perspective on the relations between the history of ideas and local emergences in social and political terms. The modernity/coloniality relationship constitutes one of the hegemonic discourses that postcolonial theories and subaltern studies attempt to deconstruct.

Many authors have worked on a different way of making and studying our history, and of making our philosophy. Intellectual work includes procedural suggestions concerning periodizations, different ways of understanding the concept of ideology, and the need to broaden the epistemological status of the methodology of the history of ideas in order to address the relations between the experience of alterity and historiography. This history fundamentally recovers the importance of the collective subject of ideas; for this reason, its greatest development has taken place in the political and social fields.