New latin american constitutionalism and traditional communities

Towards the recognition of counter-hegemonic epistemologies.

Abstract

The countries of Latin America, as colonies, have incorporated the way of being, producing and thinking of the mother countries. Even with the end of the colonization, the logic of assimilation and internal replication of these patterns has been maintained. This hegemonic process ended up stifling local epistemologies, throwing aside everything and everyone without correspondence with the imposed standard, notably the way of being, producing and understanding the world of traditional communities. However, the recent movement of the New Latin American Constitutionalism, in carrying out a decolonial turn, has opened the legal scope to anti-hegemonic epistemologies. From this object, the research problem arises: how does the New Latin American Constitutionalism recognize the anti-hegemonic epistemologies of traditional communities? The objective of the present work is, therefore, to describe how this constitutional movement is related with the historically repressed epistemologies. The study uses a legal-sociological approach, a deductive method, a bibliographic and documentary medium and a descriptive and exploratory purpose. The result suggests a conception of constitutionalism that recognizes, in addition to the official Eurocentric normativity, spaces of alternative normativity, based on the values, cosmology, way of being and producing of traditional communities, in a horizontal, pluralist and intercultural process.