El Lebenswelt Mesoamericano: Fenomenología de la Alteridad y Educación Intercultural Crítica

The Mesoamerican Lifeworld: Phenomenology of Otherness and Critical Intercultural Education

Abstract

Abstract: This article presents a phenomenological approach to critical intercultural education in the Mesoamerican context based on Edmund Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld). Drawing on Husserl’s critique of the objectification and sedimentation of meaning, it argues that state educational models implemented in Indigenous communities operate within a natural attitude that obscures Indigenous children’s lived worlds and subordinates their knowledge to external criteria of validity.The article proposes a pedagogical epoché that suspends the assumed neutrality of the curriculum in order to interrogate it from Indigenous lifeworlds. Through three phenomenological dimensions (lived corporeality (Leib), the surrounding world (Umwelt), and intersubjectivity) it shows that learning is constituted through communal intentionality rather than through an isolated individual subject.