La colonialidad del ser y del saber: La mitologización del desarrollo en América Latina

Abstract

This article describes the concept of coloniality of being and knowledge as a process by which a manner of hegemonic thought was built and consolidated, which became widespread in the colonial societies. The article poses the relation between coloniality and development as a historic continuum which reproduces, in the post-colonial societies, the values and beliefs of the Western Modernity. These values and beliefs make part of the modern world view which classified the colonized subjects as the othernesses of colonists, othernesses which were silenced from and by the hegemonic speeches of power-knowledge of Modernity. This classification of the others was “improved” thanks to the help of the theoretical apparatus of the XVIII century Enlightenment and the social sciences of the XIX century. Therefore, concepts like civilization, progress and development were since then the paradigms that articulated the implementation of the modern project in peripheral societies like Latin America. The reasoning of the hypothesis is based on theories of subordination/postcoloniality and on empirical data of the World Values Survey and on the Latin American Barometer.