The circle of word, ancestral and intercultural technology in the Yanakuna community – Popayán Cauca

Abstract

The circle of word is an ancestral space of life that has been part of the Yanakuna collective process. The tullpa (stove) has been, is and will be a path where day by day it is learnt and shared the wisdom and knowledge. When modernity arrived, the “civilized” life fragmented these forms and ways of establishing the order of family life, and other rules were defined that little by little destroyed the paths of our own thinking. The cultivation and wisdom upbringing from the circle of the Yanakuna word is a path of hope, where the new seeds will germinate and with their fruits they will reach other spaces contributing their own knowledge regardless of time or context. In this journey towards sumak kawsay or good living, the implementation of Yanakuna word circles was put into practice as an ancestral technology to revitalize the ancestral knowledge that has weakened in a city context such as Popayán-Cauca. It is important to affirm that one of the main results in this CCRISAC has been the community’s willingness to walk towards the return of the ancestral and, evidencing, significant achievements in sharing the word and the love of Yanakuna life. It can be concluded that today, despite the spaces of modernity in which we live, it is possible to put into practice the ancestral knowledge that revitalizes the history and the legacy of the elders of our Yanakuna people.