Nahuat epistemology: a pedagogical analysis through anatomy

Abstract

The text reflects on pedagogy as an educational practice from the Nahuat language. It ventures into cultural diversity in education and the pedagogical systems of indigenous peoples, which is known as interculturality and pedagogy. Thus, it facilitates the incursion of the development of intercultural competencies in educational contexts. The text investigates how the parts of the body relate to philosophical concepts. In this way, the way in which anatomy becomes abstract is delved into, and to do so the following is analyzed: i) a diagram of the body with its parts and names; ii) a review in dictionaries and classical anatomy texts to describe the parts of the body, their literal meaning and then how they correlate to abstract concepts, for example: ma-kwi-l = 5 = hand/grasp/passive, i.e. The hand means “counting” or arithmetic. Another example, yul-tuk = alive = heart-participle = heartbroken, therefore, the heart does not denote only the organ, but the movement of life itself, the vital process of all existence.