Holistic Education. Dialogue with Don Felipe Poot, Mayan priest

Abstract

This contribution consists of a dialogue with an authoritative personality from the Mayan community of the indigenous village of Chunyaxnic in Campeche. The purpose of the work is to study the role that ancestral culture has in education and, more generally, in the anthropology of village formation, in the face of the pervasiveness of white culture. We are interested in deepening the concept of this peculiar educational culture and its role in the community experience. Ours is an epistemological excavation: we want to explore the knowledge and, consequently, the formation that takes place in that mysterious and, at the same time, archaic and contemporary field, which is the Mayan cosmogony. The epistemological framework refers to an interpretative pedagogy and therefore to a hermeneutic approach. The qualitative type of investigation method is intended as a normative epistemology which attempts to capture the relational dynamics between the phenomena studied in a systemic perspective. The expected result is to contribute to the knowledge and valorization of the cultural instances of the Mayan indigenous people starting from the awareness of their highly refined culture, as well as from the questioning of the shift in meaning of the ancestral culture to banal folklore for tourists, but also to deepen, from a different point of view, the holistic culture of education.