Neoliberal interculturality or Intercultural neoliberalism

Abstract

This article is interested in addressing the multiple meanings and uses attributed to the term interculturalism, understood as a historically constructed object in a context of political, economic, social and cultural relations. Interculturalism is not a concept or a simple interpretative formulation, but rather it refers to a "slogan and device, a discursive apparatus" (Cavalcanti-Schiel, 2007). This is based on a seemingly paradoxical fact: during the 90s of the XXth century, there occurs the consolidation of the global financial power with the extension of neoliberalism as economic matrix and form of government. This situation causes crises, violence, serious fractures in almost all countries in the region and ways of increasingly terrible exclusion are introduced. Simultaneosly and in a contradictory manner, a series of reforms, including the text of the new constitution in Argentina, which reestablishes the topic of the aboriginal problem and especially that of education, creating educational strategies (programs and projects Intercultural Bilingual Education or EIB), which are presented as able to contribute to overcoming the historical exclusion and as a reaffirmation of the ethnopolitical projects of some indigenous peoples.