ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Race and Ethnicity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1605618
This article is part of the Research TopicReimagining Futures: Decoloniality in Higher Education – An Ubuntu PerspectiveView all 8 articles
Decolonial Knowledge in Practice: A Mestiza Reflection on Sentipensar in Indigenous Nasa Epistemologies
Provisionally accepted
- Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This paper presents the concept of sentipensar in the Nasa Indigenous practices. Through the concept of sentipensar this article shows that Nasa knowledge can emerge from being within relationships through the body, through affect, through intuition, and through deliberation processes that listen the body and the spirits. It affirms that knowledge is not only produced in the mind, but also in rituals, in land-based practices, and in the everyday acts of care and resistance that sustain community life. As such, sentipensar offers an understanding of knowledge that is deeply situated and communal, challenging the dominant view of knowledge as a cognitive or individual pursuit.
Keywords: decolonial knowledge production, Ethnograhy, Indigenous knowledge , embodiment / bodily experience, Political epistemology
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chaves. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paola Chaves, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.