Historical roots of separate strings of agronomy and the marginalized originary knowledge in the universities of Cusco and Ayacucho

Abstract

This article explores the history of the agronomy faculties, created in the late 1950s at the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC) and the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho (UNSCH), from a contextual perspective.  These institutions are important as part of the policy of state control; for this reason, their foundation dates back to the early colonial period. By examining their historical origins, this study seeks to understand the absence of bilingual intercultural agronomic training in the curricular content in these two regions with a majority rural indigenous Quechua-speaking population. This article begins by referencing coloniality in higher education; then describes the context of the creation of the agronomy degree. It then specifies the history of the Faculty of Agronomy of the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC), followed by the Faculty of Agronomy of the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH). From this analysis, it becomes evident that the state’s higher education policy has historically excluded the original knowledge of agriculture and its epistemic worldview in the training of agronomists. The original knowledge has been made invisible by centralist political discourses from Lima, which label it as backward, inferior, unscientific, among other things. However, paradoxically, at present, more than 70% of the national demand for food is produced with the original knowledge practiced by family farming. The article concludes with some preliminary conclusions leading to the understanding of the absence of bilingual intercultural training, which would logically be expected in these regions of high density of Andean peasant agriculture and Quechua speakers. The lack of inclusion of bilingual intercultural agronomic higher education is due to state policy defined in the national constitution, the congress of the republic and the executive government. We believe that behind it, there is something deeper of a historical nature: the form of naturalized colonial mindset.