Metaculture, progressivism, and epistemic coloniality: a reflective decolonial analysis for Latin America

Resumen

Global metaculture, the transnational layer of cultural norms circulating through digital networks, institutions, and globalized social systems, continues to be shaped by enduring epistemic hierarchies that privilege Western categories of meaning, elevating autonomy-centered ethics, individualism, and rights-based frameworks as universal standards while obscuring relational, communal, and dignity-based epistemologies central to Indigenous, Afro-Latin, and other non-Western traditions. This reflective, qualitative, interpretive article examines how Western progressivism functions as selective universalism that presents culturally situated norms as globally applicable, reproducing epistemic coloniality within Latin American institutional contexts. Drawing on decolonial theory, epistemologies of the South, African relational ontologies, and contemporary intercultural scholarship, the analysis explores how epistemic misrecognition and institutional blindness emerge when Western interpretive categories are applied to relational cultural practices, limiting the capacity of applied social sciences, particularly education, governance, organizational studies, and intercultural policy, to engage with local epistemic diversity. Through conceptual synthesis and reflexive methodological engagement, the article illuminates how epistemic coloniality is reproduced and proposes pluriversal pathways grounded in epistemic reciprocity, dialogical integration, and institutional reform. Ultimately, it argues that Latin America possesses unique potential to advance pluriversal transformations within global metaculture by centering relational ethics, communal epistemologies, and intercultural justice.