Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper focuses on examining the space of the Plaza de Cajamarca Cajamarca (Peru) to submit it to the semiotic analysis proposed by Jacques Fontanille. This approach will allow designating the correspondence that exists between the colonial history that is documented in the text True Relationship of the Conquest of Peru (1534) of Francisco de Xerez with its symbolic value (sacralization), which is obtained by making the appropriate interpretation of Mircea Eliade’s concepts when referring to the sacred, as opposed to the profane. The objective of this article is to base the principles on which this cultural monument survives in the national records of History and Literature. Keywords: Semiotics; Conquest; Cologne; Literature; Sacralization.

The teaching of chemistry as a strategy for the development of critical thinking in high school students offers a series of possibilities that, although they require the teacher to recur and construct didactics aimed at this objective, it also implies that the academy takes carried out a review of the different approaches that have been developed in this regard, so that, in contrast to teaching praxis, more effective forms of construction of critical thinking can be established. In the previous framework, this work seeks to be a documentary compilation that, although not detailed, articulates the theoretical bases of the categories of analysis selected for the development of an investigation on the conceptions about critical thinking, as well as the strategies of teaching chemistry. Keywords: Critical thinking; development of critical thinking; teaching; teaching chemistry.

The purpose of this interview is to provide an approach to the topic of Political Violence and the State from the field of Social Sciences, through the perspective of Anouk Guiné (Postdoc. in Sociology, Institut National d’Études Démographiques). From the analysis of the Internal Armed Conflict in Peru between 1980 and 2000 and her book Gender and Armed Conflict in Peru, she approaches the concept of political violence as a tautology, where violence and non-violence are social constructs. The interview highlights the importance of making counter-hegemonic voices and narratives visible and leaving aside taboos and distorted visions of violence and memory promoted by conservative groups. She raises the possibility of breaking with the victim-victimizer dichotomies, and the hierarchization, as between “innocent” and “guilty”, of women victims of state violence, insofar as these categories serve the interests of the state narrative. Likewise, from a counterhegemonic and problematizing perspective, Guiné reviews the different ways in which violence is deployed and explain them in this interview via email, between Perú and France.

This paper seeks to analyze the online adaptation process of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two key moments were chosen for the analysis: the new modality of the admission exam and the online classes. Based on the review of institutional sources, social network publications, and news, we sought to understand the scope and limitations of the present decisions taken by the UNMSM management. The university as an organization, therefore, is understood as a space where power relations fluctuate and where it is difficult to find consensus for decisión-making. Also, the capacity of two actors with conflicting interests has been highlighted: on the one hand, the rector’s group, made up of the rector, vice-rectors, and faculty deans, and, on the other hand, students organized as a union.

With the arrival of the pandemic due to Covid-19, the worsening of citizen insecurity and the rise of the new government, the nature of voluntary military service has been debated, seeking to make it part of a public policy that addresses young people. Against this background, at the social level some debates have been developed that point out before the importance of understanding the structural bases of youth. Starting from this approach, the following paper presents a review that shows the trajectory and scope of the exercise of voluntary military service in contemporary Peru. The structure of the text is based on two thematic axes: studies and approaches to military service and military service in the political agendas of governments. Interest in the exercise of military service in Latin America and its variants is part of a large body of research and there is a varied literature on the historical notion of military service. However, only in some cases have social aspects been considered in a very superficial way and not directly related to military service, but with respect to the profession. Given this absence, it is hoped to contribute with a scope that highlights this often invisible and complex space, considering that it can be promising in terms of data for the analysis of political decisions that lead to strengthening the actions of the Armed Forces institutions by time to convene volunteer military personnel and future public policies for youth.

Racism is a current problem that generates structures of violence and structural inequality; it directly affects the individual experiences and quality of life of afro-descendant individuals. One of the ways in which this system expressed itself is in labor discrimination. Within the workplace, aesthetic categories such as “good presence” are often used to justify discrimination against individuals who, supposedly, do not fit into a professional climate. This article’s objective is to reflect on the experiences of labor discrimination against young Afro-Peruvian professionals because of their afro-curly hair in Metropolitan Lima. From the dialogue with the interviewees, it was found that the rejection of people with afro-curly hair in work spaces occurs implicitly and explicitly. This is based on stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes, and results in discrimination, which ends up reproducing and reinforcing racist structures. Faced with these, young people generate strategies that consist in the modification of their bodies, which bring consequences for the construction of their identity.

This article aims to present an analysis of the Priority Objective N°5 of the National Competitiveness and Productivity Policy (NCPP) from the perspective of economic anthropology. This objective refers to the creation of conditions to enable the Peruvian labor market to be more dynamic and competitive and to generate decent employment. To do this, we resort to key concepts used in this branch of anthropology, such as the labor theory of value (Marx, 1975; Collins, 2016), that of accumulation by dispossession (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2014), precariousness (Castel, 2014), as well as the theoretical approach of the moral economy (Carrier, 2018; Thompson, 1991; Scott, 1977; Palomera and Vetta, 2016). In the first part, the main aspects of the diagnosis of the Peruvian labor market from the NCPP are presented. Next, the policy measures proposed in the National Competitiveness and Productivity Plan are examined to determine how they fulfill the objective. Afterwards, the NCPP design and approval process is explored. Finally, it is concluded that the approval of this policy should be understood as part of a larger-scale process that aims to stripping workers of their non-wage labor benefits. This dispossession makes workers’ lives precarious and weakens the moral component of the Peruvian economy, that is, respect for the fulfillment of the obligations that people contract with each other in the framework of social relations and economic transactions.

In this so far unpublished interview, carried out on September 20, 2019 in the city of Huancayo, doctor Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino (Ph D. in Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), with honorary doctorate from the National University of the Center of Peru, exposes his reflections on the social problems of the Quechua language and the constant segregation of its speakers. He provides us an account and reason, from an interdisciplinary approach, of the colonial history whose effects radiates up to the present, evidencing, in an absent State, official educational strategies and private ones that, buried and at the same time manifested, turn out to be symbolically violent, stigmatizing the practice and knowledge of the comunolects in the Mantaro valley. Professor Cerrón-Palomino also explains in detail his work in interpreting and modernizing the vocabulary compiled by the Franciscan huancaíno, José Francisco María Ráez, in the first decades of the XXth century, by editing philologically the Diccionario huanca quechua-castellano/ castellano-quechua of the illustrius Franciscan friar. Finally, reference is made to his tenacious investigation on the Puquina language, which the interviewed proposes as the ancestral tongue of the Incas.

In this article, we discuss the cases of two artists from Lima, focusing on the strategies they develop to confront institutionalized job insecurity. It is argued that such insecurity is due to the nature of a national art system co-opted by the elites and the State, in which external actors are left aside. Plus, this phenomenon is caused by the capitalist mode of production that frames the artistic labor in a specific way and logic. After carrying out fieldwork during June and July 2021, it is proposed that strategies can be analysed from four different axes: market relations, institutional and/or governmental support, use of social networks and cooperation networks with other colleagues. To achieve analytical depth, we put this empirical data in dialogue with the theoretical approaches that come from anthropology of art and studies of job insecurity and strategies developed by individual actors. Following a material perspective, we read these cases as embedded within a national art system that conditionates specific social and material foundations.