Paper long abstract:

In the last decade, the "multiculturalization" of educational institutions designed for and/or by indigenous peoples has reached higher education. In Mexico, innovative new "intercultural universities or colleges" are being created. In this paper, after a brief contextualization of the Mexican process of decentralization and "devolution" in the sphere of higher education, the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural is ethnographically studied and comparatively analyzed. This academic programme is offered as an interdisciplinary B.A. focussing on intercultural management and interdisciplinary mediation in development projects, in the course of which the mainly indigenous students specialize in sustainable development, heritage and communication, language promotion and translation, legal pluralism and customary law or medical pluralism and intercultural health. Our paper scrutinizes the role played by both intra-academic and externally applied anthropology in the development of this new programme and the contribution of ethnogrpahy to the intercultural translation and mediation processes taking place between teachers, studnets and their communities.