Content area
The epistemological approaches to the study of Andean and Amazonian oral traditions have evolved over time, both conceptually and procedurally. Contemporary sciences that have examined these human productions through theoretical and methodological criteria inherent to their respective scientific disciplines have generated more uncertainty than epistemological precisions. The present study aimed to identify the epistemological principles that have guided the study of Andean and Amazonian oral traditions at linguistic-textual, cognitive-ideological and sociocultural levels. Regarding the methodological aspect, the study applied a qualitative approach gathering academic documents produced by researchers during the processes of collection, characterization, and categorization of Andean and Amazonian oral traditions. The research design corresponded to a descriptive-inductive type, and the document analysis technique was applied from the hermeneutic perspective. The findings prove that the epistemological principles that guided the register, characterization and conceptualization of Andean and Amazonian oral traditions encompass all three discursive dimensions: linguistic-textual, cognitive-ideological, and sociocultural. It is concluded that these principles have evolved through four progressive tendencies: suppression and omission of oral traditions as study objects within social sciences; recovery and subsidiarity from orality to writing; recognition and acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of oral traditions in the framework of human production within the academic community; and integration of oral traditions into sociocultural studies and epistemological configurations from the linguistic-textual, cognitive-ideological, and sociocultural perspectives.