PLANETARY GENEALOGY OF SUPERVISION: FROM PRIMATES TO SOCIAL WORK. A Decolonial Archaeology of Professional Accompaniment

This article proposes a planetary genealogy of professional supervision that transcends the hegemonic Western narrative. Against conventional histories that place the origin of supervision in Mary Richmond (1917) and the professionalization of American social work, this research traces practices of accompaniment, mentorship and knowledge transmission to functionally analogous forms in non-human primates, archaeological evidence from the Paleolithic (Qesem Cave, 400,000 years), and epistemological traditions from the Global South: Sub-Saharan Ubuntu, Hindu Guru-Shishya, Māori Tuakana-Teina, and Indigenous mentorship practices of the Americas. The research includes a comparative international analysis of over 35 countries on mandatory supervision and citizen participation in social work codes of ethics, distinguishing between binding legal frameworks and regulatory guidelines with professional registration effects. Results reveal that Spain, with its 2025 Draft Code of Ethics, represents an exceptional case of regression by degrading supervision from a professional function (2012 Code) to optional self-care, contradicting standards from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Five serious structural problems are identified in the Draft: degradation of supervision, epistemic expropriation, conditional language that exonerates institutions, absence of citizen participation, and non-binding rulings. The analysis incorporates three additional critical dimensions: (1) a legal-juridical study demonstrating how the degradation of supervision violates current Spanish labor legislation (Workers' Statute, Occupational Risk Prevention Act) and European Directive 89/391/EEC; (2) documentation of the omission of Spanish literature on supervision (Berasaluze Berasaluze and (3) formal legal arguments for allegations pursuant to Law 39/2015 on Common Administrative Procedure. From the theoretical framework of Planetary and Pluriversal Social Work, a reconceptualization of supervision is proposed as an ancestral, pluriversal practice constitutive of humanity, arguing that contemporary professional supervision is not a Western invention of the 20th century but the late—and often partial—formalization of accompaniment knowledge that humanity has developed over millennia. Keywords: professional supervision, decolonial social work, epistemologies of the South, Ubuntu, Tuakana-Teina, planetary genealogy, code of ethics, Spain, ORPA, employer obligation, citizen participation. INTELLECTUAL AUTONOMY STATEMENT ENGLISH My work is part of an independent academic, scientific, literary and artistic production that neither requests nor needs institutional authorization or permission to exist. My reflections do not require the endorsement of journals, committees, organizations, or economic or political interests to be thought, written or shared. I need no permission to think, to exist, or to share. I studied Social Work and I continue learning every day to contribute to social transformation, not to reproduce systems that instrumentalize care or neutralize critical thinking, nor to normalize institutional abandonment or the exclusion of professionals with humble but essential voices. I write from the margins. From rural areas, from my mountains and my corner of the world. From my land and my roots. From the front line, where Social Work is embodied daily in real people and communities with names, faces and lives that do not fit on paper. I do not write from apparent neutrality or strategic obedience, but from the ethical responsibility of thinking for myself, fully aware that sometimes the most ethical choice is to disobey. The works I publish are offered to anyone who wishes to read, discuss or cite them, anywhere, without mandatory intermediaries. They do not claim consensus or adherence, only intellectual honesty. Whoever accesses this work explicitly knows the framework from which it is written: from my own expertise, from scientific research, and from the paradigm I have built to found Planetary and Pluriversal Social Work. "Social Work will be Planetary and Pluriversal or it will not be."