Abstract

MCCALLUM, Cecília. Escrito no corpo: gênero, educação e socialidade na Amazônia numa perspectiva Kaxinawá. Revista da FAAEBA: Educação e Contemporaneidade [online]. 2010, vol.19, n.33, pp.87-104. ISSN 0104-7043.

In the 1980s, the Pro-Indian Commission of the state of Acre developed an educational project aimed at training indigenous teachers, enabling them to teach literacy skills to their relatives and to create indigenous schools. The object was to empower indigenous to escape debt slavery relations with Brazilian bosses and trades. The article presents an ethnographic discussion of the first years of this project, focusing on the Cashinahua schools. With few exceptions, all the teachers chosen by the Cashinahua were male and so were their pupils. This paper discusses the relationship between gender, personhood, sociality and school education among the Cashinahua, focusing on the question of women’s absence from the classroom in that period. It asks whether women thereby ran the risk of disempowerment in the context of the social, political and economic developments to which they were subject. The ethnographic discussion shows that from an indigenous perspective, female school education was not seen as empowerment. Rather, women were preoccupied in strengthening female participation in the production of sociality, seeking to widen their access to the art of weaving graphic design. The paper suggests that the overwhelming predominance of men among indigenous schoolteachers in Brazil may be explained as the result of the operation of similar logics with respect to gender, epistemology and sociality among other indigenous peoples.

Keywords : Indigenous Education; Gender; Cashinahua; Writing; Graphic Design.

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