Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

In 2016, a group of Wayana intellectuals from French Guiana approached academics and museum curators to assist them in recovering texts, images, sound recordings, and ancient artefacts collected over the years by several generations of travelers and researchers. This led to the creation of a bilingual Wayana-French portal designed to facilitate virtual access to these formerly scattered collections. Although the main objective was to create a digital database developed according to Wayana-defined criteria, the initiators soon felt the need to produce a parallel printed work to relate their experience. Written exclusively in their language, the book, titled Itëneimëk Kunolo, was published in 2019. This paper recounts its making and its social significance, with emphasis on the challenges of achieving authorial autonomy in the context of a collaborative digital repatriation project.

Artisanal fishing is essential for the food sovereignty and cultural identity of the Raizal people of Old Providence and Santa Catalina islands, Colombia. However, Colombian state intervention in the 20th century brought significant local transformations that negatively affected this activity and the associated knowledge. To address this problem, a group of researchers, fishermen, community leaders, anthropologists, and biologists proposed designing a sustainable artisanal fishing school, a pedagogical initiative that seeks to recover and strengthen traditional fishing knowledge and support a model of indigenous development. Against this backdrop, the article analyzes the historical and political context that supports the initiative, with particular emphasis on how internal colonialism and neoliberal multiculturalism have impacted island society and artisanal fishing. It also highlights the importance of local knowledge in an environment threatened by overexploitation and the loss of cultural identity. Finally, it addresses the school as a tool for the dialogue of knowledge and for fostering the autonomy of the Raizal people in their maritorium.

Several years ago, Hilario Chi Canul showed Valentina Vapnarsky a collection of ancient Maya notebooks, which had been entrusted to him as an Indigenous Maya scholar. Their content remained opaque to him and their nature ambiguous. We have since collaborated to decipher these texts, exploring their histories and materialities while considering how to ethically share them. Our approach has evolved as we have gained insights into the meanings and functions of these palimpsestic religious texts through ethnographic, philological, and historical work. Discovering that many writings were part of a regular process of copying and recopying for regeneration, we considered print publication. However, this raised a number of questions. Can the printed version be considered as another regenerative copy? What about the transformative power of the oralization of the text that generally takes place between two written copies? Would printed copies be as readily accepted by the ritual specialists as the digital copies used in our research? What kind of interest would they and the lay Maya find in publications of such kind? This article addresses these issues, examining the relations between traditional written texts, modern publications, and cultural regeneration.

This article takes as its starting point the request, in the form of letters, by Yanomami people living in Venezuela to produce a book that would enable young children to learn about the culture of their ancestors and thus avoid losing it. It will analyze this autonomous initiative, the socio-political context of its emergence, and the political and educational will underlying this request. It will briefly present previous experiences of producing printed educational material in Indigenous languages in Venezuela. The discussion will address a number of issues, in particular the conflict between generations and the “generational gap”, and the search for autonomy through the publication of books showing how, in response to divergent positions between modern and traditional lifestyles, the publication of cultural texts corresponds as much to a political response to the imposition of external values as to a desire for transmission. The aim of this article is to highlight the ideology of transmission as a value. This configuration includes the transmission of values and therefore its control. The latter is actively desired and effective thanks to operations designed to control the transmission of knowledge as a fundamental operation guaranteeing the reproduction and perpetuation of society.

An educational initiative called Aynikusun in northwest Bolivia, run by rural Indigenous communities with the assistance of a Belgian agronomist, significantly transformed social relations between Spanish-speaking townspeople and their campesino neighbors in the 1980s and 1990s. This article—co-authored by an anthropologist and one of the school's directors—highlights the “revolutionary” education Aynikusun provided by enabling students to complete their high school education using texts written in Quechua and Aymara that reflected local realities, rather than the Spanish-language textbooks of state schools, which were oriented toward a metropolitan national culture. Literate campesinos no longer needed to rely on the townspeople, for example, to navigate state bureaucracy. Aynikusun also provided its adult students with a dedicated space in which to discuss their problems free from interference. This became particularly important prior to municipal elections in 1995, the first time a mayor was elected from one of the Indigenous communities rather than the town, Charazani. Prior to the election, campesinos deliberated shared challenges and reimagined their relationship with the town. Ultimately, literacy and empowerment fostered by Aynikusun made it possible for campesinos to govern the municipality and to reshape social relations.

In this article I start from fieldwork carried out in the now defunct Fazenda Campos Novos, Rio de Janeiro state. I focus on the perspectives of its former inhabitants about the land conflicts that have occurred in the region since the 1950s. I attend to the “confusion” category with which my interlocutors refer to my questions. The “confusions” lead us to consider the kinships and histories through which people relate to territory and their opposition to property relations. From these, I intend to show the need, when analyzing land disputes, to look not at separate social spheres, but at their entanglements.