What are the challenges that an indigenous teacher from South America faces in Austria?
Navigating between local and international institutions my question is should I do the colonizers reverse trip and decolonize my little Europe?
Paper long abstract:
I have been teaching Latin American social studies and cultures for five years through language courses at a school in Vienna. My personal mission, as an anthropologist and an indigenous person, has been to bring the anthropological perspective into the classroom. I lack a theory, but not much; the practice has transformed my classroom into an ethnographic field that raises more questions than answers, as my audience is made up of international students.
Faced with this, questions about who and the other, how do I know the other? what is knowledge, how the past of other peoples and their present problematize ideas of time, space and development? And what about my indigenous perspectives on science and Western knowledge? how to deal with the term race when it translates into the culture? Is it possible to decolonize young minds? Do they express racist perspectives? How to deal with this in the classroom?
Some things studied in geography can also be categorized under the natural sciences, while other aspects are strongly related to world religions and indigenous knowledge.
How do people think an indigenous culture stop and more general society begin?
Why does IP matter for other countries?
• If we have our own strong cultural traditions how are we different from indigenous peoples?
• How many generations should there be in a particular place for a population to be regarded
as indigenous?
• If members of a recognized indigenous group such as the Yanomami of Brazil/Venezuela move from their recognized homeland to a multicultural city, for how many generations could we regard their descendants as being indigenous? Am I still Indigenous?
To what extent can indigenous knowledge be applied to situations outside the environment in
which the people who develop that knowledge lives?
How might we evaluate a knowledge claim that is based on indigenous knowledge?
With reference to at least two ways of knowing, explain the difference between superstition and indigenous knowledge.
Cultural appropriation is a tricky concept, and although students and teachers are not really interested in the rightness and wrongness of museums, we are interested in the process of arriving at a judgment about them.
How should we define cultural appropriation without delegitimizing the institutions? What are the difficulties in applying the term ethically? Are certain styles and modes of behavior owned by specific cultural groups - and how do we ascertain this ownership?
Therefore, my contribution will be to bring my questions and perhaps my experience to the Studio, which specifically theories or pieces of literature.
Accepted Contribution:
Contribution description:
Paper long abstract:
I have been teaching Latin American social studies and cultures for five years through language courses at a school in Vienna. My personal mission, as an anthropologist and an indigenous person, has been to bring the anthropological perspective into the classroom. I lack a theory, but not much; the practice has transformed my classroom into an ethnographic field that raises more questions than answers, as my audience is made up of international students.
Faced with this, questions about who and the other, how do I know the other? what is knowledge, how the past of other peoples and their present problematize ideas of time, space and development? And what about my indigenous perspectives on science and Western knowledge? how to deal with the term race when it translates into the culture? Is it possible to decolonize young minds? Do they express racist perspectives? How to deal with this in the classroom?
Some things studied in geography can also be categorized under the natural sciences, while other aspects are strongly related to world religions and indigenous knowledge.
How do people think an indigenous culture stop and more general society begin?
Why does IP matter for other countries?
• If we have our own strong cultural traditions how are we different from indigenous peoples?
• How many generations should there be in a particular place for a population to be regarded
as indigenous?
• If members of a recognized indigenous group such as the Yanomami of Brazil/Venezuela move from their recognized homeland to a multicultural city, for how many generations could we regard their descendants as being indigenous? Am I still Indigenous?
To what extent can indigenous knowledge be applied to situations outside the environment in
which the people who develop that knowledge lives?
How might we evaluate a knowledge claim that is based on indigenous knowledge?
With reference to at least two ways of knowing, explain the difference between superstition and indigenous knowledge.
Cultural appropriation is a tricky concept, and although students and teachers are not really interested in the rightness and wrongness of museums, we are interested in the process of arriving at a judgment about them.
How should we define cultural appropriation without delegitimizing the institutions? What are the difficulties in applying the term ethically? Are certain styles and modes of behavior owned by specific cultural groups - and how do we ascertain this ownership?
Therefore, my contribution will be to bring my questions and perhaps my experience to the Studio, which specifically theories or pieces of literature.
Decolonising the academy?
Session 1