Attempting Education 'Otherwise' - Re-collecting the Kuruman field school
Chris Wingfield
(University of East Anglia)
Contribution description:
This contribution will reflect on a field school held at Kuruman, an early mission station in South Africa, for students from both Cambridge and Sol Plaatje Universities in 2018, in the wake of student calls for 'free, quality decolonial education' emanating from #RhodesMustFall in Cape Town.
Paper long abstract:
Tim Ingold's Anthropology and/as Education suggests anthropologists should approach their work in the field and in the classroom as related activities of learning through attention, care and establishing common ground. While Ingold's primary focus was on participant observation, this contribution will suggest this is an equally fruitful way to approach other modes of fieldwork, in particular that mainstay of archaeological field projects, the field school. Through considering a field school organised with Sol Plaatje University at Kuruman in South Africa in 2018 as a location for experimenting with decolonial pedagogy, this paper will draw on the ideas of Ingold, Paolo Freire and Walter Mignolo, but also African modes of education, to imagine a future in which the field, rather than being approached primarily as a site of extraction, can be conceptualised as a place of dialogue, exchange and learning, where it may be possible to acknowledge and recollect past traumas, but also begin to develop new forms of remembering in common. While the field may be a necessary place of repair, where space and time can be found for such projects of re-collection, the challenge for the future of 'Anthropology as education' arguably lies in translating insights and methods arising from such experiments into the more hierarchical institutional structures of the university and the museum.
Accepted Contribution:
Contribution description:
Paper long abstract:
Tim Ingold's Anthropology and/as Education suggests anthropologists should approach their work in the field and in the classroom as related activities of learning through attention, care and establishing common ground. While Ingold's primary focus was on participant observation, this contribution will suggest this is an equally fruitful way to approach other modes of fieldwork, in particular that mainstay of archaeological field projects, the field school. Through considering a field school organised with Sol Plaatje University at Kuruman in South Africa in 2018 as a location for experimenting with decolonial pedagogy, this paper will draw on the ideas of Ingold, Paolo Freire and Walter Mignolo, but also African modes of education, to imagine a future in which the field, rather than being approached primarily as a site of extraction, can be conceptualised as a place of dialogue, exchange and learning, where it may be possible to acknowledge and recollect past traumas, but also begin to develop new forms of remembering in common. While the field may be a necessary place of repair, where space and time can be found for such projects of re-collection, the challenge for the future of 'Anthropology as education' arguably lies in translating insights and methods arising from such experiments into the more hierarchical institutional structures of the university and the museum.
Anthropology as education
Session 1