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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on young indigenous students in Peru who engage with political, environmental, and social youth organizations, arguing that activism represents a crucial learning process that has a transformative power over the personal development of the urban Amazonian youth.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Peruvian Amazonia, my paper focuses on young indigenous people who move to the city to pursue higher education. Young indigenous Amazonians are often invested, by their families and society at large, with the moral duty to become professionals while also carry on their elders’ cultural heritage. At the same time, their education, inside and outside formal institutions, raises fears of cultural loss and concerns that deference to scientific notions might erase indigenous forms of knowledge, along with traditional customs and values. Therefore, I explore how young Amazonian women and men become socialised persons through the acquisition of different forms of knowledge, both inside and outside academic settings in the city.

Notably, during their studies, many young Amazonians join or form political, environmental, and social youth organizations. These organizations attempt to combine scientific and traditional knowledge in order to deal with the new social and cultural changes brought about by urban life and higher education, as well as with long-term processes of political, economic, and socio-cultural marginalization. Thus, my paper expands existing anthropological debates on indigenous youth education by characterizing the forming and participating in various kinds of organizations as a crucial learning process that challenges young indigenous peoples’ key moral and cultural values, alongside with their hopes and aspirations for the future. Through a framework of knowledge as mediation, I argue that living, studying, and becoming activists in the city has a transformative power over the personal development of young urban Amazonians.