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- Convenors:
-
Malvika Gupta
(University of Oxford)
Felix Padel (University of Sussex)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Brunswick G7
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 25 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
India has the largest number of boarding schools of any country, largely based on the same ideology of assimilation as the infamous North American ones. What has been the relationship of anthropology with them? This panel aims at looking through the boarding schools of India to take a global view of what indigenous education has been and can be.
Long Abstract:
Past boarding schools for indigenous children were largely set up or run by missionaries. Most contemporary ones in India, as in many other nations around the world, involve a variety of actors and ideologies, sometimes seemingly contradictory, yet sharing the ideology of a civilising mission premised on a social evolutionary framework and aimed at assimilating indigenous citizens into a largely amorphous mainstream. In India stereotypes of primitiveness and poverty still permeate such schooling, overlooking patterns of disinheritance and dispossession. In the history of Indian anthropology, the opposed views of Verrier Elwin and G. S Ghurye reveal the deep division that have surrounded, and continue to surround, all aspects of Adivasi status and identity.
At the global level, the term 'extraction education' encapsulates current trends, since children are extracted from their land, communities, and knowledge systems; and large-scale schooling is increasingly funded by the very extractive industries that are taking over indigenous land. Even if residential schools in India can provide a safe haven for children to learn in, do they have to remove children so drastically from their family and community life?
By contrast, in India and elsewhere, a variety of models of indigenous-led education are also emerging, based on ancestral knowledge, self-determination and interculturality, that ‘reverse the learning’. Anthropology was complicit in colonial models, but can engaged and collaborative anthropology today bring to light the power structures that perpetuate boarding schools, while highlighting indigenous initiatives and thinking on formal and non-formal sites of education?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 25 June, 2024, -Thomas Herzmark (International Centre of Advanced Studies 'Metamorphoses of the Political', New Delhi, India)
Paper short abstract:
Within a landscape of shifting cultivation in South India, this paper explores how schooling is a critical site of intergenerational decision-making, revealing the interwoven but counterpoised aspirations for economic integration on one hand, and territorial and cultural autonomy on the other.
Paper long abstract:
This paper charts the narratives of young adivasi peoples’ education in Andhra Pradesh, India, from an intergenerational ethnographic perspective. Using life-history interviews supplemented by qualitative survey data on educational outcomes in three relatively isolated villages, I analyse decisions around schooling which encapsulate processes of change across the Koya community. While school attendance is understood as one path towards social mobility, this is a context in which education results in cultural assimilation and dislocation from close-knit networks of kinship and care within adivasi villages. Some parents justify these decisions through longer-term aspirations, believing hostel schooling makes young people adaptable and prepared for life outside the village, and able to then earn cash through migrant wage-labour, imagining their future return. A larger proportion of parents are reluctant for their children to extend their education, and fearful of losing their social reproductive labour within the shifting cultivation economy. From the perspective of first-generation school goers, many foresee for themselves a more individualised, adult selfhood; projections of the future often include the allure of a love marriage and the attraction of conspicuous consumption patterns, valorised across the region. However, schooling is experienced and narrated as a difficult and traumatic experience, which exposes adivasi youth to stigmatisation, from which they “run back”. The paper elaborates the complexity of counterpoised aspirations for perceived social mobility and economic integration on one hand, and territorial and cultural autonomy – closely tied to adivasi kinship and religion – on the other, showing how education is exacerbating and solidifying emergent class distinctions.
Hugh Brody (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
The paper centres on Canadian Residential Schools, focussing on the nature of not-knowing - mine and that of the agencies, communities and First Nations individuals whom I worked with. And the challenge of explaining and understanding the extent of conscious (or semi-conscious) ‘not-knowing.’
Paper long abstract:
CHOOSING WHAT TO KNOW - reflections on the Canadian Residential Schools
ABSTRACT
This paper first sets out, in summary form, the history of the Residential School programme for indigenous children that is now a source of deep national shame and formal apologies from both government, for initiating and funding the policy, and churches, for doing so much to implement it. This overview of the history will reach as far as recent processes of compensation and reconciliation.
The flow of this story follows the shocking and deeply troubling events taking place in the relative secrecy of government and church, as represented by internal and deliberately opaque narratives. And continues to the recent public and academic discovery of the history - and its being made known through mainstream media - especially through the discovery of many unmarked graves of children who died while attending these schools. This is now a public narrative of abuse and death.
The paper then focuses on my own experience of the narratives, or the silences that constitute the disappearance or denial of the events that these narratives now reveal. This takes me to first working within the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (as it was then called) in the late 1960s and 70s. An official visit to one school. Research with ‘Indians’ on the streets of Edmonton. And first journeys to the Arctic.
The line of the discussion here centres on the nature of not-knowing - both mine and and that of the government agencies, communities and First Nations or Inuit individuals whom I worked with. The argument turns to the overlap between lack of information - the difficulty of ‘knowing’, and the extent to which there were conscious (or semi-conscious) choices that constitute a ‘not-knowing.’
The paper will conclude with a consideration of the way in which this choosing not to know is now taking place in other nations - with the example, from my own work, of Botswana.
Felix Padel (University of Sussex) Malvika Gupta (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Our joint paper spells out the history of how boarding schools for tribal children have proliferated in India, gauging the impacts on communities, languages and individuals
Paper long abstract:
From Christian missionary beginnings, and the 'ashram school' reaction, boarding schools for Adivasi or tribal children have proliferated in India, presently numbering several thousand. Assimilationism was openly advocated by leading educationalists in the 1940s; and although policy documents repudiated this policy, an undeclared assimilationism persists, in an attitude of cultural racism among teachers, and the normalisation of a boarding school system that takes children away from family and community for long periods. Similarly, tribal language textbooks have been printed, even while tribal languages are forbidden at school, or incorporated only 'tokenistically'. The ideology disseminated in most of these schools tends to combine hindutva (Hindu nationalism) with industrialism. The newer types of boarding schools are part-funded by the mining companies that are taking Adivasi land and resources, and displacing communities. In this context, tribal boarding schools play a major role in alienating children from their communities, land, languages and systems of knowledge and values, and in undermining social movements that are trying to stop these companies' perceived assault on the environment.