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Paper short abstract:

What do indigenous projects of “civilization” mean for decolonial anthropology? This paper explores attempts by Tukanoan schools in Northwestern Amazonia at raising children into what they call “civilized people” and how this productively unsettles notions of indigenization and decoloniality.

Paper long abstract:

In the Papurí River, located in Northwestern Amazonia, Tukanoans cultivate “civilization.” On a daily basis and over centuries they have scrutinized and reworked elements of their lifestyle, sociality, and cosmology to fashion themselves into “civilized people.” This they do by recourse to the imaginaries and values of Tukanoan tradition, Catholicism, Hollywood, conspiracy theories, and Colombian popular culture. Let us call this active and deliberate project a “culture of civilization.”

Local schools have played a pivotal role in this endeavor, first because these are the institutions where ideas of “civilization” are distilled, conceptualized, and transmitted by indigenous teachers to indigenous students. Second, as their own anthropological analyses have led them to conclude, because schools are the places where “Whites” produce and reproduce themselves as “civilized.” Schools hold the promise of this transformative process.

In this paper, I will use the Tukanoan project of raising “civilization” in their indigenous schools to shake up our anthropological ideas of decoloniality and indigenization. Well beyond the usual process of incorporating Amerindian knowledge into a Western institution, indigenous schools in the Papurí speak of a higher-level inter-epistemic dialogue where Tukanoans’ vernacular anthropology has been put to work to study, understand, produce, and teach their own theory of civilization. Reduceable neither to innovation nor assimilation, this process civilizes indigeneity in the exercise of indigenizing civilization. Thus, Papurí Tukanoans see schooling as deeply transformational while empowering and grounded in their culture. Becoming civilized, as we will see, has always been the Tukanoan fate of self-betterment.