Epistemic ethnicity: intercultural higher education among urban Amazonian youth in Peru

Giattino, Angela (2024) Epistemic ethnicity: intercultural higher education among urban Amazonian youth in Peru. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

Amazonian youth are often invested, by their families and society at large, with the moral duty to become professionals while carrying on their elders’ cultural heritage. At the same time, their education, inside and outside formal institutions, raises fears that deference to scientific notions might erase traditional forms of knowledge. In Peru, a country with 55 ethnic groups – no fewer than 51 of which are Amazonian – intercultural universities aim to incorporate ancestral knowledge into academic education. Based on 33 months of fieldwork in the Amazonian metropolis of Pucallpa, this thesis explores the realities of the intercultural educational project as experienced by urban Amazonian youth. Foregrounding the strong link between ethnicity and knowledge, it develops an original analytical framework – epistemic ethnicity – to make sense of the impact that interculturality has on the life projects, worldviews, and ethnic belonging of young Amazonians. The thesis analyses both the emancipatory and burdensome aspects of intercultural ideology and its relationship to contemporary identity politics, showing how it can exacerbate the polarization between “indigenous” people and “mestizo” (non-indigenous). This dichotomy unfolds through processes of ethnic marking and the exaltation of traditional knowledge as a category that indexes the societal value of indigenous ancestry. Intercultural ideology also consolidates the construction of native and scientific knowledges as distinct domains that ought to be fruitfully integrated. Whereas an academic orthodoxy has historically understood Amazonian peoples as quintessentially “open to the Other”, especially to foreigners’ scientific and technological advancements, the present work nuances such interpretation by focusing on the various ways in which young Amazonians’ folk epistemologies go in the opposite direction: that of recovering and treasuring their own ancestral knowledge. The thesis contributes to the anthropology of aspirations, ethnicity, youth, education, and knowledge, within Amazonia and beyond.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Angela Giattino
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology L Education > L Education (General)
Sets:	Departments > Anthropology
Supervisor:	Astuti, Rita and Walker, Harry
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4692

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