Ethical living & the salience of work: growing up in a Cacua community of Northwest Amazonia

Flatau, Sasha (2023) Ethical living & the salience of work: growing up in a Cacua community of Northwest Amazonia. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Text - Submitted Version Download (16MB)

Abstract

This thesis focuses on how an indigenous group of Northwest Amazonia that was previously highly mobile came to live together in a community, value the work required of subsistence living and raise their children to live well through learning to work. Based on long-term fieldwork among the Cacua in their community of Wacará (Colombia), the thesis explores how learning to work as part of subsistence living is key to growing up and maturing into adulthood. This process, which begins early in childhood, provides an informal medium through which children are expected to cultivate the desirable dispositions and virtues of living well. Regional literature has much to say about the virtues of living well and the role that work plays in achieving this, but little with regards to the way in which children cultivate such virtues or learn to work. While men and women’s complementary roles in the subsistence economy have also been well-documented, the thesis proposes that analysis of the subsistence economy and its inextricable relation to morality requires close attention to learning processes in childhood. It investigates how a desire to live well while living in a community with others permeates the everyday and explores instances in which adults and children enact practical judgment in evaluating their actions and those of others. It argues that considering how children learn core values associated with living well and living with others by learning to work is key to understanding how cultural reproduction takes place throughout continuous processes of social change. By including children as active learners in an analysis of the subsistence economy, the thesis contributes to a broader anthropological understanding of ethics, social change and the ways in which skills and values for living well pass from generation to generation.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Sasha Flatau
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Sets:	Departments > Anthropology
Supervisor:	Astuti, Rita and Buitron, Natalia and Deshoulliere, Gregory
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4743

Actions (login required)

Record administration - authorised staff only