How a rewired education system that values marginalised forms of knowledge can reach far beyond minority communities.
“It’s a matter of social justice,” says anthropologist Dr Angela Giattino. “And epistemic justice sits at its core: the recognition that other people bear other ways of learning and knowing that are just as valuable as our own.”
This core motivation led Dr Giattino to pursue her recent doctoral research on the subject of intercultural education. In our increasingly diverse, modern societies, this specialised educational approach has grown globally in recent decades in an attempt to better equate cultural differences and worldviews.
Interculturality aims to adapt formal academic education to the learning needs of ethnic minorities. It engages with indigenous heritage, even incorporating ancestral knowledge systems and indigenous languages into the wider curriculum. Whether embedded in a single conference, a special course or across an entire university, these are broad attempts to reverse the long-term marginalisation of indigenous knowledge.
Put simply, intercultural education “emphasises the relevance of knowledge when it comes to ethnicity”, explains Giattino.
Amazonian metropolis
This approach is particularly relevant for Peru, one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Of its 55 ethnic groups, 51 belong to the Amazon region.
“With urbanisation, many of these indigenous people have migrated to cities,” says Giattino. “Pucallpa is an excellent example. It's an Amazonian city with a great ethnic variety of indigenous and non-indigenous people.”
With no means to pursue higher education in their native, often remote communities, young indigenous Amazonians are among those increasingly moving from rural to urban areas to study at higher education institutions. Those offering intercultural education are often the preferred choice.
Before arriving in Cambridge last year as an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postdoctoral fellow, Giattino spent nearly three years in the riverine metropolis of Pucallpa – the second largest city of the Peruvian Amazon. Here, she studied how indigenous youth experience the realities of intercultural education.
A cultural melting pot
Giattino discovered a thriving city hub. Indigenous students from across the breadth of the Amazon could meet up, exchange ideas, and educate themselves on the country’s unique ethnic diversity. She found how indigenous Peruvians were connecting with indigenous peoples from other countries to form broader networks beyond borders.
Some were even using the opportunity to establish entrepreneurial ventures with others, typically community-based, culturally sustainable or environmentally focused start-ups.
“It was amazing to see how people from very different communities and ethnic groups – each very distinct linguistically, culturally and historically – could come together and establish friendships and collaborations,” she says.
Educational challenges
But Giattino also discovered an anxiety shared across generations, heightened in indigenous young people, that their ancestral knowledge might one day be lost. As the future of their peoples, the younger generations felt the greatest burden of this responsibility – stoked by their families, communities and society at large.
Through her Sicilian heritage, Giattino personally connected with these concerns. Sicily, too, has a distinct language and set of traditions that many Sicilians fear might be lost in the future.
Some young Amazonians were pursuing formal education as a way to give back to their indigenous communities. “Many wanted to become intercultural school teachers,” says Giattino. “Teaching is one of the few careers that allows them to return to their native homes. In fact, some of the young people I worked with have become the first indigenous school teachers in their communities.”
There remains a strong desire among young indigenous people to connect with the traditions of their elders. Yet a formal academic education – that prioritises the transfer of knowledge through written texts – was also seen as a solution to preserving a tangible future for their heritage.
Giattino found indigenous people often wanting to ‘systematise’ their ancestral knowledge when entering higher education, primarily through writing a book. “Yet some forms of indigenous knowledge can be very difficult to gather in this way,” she explains. “There is a tension between content and medium.”
“Acquiring indigenous knowledge is less about learning notions and more about embodied, intersubjective and processual knowledge. In other words, it’s about the relationships created with other people or beings around you. This might include interactions with animals, plants or supernatural entities. Some described it more like a kind of energy you cultivate.”
Identity and belonging
Giattino realised that most young Amazonians connected their indigeneity with their ability to acquire these unique knowledges.
“There is this idea that you're born indigenous. To use a term that my interlocutors were using – or as we say in anthropology, an ‘emic term’ – they have ‘indigenous blood’. But it is indigenous blood that needs to be harnessed or activated through the acquisition of certain kinds of indigenous knowledge.”
However many young indigenous people are born or raised in the city. With separation from their ancestral homes, their indigeneity does not get fully acknowledged. Giattino met many young Amazonian residents of Pucallpa who felt they were ‘not indigenous enough’. “They didn’t speak the native language or weren't able to perform typical activities such as hunting, fishing, embroidery, shamanic medicine or other crafts,” she explains. They felt disconnected from their roots.
Giattino’s resulting thesis sought a way to make sense of these findings, so she developed an original framework that could help explain the broad impact that interculturality has on young Amazonians.
“These young people felt they were not indigenous enough precisely because of the value key local social actors — and us in the West — give to indigenous knowledge.” Giattino’s concept of ‘epistemic ethnicity’ reveals that, increasingly, ethnicity is predominantly a matter of knowledge in the Amazonian setting and beyond.
Wide-reaching benefits
Giattino’s research primarily considered the perspectives of indigenous youth, but she is keen to stress that intercultural education is not only for ethnic minorities. The benefits of these inclusive institutions reach far beyond indigenous and other under-represented communities.
“This connective knowledge benefits our whole society. It's not only about knowledge or even pedagogy. It promotes different, more effective ways of teaching that take into account the learning needs of all kinds of people. This type of education tries to be globally relevant, yet also in line with the environment that one inhabits.”
Next steps
During her time in Pucallpa, Giattino secured a temporary role as an indigenous youth educational policy consultant in the Municipal Bureau for Indigenous Affairs.
Giattino shared her initial research findings to help improve educational policies and to design policy recommendations for indigenous learners. For there remain deeply rooted educational inequalities for indigenous Amazonian people. Language barriers in particular can lead to high university dropout rates. Indigenous students are also at risk of lower academic performances.
“This is a collaboration that I would love to resume and expand in the future. There is still much to do to achieve the equality of access that needs to be reached.”
“Not all research in the social sciences and humanities lends itself to this kind of impact. But when you're researching certain subjects – like my own – I think there’s a duty for a scholar to try to have a positive impact on the real world.”
Dr Angela Giattino is a social anthropologist specialising in education, epistemology, youth, ethnicity, migration, and health in Latin America, with a particular focus on urban Peruvian Amazonia. She is currently an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Words by Joanne Dodd, Communications Coordinator in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences