This Great Emptiness We Are Feeling

Toward a Decolonization of Schooling in Simunurwa, Colombia

Bibliographic Data

ID2280429
AuthorsLuz A Murillo (North American University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume40
Issue4
Pages421-437
Publication date2009-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropology & Education Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0161-7761 • E-ISSN: 1548-1492
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1548-1492.2009.01062.x
OpenAlexW1906941846
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited17

This article examines the decolonization of schooling in an Arhuaco community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia. Interweaving ethnographic description with accounts of key events that took place between 1915 and 2006, I trace the community's struggle to develop an Indigenous school capable of appropriating Western forms of knowledge while retaining Indigenous practices and beliefs. I describe how Indigenous educators incorporate local forms of knowledge into schooling, and how these are presented and understood relative to the structures and discourses of the colonized school. Using the concepts of "translocality" and "transculturation," I frame this discussion of the struggle for educational autonomy within broader efforts to decolonize knowledge and epistemologies inherited from European traditions and the Colombian state. I argue that educators have transformed the school from a colonizing space to one in which Indigenous people contest and negotiate, via practices of cultural and linguistic revitalization, the state violence that threatens to surround them. [Arhuaco, Colombia, decolonization, Indigenous education, local knowledge, transculturation, translocality

Autonomy · Decolonization · Ethnography · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Transculturation · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History and Politics in Latin America · Indigenous Cultures and History · Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education · Law

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