Picikece (mapuche children) Turning a hostile school environment into a field for self recognition as mapuche (Neuquén, Argentina).

ANDREA SZULC

San Diego, California

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group; 2013

American Anthropological Assosiation

Elementary schools continue to play a central role today in mapuche rural communities, at Neuquén ?Argentina-, sometimes, as the only government enclave. While for non-Mapuche teachers school is the place for children per se, the practices of the Mapuche show that for them, school attendance is subordinated to other needs of the children and their domestic groups. On the one hand, these needs are related to the timing of transhumant livestock, and on the other, to children?s wellbeing, as they enter an institution perceived as not their own. For some mapuche children ?who take part in organizations with Mapuche philosophy and leadership-, school can become with time a relevant educational space, although staying hostile. Fieldwork has yielded countless cases in which they question school curriculum and the national and provincial symbols presented therein; taking pride in their performance. My purpose in this paper is then to explore the ambivalent school experiences of mapuche children, and to account for the changes occurred in the last years in this regard.These experiences are based on the Mapuche definition of childhood and also on the particular definition of Mapuche identity promoted by these organizations, according to which being able to defend their collective rights on unequal grounds becomes a diacritic feature, along with behaving and thinking according to the Mapuche worldview. By basing the arguments on a conceptualization of childhood as a field for disputing hegemony, and of boys and girls as social subjects and competent interlocutors, this paper then explores the ambivalent school experiences of mapuche children. The analysis reveals school?s reconfiguration as an arena for putting children?s self-recognition into practice along with their capacity for reasoning, a change that has been enabling these children ?successful? school trajectories, instead of becoming school drop-outs.