Rural social space transformations in Northeast of Argentine: peasants? learning in practices and territory.

PADAWER, ANA

Manchester

Conferencia; Space, Place and Social justice in Education; 2012

Manchester Metropolitan University

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northeastern Argentina, where I have been working with learning in practices to address the knowledge of the environment that indigenous mbya guaraní and peasant young people ?colonos- attain in their every day experiences. Despite formal education in rural areas often tries to incorporate the benefits of hands-on learning, it struggles with a history of distinction between the manual and the intellectual knowledge that tends to ignore this in-practice learning process. My research is located in the Department of San Ignacio, in the Province of Misiones (Argentina), bordering with Brazil and Paraguay. Productive activities of the area are related to the Parana Wood Forest biome, which has been significantly transformed in recent decades. Since property concentration of the land devoted to forest industry and to tobacco production has increased, the yerba mate crisis has driven colonos to diversify their activities even further or move to the cities. The mbyà guaraní people (who used to live in this territory before the arrival of Europeans), were also affected by recent space transformation by making access to the native forest harder for the indigenous people and impairing family reproduction -productive practices for living- without state aid. Considering the historical reconstruction about settlement of peasant and indigenous people in this area, I will use in this paper geographical and statistical data to improve an ethnographic account about the contemporary process of ?depeasantization? and the heterogeneous strategies to remain ?or return to countryside. Access to land is directly related with opportunities to learn in practice, so regarding educational inequalities is important to analyze such processes of historical uses of rural spaces. This process of ?depeasantization? has common issues with the expulsion of mbya guarani people of paranaense forest, but in order to focus in this paper I will refer to the non indigenous process, making only some remarks of the interethnic relations entailed.