Learning together otherwise: decolonizing anthropological education through multimodal pedagogies

Abstract (English)

Knowledge and learning have been traditionally exercised, quantified and qualified through methods of transmission and consumption that leave out the ways that people learn in daily life experience (Dewey, Ingold). Conventional methods of education generally preclude more sensorial, affective, and (inter)active other ways of learning and knowing (Gatt and Arantes; Arantes and Feder-Nadoff, Feder-Nadoff). Flattening the registers of cognitive processing by emphasizing structure versus fluidity, intention versus contingency also precludes the knowledge generated by indigenous, mestizo and rural communities in countries such as Mexico and Guatemala where oral, collective and material culture traditions are pervasive. Likewise, conventional academic pedagogy is often structured around a pre-determined outcomes rather than outcomes unfolding through engagement with persons, places, material and things. Knowledge as “transmission” and “consumption” also precludes analysis of how knowledge is produced between people rather than merely being passed along, like a glove for retrieval (Harris; Feder-Nadoff, Arantes and Feder-Nadoff). All these constraints make invisible the agency of the subjects who have shared their knowledge with the visiting ethnographer. These tendencies have also led to the capitalization of knowledge evidenced in the increasing bureaucratization of the university modeled after profit-based enterprises where students are left with little room to wander, explore, imagine and speculate (Ingold, Herzfeld, Magazine and Méndez Cota). This talk will present alternatives to conventional anthropological training by sharing the experiences and outcomes of a practice-based seminar in multimodal methods carried out with students in a leading university of Mexico, City.