Demarcating Knowledge: Indigenous Scholars and the Struggle for Epistemic Justice in Brazilian Universities

Abstract (English)

This paper examines the lived experiences of Indigenous scholars in Brazilian universities, focusing on their role in challenging and transforming the epistemic foundations of higher education. While affirmative action policies have increased access for Indigenous students, academic institutions remain entrenched in Eurocentric epistemologies that marginalize Indigenous ways of knowing as non-scientific, emotional, or spiritual—thereby perpetuating epistemic injustice and epistemicide (Santos 2014).

Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022, this paper explores how Indigenous scholars engage in decolonial praxis not as abstract critique but as embodied, ancestral, and relational knowledge production. For these scholars, knowledge is inseparable from land, body, spirit, and community. Their work highlights how Indigenous epistemologies are rooted in oral traditions, affectivity, and reciprocal relationships with human and non-human worlds—challenging the dominant academic model that prizes neutrality and disembodied rationality.

A central concept explored is the “demarcation of academic territory,” where Indigenous academics assert both physical and epistemological space within universities. This strategy goes beyond inclusion, seeking structural transformation to enable genuine epistemic pluralism. Programs like Licenciatura Intercultural Indígena demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge can engage with academic institutions without assimilation, fostering dialogue across ontologies.

By foregrounding the tensions, negotiations, and creative strategies Indigenous scholars use to navigate and reshape the university, this paper contributes to rethinking anthropological education through the lens of epistemic justice. It calls for the reconfiguration of the university into a pluri-epistemic space where diverse knowledge systems are not only acknowledged but sustained on their own terms.