Children´s skills, expectations and challenges facing changing environments: An Ethnographic study in Mbya Indigenous communities (Argentina)

Abstract

Mbya Guarani are one of the Indigenous peoples living in the Argentinian Northeast in the southern extension of the Paranaense Rainforest, one of the major areas of biodiversity in South America. However, during the last decades the Paranaense Rainforest has been under several pressures which has significantly reduced its extent and has led to major changes in Mbya way of life (Mbya reko). Mbya people are acknowledged for their deep relationship with the forest. The transformations in the forest are seen as the main cause of the discontinuity in the acquisition of culturally relevant knowledge and skills. This issue is often a recurring theme in the speeches of elderly leaders who claim for the recovering of spheres for learning the Mbya reko. Facing these speeches that emphasizes the generational discontinuity in cultural learning, our ethnographic study accounts for the vitality of knowledge and skills highly valued in the context of the Mbya way of life. In other words, children’s engagement in routine subsistence activities, which present a high potential for learning of local knowledge and for the process of enskillment, continue to be predominant. These processes are directly linked with the individual’s involvement in their environment, throughout careful observation and participation in activities performed by multi-aged groups of people. In this framework, “traditional” knowledge and practices are not only reproduced but also continuously transformed in creative ways. However, Mbya children also engage in other activities such as school or entertainment, which are considered “non-traditional.” The data analyzed in this chapter come from observations, interviews, drawings and models produced by children from Mbya communities. Considering this background, this chapter first describes some settings in which children learn about their way of life, in the framework of interactions with peers and more experienced people. Second, it explores how drawings and models made by children can tell stories about children´s preferences, expectations and future horizons. Finally, the chapter reflects on how intergenerational and peer interactions involve transmission, adaptation, questioning and innovation of knowledge and skills necessary to dwelling in changing environments. Moreover, how elderly knowledge and advice are acknowledged by children and young people for exploring new opportunities in the globalized world. Based on that, we discuss elders’ ideas about the discontinuity of learning and stress the relevance of taking into account perspectives of both children and youth to understand the contemporary Mbya way of life in the framework of ecological changes.