IEIPWA
Indigenous Epistemologies and Images of Public Wealth in Amazonia
Research focuses on the place of indigenous epistemologies in intercultural and highly politicized interactions that revolve around the interface of development in Amazonia: the external planning and implementation of development projects in indigenous communities, and indigenous people’s own critical responses to such projects. Although we have informative studies of development as a process linked to Western modernity, we have little sense of what cultural meanings are harnessed in political processes that challenge the implicit beliefs of development, as well as its practical workings. This project is partly intended to correct that lack through a consideration of indigenous notions of wealth and well-being that are deployed against the dominant development paradigm. It anchors the analysis of such notions in native epistemologies–indigenous theories of knowledge and theorizing knowledge–which not only involve sophisticated theories of cognition, agency, and the self, but also inform native senses of history, interculturality, and cultural change.
"Curar o Mundo: cosmovisões em diálogo" - Video of the exhibition in Ocupação Tropicana, Coimbra, August 28-29 2015.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 328421
