The constitution of a new indigenous social subject: Guarani people, formal education and intercultural capital

Abstract

Guarani students´ access to Higher Education Institutions (HEI) is a recent phenomenon both in Brazil and Argentina. As members of a group which occupy a dominated position in social space, Guarani people have scarce possibilities of accessing and remaining in the higher education system. Their presence in such places expose numerous issues related to the unequal conditions of access, permanence and completion that the formal education system pose for indigenous populations, and possibly for members of other disinherited social groups in both countries. Based on an intense anthropological fieldwork, this paper aims to further increase our knowledge of this phenomenon, taking into account the experiences of the Guarani students that play a leading role in it, as well as the different institutions engaged throughout the process. By making use of a narrative style, educational trajectories of two Guarani students are presented, one from the province of Misiones (Argentina) and the other from the State of Paraná (Brazil), in order to convey some signs of how Guarani students experience the passage through the formal education system of the dominant society.