One’s own education. Resistance of the indigenous peoples in Colombia to the homogenization model

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the educational component of the investigation ‘cosmovision of unity’ in the ‘Nasa de Caldono’ indigenous community in Colombia, whose main objective was to identify practices of the ‘leisure culture’ in the San Lorenzo de Caldono indigenous reservation and its relation with the sustainable development culture. The research was developed from ethnography as dense description (Clifford Geertz, 2003) and the reflexive ethnography of Rossana Guber (2001), with theoretical interpretative support on Maria Cecilia de Sousa Minayo (2005) and the reflexive sociology in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Vacquant (2005). In so doing, it was found that education is acquired in the community in three manners: education as heritage or own education, bilingual intercultural education and the official education. As a conclusion, these three ways of education express themselves in permanent tension in the deferent community scenarios, which raises the challenge to advance in constructing intercultural projects that can make democracy possible with different sectors in the national society where recognition, appraisal of what each one is and represents in his being, knowledge and way of living, can prevail.