Refusing making

Abstract

This article is an examination and a refusal of education as a site of making-up kinds of people. “Indian,” “Aboriginal,” “Black,” “refugee,” “special needs,” “citizens,” “white,” “boy,” “girl” are but a few of the kinds of people education continues to make up. The social sciences and the humanities have offered critical contributions towards the making-up of human kinds. Drawing from the specific case of Indigenous making-up in Guatemala, this article zooms in to twentieth-century anthropology, its activities, aspirations, and reverberations in contemporary Guatemalan curriculum and pedagogy. With Ian Hacking’s framework for making up people, this article proposes a study of difference and race that charts and interrogates the knowledges, experts, and expert institutions implicated in making up particular kinds of people and the effects that their making produces. Finally, and contrary to the popular folklore that “Indigenous” peoples in their imposed “uncivilized” ontology accepted the invader, this article draws from Indigenous refusal. The making-up of people in education sorts, orders, and exploits. This colonial order must be refused. The article offers conceptual cues for refusal from which specific actions can be initiated in school curricula.

Notes

Contributor

Ligia (Licho) López López is a McKenzie Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Her research interests are interrogating diversity, visual studies of difference, youth popular visual cultures, and Black and Brown affect as curricular trans-formation.She is the author of The Making of Indigeneity, Curriculum History and the Limits of Diversity (Routledge, 2017).

Notes

1 Before I go any further, I must disclose that I am fully aware that I am thinking with Ian Hacking who stands on the shoulders of Foucault, Nietzsche, Duhem, and Wittgenstein; all “white,” “European/North American,” (some) “dead” (are they really?), “men.” My citing their thinking in this article is fueled by the suspicion that they learn/ed their imperial and dominant cultures very well. Some of these “white men” left the fence (that protects these cultures) cut for critical feet to march in, occupy, and refuse. The act of cutting the fence may be understood as Salvationist, narcissistic, and still imperialistic. Regardless of their aspirations, this article marches in to refuse the making-up of human kinds in and through education.

2 Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act gives assistance to schools serving high percentages of students coming from low income households. Title VI of the Civil Rights act of 1964, protects people from discrimination based on race, color, and national origin.

3 “Four pueblos” is often used to refer to Guatemala’s diversity and multiculturalism. On the colonial history of pueblos see Lovell, Lutz, Kramer, and Swezey, (2013).

4 Though reinscribing linear time, and giving into presentism, perhaps, I use the present tense intentionally to maintain a sense of current happening that is this popular-culture-infused classroom event and pedagogy.

5 “Ladino” is roughly that which is less “indigenous” and more “Spanish/European” like. “Ladino” too is a taken-for-granted made-up human kind (see, e.g. R. Adams, 1964 and González-Ponciano, 2005).

6 For a genealogical account of race and American anthropological ideas and their influence in Guatemala see Smith (1999).

7 An extensive discussion on this appears in López López (2016).

8 My reading of María’s refusal here is inspired by spoken word poet Denise Frohman and the 2013 poem “Accents” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtOXiNx4jgQ.

9 Here I draw from novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk “The Danger of a Single Story” https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story#t-376854.