Between academia and village. Reflections on the training of indigenous anthropologists in Brazil

Abstract

The enrolment of indigenous students at universities is an event which constitutes a great challenge for groups which have historically been excluded from the academic knowledge production process. Based on my own experience as an indigenous anthropologist, in this article I share my reflections about the training of researchers who are looking to conduct fieldwork in their own native communities. Using two stories, one from the academic setting and the other from my own community, I not only want to discuss some central anthropological concepts, such as “keeping one’s distance” and “neutrality”, but also to problematise the historically-constituted relationship between the Subject Who Knows and the Object Which Is Known inside our discipline.