Educational cultures and Aymara community pedagogical praxis: Wawas-territory in Micaya and Colquencha (La Paz, Bolivia)

Abstract

This article describes the practice of Aymara community pedagogy, specifically in the territories of Colquencha and Micaya, part of the sixth municipal section of Aroma Province (La Paz Department, Bolivia). The main techniques employed were individual interviews, observation, and bibliographic review and analysis. These techniques provided an opportunity to understand the context of the study and explain the community practice of relationality between Wawas and territory through the learning process as part of being a natural and social person in Aymara territory. One of these is the roles assigned in the planting and raising of crops in Micaya; and the other is the spiritual biopolitics of the little angels in the position of Kamana. In both cases, the sociality, conviviality, and relationality of body-territory-land are appreciated, which reveals the validity of an ancestry and memory of caring for life and nature through the deployment of biocultural learning and agroecological knowledge that are recreated through learning by doing, through the education of attention, orality, and corporality.