Guillermina Espósito

This project will analyze the incorporation of the indigenous population of the Andean highlands of the Argentine province of Jujuy, into the national school system between the 1900s and 1930s. The research question is: How did the articulation of the nationalist educational project with the Andean ways and conditions of life led to the creation of new social categories in the process of building the State? The ethnographic site is that of the highland remote village of Carahuasi, where in 1908, the National Council of Education established a school within the process of the extension of the national educational system to rural territories. The core hypothesis is that the assimilationist project of the Argentine school system, as it got articulated with the Andean ways and conditions of life in Carahuasi, developed a process of subordinate incorporation of difference that, rather than producing civilized citizens, drifted towards the social production of barbarians through new categories developed by the scholar state agents. I will carry out a historical archival and on-site ethnography that will encompass both the hegemonic consolidation of the Argentine national state through the school system, as well as the resistances and singularities that the process had.