LEARNING FOOD: TERRITORY, KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION AND EDUCATION IN THE TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM OF THE RIO NEGRO

Abstract

This article examines how knowledge related to the production, processing, preparation, circulation and consumption of food can be understood as educational processes produced within the territory of the Rio Negro, in the Brazilian Amazon. It draws on the documentation of the Traditional Agricultural System of the Rio Negro, registered as Brazilian cultural heritage in 2010, particularly the registration dossier and the 2021 technical reassessment report issued by IPHAN, which gathers contributions from knowledge holders, researchers and civil society organizations, as well as on the collective volume on traditional foods of the Upper Rio Negro edited by Luiza Garnelo and Gilda Barreto Baré. These sources are read in light of approaches that treat learning as participation in practice and as an education of attention, and of the Brazilian debate distinguishing Indigenous education from Indigenous schooling. The bibliographic and documentary analysis indicates the importance of participation in everyday activities and of kinship, marriage and care relationships in food-related learning, a process that depends on material conditions such as the presence of plants, access to gardens and time shared across generations. The sources also record tensions: young people moving to town for schooling, the monetization of knowledge-transmission activities and the distance between schools and territorial knowledge. Safeguarding a food system therefore requires securing the territorial conditions for knowledge to be reproduced, a task in which the school can take part as one institution among others.