This ‘glossary’ brings together short texts addressing key research challenges related to the project’s main objective: Entangling Indigenous Knowledges in Universities. The focus is on Indigenous peoples in lowland and highland South America, with examples from countries including Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Ecuador. The glossary is intended as an ongoing, open forum for debate, arising from a project involving almost two hundred researchers.

Funded by the European Union, the glossary reflects a cross-dialogue between academics from Europe and Latin America. It is not a ‘dictionary’ with definitions, nor is it representative of all the themes of the entanglement of Indigenous knowledges in universities. It is deliberately a reflection by these researchers, based on and transformed through meetings between Indigenous and non-indigenous anthropologists and historians who are members of this team. The limited number of entries by Indigenous authors in the glossary reflects the continuing underrepresentation of Indigenous researchers in universities; nevertheless, the project’s mobility activities have enabled all non-Indigenous contributors to developed their reflections through sustained dialogue with Indigenous interlocutors. This is central to the project, and the glossary will thus grow over time, increasingly reflecting the ways in which knowledge emerges and is transformed through these encounters. Ultimately, the glossary is intended to develop into a foundational theoretical and methodological toolkit for researchers within and beyond the EDGES project.

The glossary is organized around the topics of the project’s six work packages. Titles of entries reflect each author’s research and vary greatly in scope and perspective. While some entries are the result of anthropological fieldwork, others cover strictly theoretical and broad topics (such as nature, memory or epistemology), and still others provide concrete information, for example about historical sources. This plurality is joined by another: we acknowledge tensions, frictions, and very disparate relationships between university knowledge of history and anthropology on Indigenous contexts and the knowledge uttered by Indigenous peoples. In our project, entanglements mainly refer to knowledge practices, going beyond and merging out the distinction between action and thought. Entangling Indigenous knowledges in universities necessarily means being able to recognize and engage with different epistemologies, as well as actively transforming universities into sites of plurality and effective Indigenous presence. 

Coordinating Institution: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú