Children’s agency and cultural appropriation through the lens of South American anthropology: Mapuche and Toba/Qom children facing Catholic education

Abstract

ABSTRACT As experienced researchers from Argentina, we set out to draw attention to the diversity and inequalities within the childhoods of the so-called ‘Global South’ that the ‘Global North’ uniformly addresses as ‘other childhood.’ Based on our long-standing ethnographic research with indigenous children in Argentina, we will present a conceptual discussion on children’s agency and cultural appropriation, through a comparative study of Catholic education and appropriation processes that Toba/Qom and Mapuche children have experienced in different regions of the country. After a brief historical reconstruction, we analyse comparatively contemporary projects of different Catholic congregations towards Mapuche and Toba/Qom children, exploring simultaneously how children themselves receive such proposals. Considering these processes are not homogenous nor linear, we will argue for an approach that contextualises children’s agency and cultural appropriation in sociohistorical and cultural terms, within different power relationships.