Teaching anthropology in dark times

Abstract

Anthropology professors and researchers are still trying to understand the effects that the recent and rapid
changes in the country’s political and social scenario have had on the field of education – basic, higher
and postgraduate. The purpose of this article is to reflect on these changes from the concrete experience
as an anthropology teacher in undergraduate and graduate courses. In the last decades, there has been a
process of expansion of anthropology, with the creation of new graduate programs, the dissemination of
anthropology disciplines in undergraduate courses, the creation of degrees in anthropology. At the same
time, the inclusion policies in higher education and graduate studies, and the creation of intercultural
indigenous degrees, among others, produced methodological, pedagogical and epistemological challenges
for teaching anthropology that had been driving the production of new paradigms for our country. field.
The radical changes in educational policies for basic and higher education and for postgraduate studies
triggered by the process that led to the 2016 coup of State and the establishment of a far-right government
in January 2018, introduced a new and difficult scenario for the anthropology, for the humanities and
for the scientific field in general. The starting point for thinking about possible forms of resistance is to
conceive the classroom and the educational space as places not only for the transmission of knowledge,
but for critical, dialogical reflection and the development of potentials for social transformation.