Intercultural bilingual education. Reflections about Salta’s and Misiones’s cases (Argentina)

Abstract

This article inquires about the characteristics adopted by the process of developing Bilingual Intercultural Education (EIB) policies in the provincial territories, through the problematization of said model applied in the provincial territories of Salta and Misiones (Argentina). Likewise, we ask ourselves: How do provincial regulations build local senses of the EIB as an educational policy and of interculturality as an educational right? How are the target subjects of this policy defined and what are the representations that are put into play? What kind of territorial intervention devices are designed to address local issues? We start from the hypothesis that in Argentina the models of intercultural education aimed at indigenous populations not only were not implemented in a homogeneous way but also admit different periodizations and propose their own developments linked to the context and the target population. Moreover, in the provinces, certain senses of the IBE are re-signified, selected and fixed, which constitute a field of discussion with its own texture. Thus, this contribution describes the public policies destined to the education of indigenous peoples in two provinces of the Northern Great Argentine Region. From an anthropological perspective, the construction of the target subjects of these policies, the territorial devices designed to attend them and the local senses that are built around interculturality are approached.