The Anthropology of Amazonia is a popular module offered across the School’s Anthropology programmes by Dr Daniela Peluso, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, and Dr Miguel Alexiades, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobotany. Daniela’s passion for Amazonia has meant that she is also committed to teaching this subject beyond our walls. After years of repeatedly receiving requests to share her syllabus, Daniela set out to create a site that would be useful for young and veteran scholars alike for the purpose of teaching Amazonia as widely as possible.
As an active member of a broader international community of lowland South American scholars, Dr Peluso has served as the twice-elected Board member-at-large for the Society of Lowland South America (SALSA). Encouraged by the current president of SALSA, Carlos Londono-Sulkin, and with the assistance of her colleague, Juan Alvaro Echeverri, Daniela spearheaded the task of creating a space for the shared open access of materials and pedagogical tools. This has resulted in the launch of the Teaching Lowland South America website hosted by SALSA.
The website, still in its early stages, hosts themes and links aimed to provide materials, information and inspiration for those interested in teaching lowland South American anthropology. As Daniela states on the site, “As past and current bodies of literature that emerge from fieldwork among communities, villages, cities and organisations, our ethnographic and theoretical contributions to anthropology are significant. We hope to capture the wealth and range of our contributions by suggesting topics that can contribute toward various forms of pedagogy.”
The site allows anyone to download materials such as syllabuses, class notes, exercises, assessments, slides, online sources, information about summer schools, and other topics of interest for teaching lowland anthropology.
Dr Peluso believes that knowledge should be shared as widely as possible, and that making it available for students and colleagues outside of formal educational institutions is one of the small, but many needed, steps toward decolonising academia.
