Finding the Taste of Knowledge: The Orphan in Indigenous Epistemologies.

Following the suggestion of my indigenous consultants, that to better understand their theories of knowledge one has to start from myth, I take here the myth “origin of education” as the starting point for analyzing the alchemical processes of embodiment in indigenous epistemologies, in a dialogue with information produced through an ethnography of learning, and with other, western, theories of embodied cognition. The myth relates the story of the “Orphan” a central character in the People of the Center’s moral and mythical narratives. The Orphan’s quest for “the taste of knowledge” is simultaneously a process of self-discovering and self-shaping. It involves and experimentation with different plants and technical procedures, which are measured by the effects on the “physical-spiritual body” of the substances so produced. Shunning the Cartesian distinction between the physical and the spiritual, these views put emphasis on embodied processes of mediation and transformation that link knowledge to the ongoing fabrication, and nurturing, of personal and collective selves, and of the world in which they live. True knowledge shows in the ideal state of generalized well-being, an issue that acquires critical significance in indigenous debates concerning the recreation of authoritative knowledge, and of authority more generally.