Wauja Summer Experience

A collaboration with Indigenous scholars

Purdue University and the Wauja community in the Xingu Indigenous Territory of Brazil are collaborating to offer an innovative, community-based ethnography Wauja Summer Experience. In this 6-credit, 3-week course, students live as guests in Wauja longhouses, participating in daily domestic life. You will get hands-on training in ethnography, from both U.S. faculty and Wauja elders, as you work side-by-side with local youth to video-record Wauja language and culture.

The course covers Indigenous identity, interethnic contact, inter-generational transfer of traditional knowledge, and environmental change. See whether globalization, social media, and Internet culture are changing Wauja social traditions. Learn how deforestation and climate change are affecting your Indigenous hosts. Find out how the Wauja are addressing these existential challenges to their rainforest environment, which provides their food, housing, medicine and spiritual sustenance.

Based on your interests and goals, as well as those of the young Wauja scholars, you will be teamed up with a Wauja “learning partner” for several hours a day. The Wauja are generous hosts and superb teachers, well accustomed to interacting effectively and engagingly with people who do not speak their language. In the effort of direct interaction and the give-and-take of collaboration, you will learn valuable ethnographic skills.

In addition to offering an unusually intense and interactive experience for American students, this course provides important intellectual and economic opportunities for the Wauja community, employing dozens of Wauja participants in the shared project of creating their own “Wauja University.”

See the Wauja Summer Experience in Brazil brochure at: http://tinyurl.com/WaujaSummer

To apply, visit: https://purdue.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6VyurInQOWSdQjP

Photograph: E. Ireland 2018