Games of children Mbyá-Guarani in the town: reflections about anthropology and psychology of education

Abstract

This text is composed by partial results from an ethnographic fieldwork made with a Mbyá-Guarani group in the urban part of Santa Maria city, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil. It presents reflections about some games performed by Guarani children in their territory, a Native Brazilian camp and also downtown, where those kids follow handicraft sale. Thus, with this work, it aims at establishing relations between playing act and the constitution of Native Brazilian ways of being, as well as comprehending non-scholar education practices in those games. In that sense, it intends to make clear links between Developmental Psychology and Social Anthropology, as disciplines that search to understand and explain teaching and learning processes of social groups. In order to do that, it is necessary to emphasize that this text does not intend to discuss the epistemic interdependence that education has with fields of scientific knowledge (GOERGEN, 2005), as, in the case here, Psychology and Anthropology. The intention is describing, under those disciplines, some games that were lived in participative observation and analyzed through an interpretative approach of culture,in Geertz terms (1989).