Education in primitive communities in Eleanor Leacock

an approach from Myths of Male Dominance

Abstract

Primitive communities express humanity's first step towards the constitution of what is now the humankind. In an intermittent process of transformation, which also involves essential elements of continuity, humanity is a totality in motion, whose beginnings refer to its first forms of social organization. Its study is fundamental for us to understand how we got here and how we can guide our future history. Based on these assumptions, we focus in this article on education in primitive communities, understanding that the comprehension of how it was organized in primitivity is fundamental to guide our pedagogical actions today. We understand that since Aníbal Ponce's book, Education and class struggle, from 1937, nothing more significant about our object has been produced in the theoretical perspective that we adopted about education in primitive communities, that is, the Marxist perspective. This article seeks to update, in the sense of denying, confirming and deepening, the theses on education in primitive communities pointed out by Ponce in his work. In order to do so, we base ourselves on the immanent reading of Myths of Male Dominance, a classic of Marxist anthropology, by Eleanor Burke Leacock. In this book, the author draws a broad panel about the relationships and the form of organization of primitive communities, from which we can extract the general lines of the underlying educational dynamics.