Body education in the Kichwa Mandari Panga community. Worldview of the indigenous peoples in the body.

Abstract

The following article describes and analyzes the body education observed in the Kichwa Mandari Panga community of the Ecuadorian Amazon, from a perspective focused on the recovery of knowledge of the original peoples of Latin America. It is based on the information obtained in the ethnographic work carried out in the community, in triangulation with different documents from communities of indigenous peoples. From this, the work tries to describe how the different representations of the body in the community, expressed in the Kichwa worldviews, are linked to certain bodily practices. In this way, the possibility of beginning to analyze the community’s body education from its ancestral knowledge in dialogue with the knowledge of Physical Education is raised; an education of the body that assumes an intimate relationship with the environment and with the community, opposed to hegemonic approaches that consider people as individuals and the environment as a natural resource.