Abstract
This article describes and reflects on approaches to learning in anthropology based on person-making processes among coast and lake fishermen in the Amazon estuary. It discusses alternatives to perspectives on learning as socialization or knowledge transmission and to the formal-informal divide by putting forth an ethnographically grounded, practice-centered approach. I comment on the potentials and limits of the notion of skill, which broadens the scope of debates on learning to encompass relations between organisms-persons and non-human animals, environments, and objects. Finally, I evoke Gilbert Simondon’s notion of individuation and his ontogenetic proposal for understanding the anthropos and learning. Drawing on this literature and on a comparison between Amazonian fishermen, I put forth a notion of learning as the simultaneous genesis of a person and of a system of relations.
Keywords
fishing; individuation; learning; skill
