Diversity as a weapon

on cultural wars in the field of education

Abstract

This article is based on a series of news, reports, and ethnographic materials taken from my thesis research to point out and reflect, from an anthropological point of view, the existence of a martial game of attacks and resistances in the field of education, where the issue of values, ideologies, and forms of social representation of diversity clash within the current political-social context. These conflicts are taken as asymmetric battlegrounds and viewed by a concept of cultural war. Political minorities, of gender, race, class, and different marginalized and stigmatized social actors place themselves in the frame of symbolic-material resistances against the conservative practices of the Brazilian State in contemporary times. Such a process instrumentalizes diversity not only in a conceptual-descriptive way but as a performance product of power and rebellion. In this sense, diversity is presented by conflicting perspectives and scales: an instrument of moral panic, a progressive agenda, a way of constructing social identities, a criterion for political self-promotion, a key to pedagogical debates.