The educational ideology of French Guiana Wayana-Apalaï: a transfiguring autochthonous cultural identity

This article describes the educational ideologies observed between 2010 and 2015 among the Wayana-Apalaï – an indigenous community living in the French Guiana rainforest - and their influence on local educational styles, training priorities and strategies of social success. The results of our fieldwork show that the dynamics of national and global integration have succeeded in transforming local educational ideologies - especially those linked to the Amazon ecosystem - by introducing new criteria of success and assigning a leading educative role to formal schooling.