ORIGINAL ARTICLE https://doi.org/10.1007/s43638-023-00066-2 cultura & psyché: Journal of Cultural Psychology (2023) 4:47–65 Weaving as writing: a serious omission in the Bolivian Educational Reform of 1994 Denise Y. Arnold Received: 4 October 2022 / Accepted: 15 March 2023 / Published online: 12 May 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE 2023 Abstract The author examines the conflicts arising, with the Bolivian Education Reform of 1994, between previous forms of literacy acquired through weaving prac- tices, as a longstanding Andean form of writing and identity, and the new teaching of literacy in the classroom through alphabetic writing. She argues that the teaching modules introduced during this reform ignored this historical context, and perceived rural indigenous children as part of an oral culture. One result was a crisis for teenage girls, forced to choose between “two pathways” to knowledge and ways of being in the world: one taught through age-old Andean educational practices at commu- nity and household levels and the other through state-controlled formal schooling to acquire the attributes of modernity and citizenship. The author suggests that this conflict in part might oppose weaving as “natural” or “semasiographic” writing, directed towards things in the natural world, to “conventional” alphabetical writ- ing, directed at representing the sounds of human speech. Both writing forms have their respective communicative and integrationist functions for Andean populations. But the Reform programme underestimated how weaving also formed part of a re- gional scientific enterprise that appealed to the imagination, sense of personhood, and emotions, in which human interactions in the world introduced life into material form. Keywords Andes · Semasiographic writing · Weaving · Integrationist function · Life-centred actions  Denise Y. Arnold University College London, University of London, London, UK E-Mail: deniseyarnold@yahoo.com Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, La Paz, Bolivia K