Da cultura material à vida: urnas mortuárias e dinâmicas de contato no Planalto Meridional Brasileiro - Séc. XVIII e XIX

Abstract

The present work combines the interests of Anthropology, History and Archeology when discussing archaeological records of mortuary urns in the regions that today comprise the Triângulo Mineiro, north of São Paulo, south of Goiás and east of Mato Grosso. In the analysis of the mortuary urns, the exercise is to look not only at the material artifact, but at life, identifying possible itineraries and human dynamics that could have allowed its production and meaning. Therefore, part of a bibliography and historical documentation from the 18th and 19th centuries referring to the present region is investigated, with a view to contributing to the reconstruction of a historical-ethnographic panorama of the intertribal and interethnic contacts that developed during this period, which allowed the transit of material elements, people, knowledge and symbolic representations. Thus, the objective is to show an intricate network of contacts between those known in the historical documentation as “Cayapó” Meridionais, and its different others, demonstrating that in the historical processes of contacts, societies trigger strategies and agencies that demonstrate the dynamic character of culture, which it seems to function as a synthesis between structure and event, ruptures and continuities, pointing, based on these assumptions, to the need for a more rhizomatic understanding of history and for a more holistic look at the identities and alterities involved there.