A inquietude selvagem: estudos de etnologia e história indígena

Abstract

This thesis is a momentary testimony of a trajectory of studies in the fields of ethnology and indigenous history. Its guiding thread is that of historical and structural transformations read from the perspective of mutually reflexive relations between praxis and logic of thought - or structure and strategy. In the first chapters, the mythology and ritual of the paricá of the Mawé, an indigenous group from the central Amazon - Madeira-Tapajós area, lead to the field of synchronic and analogical transformations between codes whose background is the relations between transformation and production. When placed in relation to ethnography and indigenous history, these data also allow us to put on hold the classification of this group and the area as eminently Tupi by pointing out routes of contact with the Aruak and Karib populations of the northwestern Amazon. An intermediate chapter allows us to make the transition from the Tupi ethnology of the Amazon to the indigenous history of the Jê groups of central Brazil. In this article, burial practices in ceramic urns among culturally different indigenous peoples allow us to consider the hinges that lead reciprocally from the interior to the exterior and point to possible transformative relationships between the spirits of the dead, living enemies, and wild beasts, a theme that serves as the basis for subsequent chapters. In these chapters, the indigenous history of Jê groups in the regions of what is now northern São Paulo, Triângulo Mineiro, and southern Goiás, known in 18th and 19th century documentation as Cayapó, leads to the field of diachronic and historical transformations. By recovering the historical subject that acts through the understanding that the cultural structure is not antagonistic to indigenous agency, the materials presented allow us to question the models of Jê ethnology based on a supposed closure, spatiality, dualism, and centripetal vertigo, and to definitively place these groups in temporality. In this field, the focus is, on the one hand, the differential incorporations of their different alterities and, on the other, the historical changes in the relations of contact with non-indigenous people. The constant restlessness of the symbolic evaluations and pragmatic strategies of these indigenous groups allows us to indicate that there was no single possible path for this history, because there were modalities of reversal and paths of multiple destinies at work in it. In this set of structural and historical transformations, it is hoped that, in the end, it will be clear how cultural symbols are not timeless or unconscious, but constantly transformed and impacted by the reality (material and historical) to which they are applied and in which they are updated.