Cayapó e Panará: caminhos e destinos históricos

Abstract

This article investigates the remaining historical continuities between the Panará and the Southern Cayapó. To this end, it articulates critiques of static models and colonialist discourse that, even when incorporating Indigenous peoples into historical narratives, often portray them as victims of assimilation, miscegenation, modernity, and pacification. In an effort to connect the clues and signs left in documents with ethnological knowledge, we seek to reinterpret historical facts from a new perspective. This article is based on ethnographies produced since the 1970s among the Panará and on documentation and material related to the Southern Cayapó in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, the cross-referencing of data from Anthropology and History projects the overcoming of tutelary parameters by considering deliberate Indigenous agency and political action in the processes of transformation, continuity, hybridization, and ethnogenesis as creative aspects of these groups’ historical paths and destinies. In this way, the research investigates the documents and materials produced about the Southern Cayapó in search of continuities in the logics of social life interpretation present in the transformations articulated by the groups themselves. To demonstrate the Southern Cayapó - Panará continuity, the multidisciplinarity in some aspects that possibly connect the groups is presented. First, the reflections start with a more linguistic and technical approach, therefore, they will reflect on vocabulary lists, phonetics, the technique of producing arrows and baskets, and the continuity of elements such as earth ovens, peanut cultivation, and the presence of logs in front of houses. Afterward, with a focus on the internal symbolic economy, different overviews of the production of bodies and persons will be discussed in an effort to investigate the continuity of common cognitive logics responsible for guiding behaviors and world interpretations. Thus, the confluence of productions from History, Ethnology, and Anthropology enables a re-reading of the past through a perspective of alterity that evokes a field in expansion and movement and, therefore, considers transformation and ancestry in its praxis. Finally, it understands agency, flight, contact, ethnogenesis, and restlessness as aspects of the path that leads from Cayapó to Panará, thereby filling a part of the empty gaps between the narrative poles of the historical past.