Indígenas e não indígenas: como se transformou historicamente a simbólica da alteridade dos Cayapó meridionais ao longo dos séculos XVIII e XIX

Abstract

This research sought to investigate how the symbolic alterity of the southern Cayapó was historically transformed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, in the present day Triângulo Mineiro region, northern São Paulo, and southern Goiás, based on contact with non-Indigenous people. The aim was to understand how the historical arrangements of contact relations enabled the appropriation and incorporation of symbolic and material goods of alterities, modifying and redefining the symbolic structure of the southern Cayapó while simultaneously altering the form of contact with non-Indigenous people. To this end, the research focused on analyzing the differential symbolic evaluations of alterities (Mano, 2020), on the one hand, towards Indigenous people and on the other, towards non-Indigenous people, on the place of war and plunder in Kayapó cosmology, on the relations between "practice of structure" and "structure of practice" (Sahlins, 1990), on Kayapó ontological production, and on overcoming the binaries attributed to the Jê models. Through a bibliographic analysis that combined anthropology and history, combined with an ethnographic projection that helped understand the symbolic structures and how the Cayapó cosmological universe operated in practice, it can be inferred that the southern Cayapó were groups that transcended their ethnic boundaries to produce and reproduce their social systems, occasionally redefining their symbolic structures and their different contact policies, enabling adaptations to changing historical circumstances. Thus, their histories and policies have not ended, but are re-enacted in the present.