The Anna Pata Anna Yan campaign. Relations between indigenous peoples of Raposa Serra do Sol and international NGOs.

• Grant number: 11/21513-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2012
• End date: January 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Piero de Camargo Leirner
• Grantee: Anna Catarina Morawska Vianna
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Weeks before the Brazilian Supreme Court's ruling on the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Land in August 2008, the indigenous organization Conselho Indígena de Roraima (CIR) launched the Anna Pata Anna Yan [Our Land Our Mother] campaign in Europe to gather international support for their right to keep the land. Rice growers who had settled in the region and opposed the demarcation denounced the relations between CIR and international NGOs who supported them as "obscure". In light of this allegation, this research project proposes to develop an ethnographic account of the campaign in London so as to explore the perspective of those who effectively took part in it - CIR and organizations such as Amnesty International, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development and Survival International. The aim is to describe the relations between international NGOs and indigenous associations, and more broadly to contribute for the discussions of how an ethnographic approach may help understand transnational relations. Instead of adopting the idea of the world a single shared system, a procedure common to analyses that seek to clarify international relations (and render them less "obscure"), we give attention to the actors' own suppositions about the world. The hypothesis is that actors create explanatory elaborations on the world largely from what they cannot see (and thus seems "obscure" to them), and these elaborations are crucial for the course relations take. Rather than clarify what seems obscure, we will highlight how what actors cannot see has important effects on relations. We argue that it is only by moving from different points of view that the ethnographer is able to take into account: a) the actors' explanatory elaborations on the world; and b) the effects of these elaborations on defining potential alliances and establishing relations.