The peccary-women: body metamorphose and Jarawara feminine initiation ritual

• Grant number: 13/03977-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2013
• End date: April 30, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Marta Rosa Amoroso
• Grantee: Fabiana Maizza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 13/21240-0 - What do the "ritual interactions" tell us about the "Amerindian perspectivism" and vice-versa?, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The central theme of this project is the body metamorphosis inside animism. The project seeks a dual purpose: ethnographic and comparative. In ethnographic terms, it wants to investigate the Jarawara girl's initiation ritual to test the hypothesis that the rite, causing the young girl's transformation into white-lipped peccary, aims to change her perspective. This would be done through the relations established with her and also through the actions that her body is submitted to - from her menarche until the end of the ritual. The ritual clothing and artifacts as well as the whipping and the performances that precede it, will be studied within the declinations of Otherness in the Jarawara cosmology. As the ritual is a preliminary to marriage, we believe that the girl's metamorphosis can be connected to marriage considered as capture, hunting or domestication. In comparative terms, our analysis searches to understand the ritual by the relations that would generate body transformation. We want to establish a dialogue between initiation rituals and other Amerindian practices that can be understood through the prism of metamorphosis or change of point of view: shamanism, disease, hunting and contact. In short, our aim is to think the body of the young girl during the ritual from the relations in an animist world, thinking about having/being/living/changing bodies in a world where the body is an unstable relational category. (AU)