Inspirations about making oneself political: Cosmopolitics dynamics among the Guarani-Mbya

• Grant number: 16/15144-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: December 01, 2016
• End date: April 04, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Renato Sztutman
• Grantee: Aline de Oliveira Aranha
• Supervisor: Montserrat Ventura I Oller
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain
• Associated to the scholarship: 15/00569-9 - Cosmopolitics dynamics among the Guarani-Mbya, BP.MS

Abstract

The interest in a research stay at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) is the possibility to deepen the theoretical framework and expand the conceptual aspects for the development of my Master research, with the organization of the writing of the thesis by the review of the specialized bibliographical production and of the ethnographic data from fieldwork. This research internship will take place under the supervision of Professor Montserrat Ventura i Oller, an expert on Amerindian Ethnology, especially on the subject of shamanism and leadership nowadays.We start from the idea that it is impossible to neglect, in the current scenario, the configuration of "new" forms and strategies mbya of leadership and political action. These transformation emerge in the intense confrontation with the jurua (non-indigenous) policy and are embedded in contexts such as the fight for land demarcation and safeguarding constitutional indigenous rights, projects of valorization, development or "cultural revival", under the rubric of "culture", territory where the mastery of bureaucracy implies a better domain of battlefield, and with that, the affirmation and demarcation of the difference and resistance mbya against the state. Through bibliographical research and fieldwork, this project aims to look into the present relations between political leadership and shamanism, to verify how they stay closely interwoven in the production of subjects, collectives, discourses and practices among the Guarani-Mbya who inhabit the South and Southeast of Brazil. This is not to conceive Guarani politics disconnected from State's public policies, but to analyze how this connection is performed in a properly Guarani point of view, revealing forces and sources of productive and creative resistance, elucidating the intense work of translation and transformation implied in it, since different domains and perspectives demand different rhetoric and different actions, and identities become political weapons, especially after the Brazilian Constitution of 1988.The idea then is to think of the movements performed by the various political subjects as corresponding more a dispositions than functions or positions properly called or even fixed, more a unique capacities-powers of act, affect and be affected, which have different modalities and styles of leadership, areas of performance, influence and prestige. That to investigate in which consist such differentiating dispositions and how they are relate to mbya processes of production and counter-production of people and collectives. Such political figures can still be thought as translators of worlds, acting as cosmopolitical diplomats, moving through different codes and agencing different worlds, where everything is political: relation, dialogue, negotiation.