About the ownership relations in Upper Xingu

• Grant number: 19/10276-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2019
• End date: February 29, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Marina Vanzolini Figueiredo
• Grantee: Yuri Werner Biguetti Winkler
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this research project is to carry out a bibliographical review about the ownership relations among the Upper Xingu river peoples (MT). The indigenous categories translated as owners or masters are recurrent on the ethnographical material and emerge as a generalized model, being materialized in the most diverse forms of relation. However, most of what have been discuted about these figures concerns the topics of politics and ritual - the chief(s) as owner(s) of the social group, the village, the intertribal parties (for example, the Quarup) and the cerimonial speech (formal speech) -, even if the owner also emerge in the domains of kinship, shamanism, expressive forms (musical instruments and graphic patterns) and the one of the ownership itself, production and circulation of specific goods. Thus, our objective in this research project is to understand the different meanings of being owner of something in the Upper Xingu, beyond the domains of politics and ritual (although never ignoring the latter), analyzing in what ways the peoples of the region think and mobilize these forms of relation between humans and these with non-humans.