Indigenous memories, family and difference in Semiarid Piauí (Brasil)

• Grant number: 19/00395-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: March 01, 2020
• End date: August 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Rural Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Ana Claudia Duarte Rocha Marques
• Grantee: Camila Galan de Paula
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Traditional historiography on the Brazilian state of Piauí has built the image of a state without Amerindian peoples: they were either exterminated on wars against Portuguese and Brazilians or integrated to national society until the first decades of the 19th century. This traditional picture was not reviewed until the present decade. Ethnics claims of Amerindian peoples in the state and the incidence of historiographic reviews were to cause such initial reassessments in the state's Indigenous history. Historians from Piauí have constructed both the image of a state without Amerindian population and that of a population formed by rural families mixed from Europeans, African descendants and Amerindians that dates to Colonial times. Ethnic claims by Amerindian and Quilombola peoples in Piauí opposes the idea of the semiarid region of the state being inhabited by mixed race sertanejo families. Apart from interethnic contexts, how do people in the semiarid region of Piauí construct sameness and otherness among communities? What is the language informing such processes of alterity and sameness building - in interethnic contexts, but also beyond them? What is the role played by memories of Amerindian ascendants in the difference-building process in cases where ethnic language and politics seem to have no place? The work hypothesis is that memories of Amerindian ascendant are important in the process of family building and that of differentiation among families. Relatedness and family are understood from a processual point of view; time is considered an important factor in the processes of family constitution by remembrance and narration. (AU)