Arremendar: an ethnography of interspecific communication in the Guaporé valley, Rondônia

• Grant number: 20/02965-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2020
• End date: January 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden
• Grantee: Gabriel Sanchez
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/08338-0 - Language as an clothes: communications and transformations between humans and animals in the Brazilian Amazon, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

Through the realization of a multispecies ethnography - and also multiethnic and multilingual - between the indigenous people that inhabit the Indigenous Land of the Rio Guaporé (Rondônia) and the non-human beings in witch they shares the universe, the main goal of this project is to investigate the so called "animal languages" and interspecific communication in the amerindian worlds, having as a starting origin and epicenter of those questions the native category "arremendar". Therefore, this will be traced as intensive fieldwork together indigenous people that's constitute the "Rio guaporé" will be tackled as a research method, privileging the participant observation, simple observation, daily living and phenomenography. Besides that, the aim at is to ethnography not only human beings, but, especially, the communicative relationships that they establish with non-human animals, considering that both co-constitute multispecific and multiethnic scenarios in this region and in the Amazon as a whole. In this way, the present project purpose to contribute to animal studies and the relationships they constitute with human beings, as well as to South American indigenous ethnology - including here the thematic of regional systems, predation and hunting, communication, of language and rituals - from an object very little explored within anthropology: namely that, the idea of "animal languages" and how they suggest events and modalities of interspecific communication. (AU)