Existential territories, visual territories: an ethnography through images

• Grant number: 20/13113-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2021
• End date: August 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
• Grantee: Tatiana Helena Lotierzo Hirano
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

During my PhD study, carried out with Inga artists from Valle de Sibundoy, Southern Colombia, I learned that the word "walking" (purij, in Inga language) refers to, among other things, how everything that takes part in existence has its walking. As things and beings walk, creativity flows, bringing about many things, such as plants and paintings. Then, I allowed myself "to walk words," writing as someone who draws a line on paper and ties a route with a drawing, or as someone who weaves or sows the earth. It also gave me a glimpse of how those artists workings were part of their existential territories, full of tracks (color/texture), routes (drawings) and lines (ways) to follow. This Post-Doctoral research proposal is aimed at following some connections between images and existential territories (with) which they compose. Using cartography as a method, I propose to explore the possibilities of combining photographs and drawings, which will be presented in both a picture book and a visual essay. I hope such an exercise will contribute to showing the ethnography, as proposed by Caiuby Novaes (2014), and also to give further consideration to the kind of existential territory that may be enabling anthropological observation and what is made visible in there. (AU)