Enchanted politics: the struggles for and with the land in the Indigenous Northeast

• Grant number: 20/05084-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: February 01, 2022
• End date: January 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Renato Sztutman
• Grantee: Clarissa de Paula Martins Lima
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The struggles mobilized by indigenous groups in the Northeast for the recognition and guarantee of rights, especially related to land, gained singular visibility from the eighties and nineties, becoming the motto of a striking set of studies carried out in the region. This research project aims to resume this bibliography and problematize it from three points of inflection: from the ethnographic work conducted with the Xukuru do Ororubá (PE) people, a group with which I have been developing research in the last ten years ; taking the land and its inhabitants, humans and other-than-humans, as an analytical focus; and through a rigorous reading of the works that have bet on the formulations of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers regarding "cosmopolitics" to problematize the struggles conducted by indigenous groups in the lowlands. With this, the research proposes an enlargement of the actors considered in the struggles in question, be they human or other-than-humans, and hopes to contribute to a more precise understanding of what moves the Xukuru, specifically, and the peoples in the Northeast in general, in the struggle for the land, and what the land is about. It is also expected to understand the effects for these groups of the current policy of the Brazilian government in relation to indigenous lands, as well as the possible dissonances that this entails in relation to local understandings of what the territory is. (AU)