Yanomami associations in Brazilian politics: disputed ontologies

• Grant number: 21/14116-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: August 01, 2022
• End date: July 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
• Grantee: Laila Zilber Kontic
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims, from an ethnographic approach, to understand practices and discourses in two aspects: (1) how the Hutukara Yanomami Association and the Yanomami and Ye'kwana Leadership Forum update their discourses in the contemporary political arena to affirm the illegality of mining in its territory and claim its constitutional rights; (2) how these practices and discourses are operated to sensitize public opinion and, at the same time, establish alliances with non-indigenous organizations, movements and groups to pressure the federal government for the removal of mining operations in the Yanomami Indigenous Land. The research will be carried out by monitoring the information disclosed by the various online platforms, constituting a field that includes different communicative languages, whose particularities may have a lot to say about the way in which Yanomami associations appropriate each of them to support their practices and discourses in the context of political dispute and the formation of interethnic alliances. The project will be developed bearing in mind the current context of worsening environmental devastation and the social and health crisis caused by mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Land, which in turn is part of the scenario of disputes in the Brazilian political field and of interethnic alliances between visions of ontologically distinct world. (AU)