In search of enemies: ethnography of an initiation rite among the Panará people

• Grant number: 25/01665-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
• Grantee: Yuri Werner Biguetti Winkler
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project aims to describe the male initiation ritual of the Panará (northern Jê), which consists of a fight with wasps. During the confrontation, the boys seek to kill these hymenopteran insects and destroy their nests; from the point of view of these Jê people, the encounter is characterized as a war between panära ('humans', 'people') and ippë ('enemies', 'other-than-humans'). In this conflict, different agencies operate in the fabrication of human male bodies: parts, attributes, qualities, affections and points of view of the ippë are appropriated, in a predatory way, by the panära universe. Thus, the objectives of this research project are: (1) to describe the male initiation ritual, observing how human and non-human agencies and perspectives construct bodies, people and relations, (2) to analyze the contemporary transformations of the fundamental opposition between panära and ippë, as well as the dimensions of predation and the incorporation of difference in these relations, and, finally, (3) examine the privileged place of wasps (important prototypical figures of the enemy) in the sociocosmologies of the Panará and other northern Jê peoples. Furthermore, this research is part of a broader effort to revisit classic themes in Amerindian Ethnology (such as enmity, predation, affinity and ritual) and contribute, ethnographically and critically, to enrich the debates regarding animism and perspectivism in contemporary anthropological theory. (AU)