"Heritage" and "tradition" from ancestors: Saint Festivals and Pataxó people's historicity

• Grant number: 25/20718-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: March 10, 2026
• End date: September 09, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Ferreira Vander Velden
• Grantee: Larissa Moreira Portugal
• Supervisor: Susana Dores de Matos Viegas
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/07567-8 - Saint's day and caboclo play: the festivities of saints in the Pataxó village of Boca da Mata, BP.DR

Abstract

The objective of this project is to broaden and deepen some of the issues raised throughout my doctoral research, which investigates the Saint Festivals among the Pataxó indigenous people of the Boca da Mata village, located in the Indigenous Land of Barra Velha do Monte Pascoal, in the South of Bahia State, Brazil. To this end, I propose a research internship abroad, to be conducted at the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Lisbon from March to August 2026, under the supervision of researcher and professor Dr. Susana de Matos Viegas - an expert in Americanist ethnology and in the anthropology of the ethnographic East and Northeast. The purpose is to explore the hypothesis that the Saint Festivals among the Pataxó people, beyond articulating relevant aspects of indigenous cosmology, evidenced in the relationship with the Saints and the "enchanted" spirits, also carry significant dimensions of their historicity, marked by the ancestors territorial movement. In this sense, the engagement with the research group Diversities: Ethnographies of the Contemporary World and the project Entangling Indigenous Knowledges in Universities, both directed by Dr. Viegas, together with a literature review in the libraries and documentation centers of the University of Lisbon, as well as Overseas Historical Archive of Lisbon, will be essential to achieving the objective proposed here. By articulating themes such as cosmology, historicity, transformation, and lived world, this project seeks to contribute not only to the development of my doctoral research with the Pataxó people but also to the academic debates surrounding the cosmohistorical universe of Amerindian societies in the Lowlands of South America. (AU)