Carnival: joy of the Immortals ritual, person and cosmology among the Chiquitano in Brazil

Abstract

This Project aims at conducting ethnography of the Chiquitano Indigenous people that speak the Chiquitana language, in the municipality of Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade, in the Southwest of the State of Mato Grosso. I propose to make a bibliographic analysis and field work emphasizing the Curusé ritual, on the stages of construction of the person and embodiment. It is intended in this way to gain access to the forms of sociality of those that are also called Indians, gauchos (people from Rio Grande do Sul), foreigners and Bolivians, in the various settlements in the Alto Guaporé Valley, between Brazil and Bolivia, where they share their lives with the self-called Marons. For that end, I propose to understand the meaning of the institution of the patronage and intimacy for the chiquitano, to describe the experiences related to the management of the chacra, of the cattle and of the extractivism with the making of maps of the routes, commercial places and exchange of products. The choices of the Chiquitano has led me to think that there would be an appropriate use of otherness that would fall upon its sociocomological construction of person and sociality, and perhaps that the person is more important than the group and the relationship is more important than the land or the territory, in the conception of the Indigenous policy. (AU)