Producing the Indian: An ethnography of indigenous category from the viewpoints Nahua and Tupinambá

Abstract

This project seeks to develop a comparative study of the Nahua Ayotitlán, located in the southeastern state of Jalisco, Mexico, and Tupinambá, located in southern Bahia, Brazil. These peoples were recognized legally and politically as indigenous in the last decade of the twentieth century, so assuming the rights and responsibilities that the new relationships created at the same time in which it operated in a context in which the definition of what being Indian / Native is became a category of dispute over the delimitation which is as it should be and that other / native, thereby revealing important part of what it means to be an Indian today. So the research aims to show the category of indigenous production in different situations and characterize natural and shared contexts in which these indigenous peoples of distant latitudes built their definitions of what being Indian, emphasizing the categories and concepts from which own name and define the reality that today recognize themselves and are recognized as people. These native categories will be submitted to the debates of anthropology with the goal of extending under this plurality explanatory reach critical that these processes pose a significant indigenous assumptions of anthropological theory. For this, the responses will be documented each of these indigenous peoples have developed and develop from their own reflections on their careers as collectivities, first facing the processes that unrecognized as Indians and later to those who recognize them as indigenous peoples, distinguishing it to the set of actors at various scales and contexts are involved in these relationships.