Raising children: how to product relations among the Xikrin of Bacajá, Brazil

Abstract

Xikrin, an Amerindian People from Brazil, say their villages are beautiful again today, full of children playing and laughing. Thus they refer to how important children are to the production of beauty in the world, ie, a full social life. They also express how their presence in this world is both an index of lived historical conditions - the villages today are beautiful after an intense period of wars, epidemics and deaths during contact and it is how to maintain that beauty that they talk about expressing their concerns on how will their children grow in this world threatened by the construction of Dams in Amazonia and close to their lands -, and that children are the focus of action in building beauty in this world. I intend to develop, from ethnographic data collected during more than two decades of relationship with the Xikrin living in the Bacajá River in Amazonia, specially focused on childhood and schooling, as having the contemporary debate on the fabrication of kins and bodies and how they connect to objects, agriculture, shamanism, hunting, an analysis of this centrality of raising children showing how it involves and elucidates much of the produced relations and what it is producing sociality - the fabrication of kins, body painting, ornaments, war, politics, shamanism, hunting, agriculture, school - and how it gives access to the understanding of how Xikrin relates to other indigenous peoples and whites, with plants, animals and spirits . The definition of what it is to raise or grow, who is raised or grown, who raises and grows and what is created by that will be motes to an analysis that take the child as a center to show the ways in which Xikrin create relationships and sociality. (AU)