Ethnocide and social memory: the village of dead in sertão paulista

Abstract

In Brazil, besides the physical extermination of indigenous ethnic groups, politically, still runs the cultural extermination of these. The social memory can shed light on the effects to the heirs of the socio-historical process of colonization. In the early twentieth century the west of São Paulo, in the areas covered by Rios Aguapeí and Peixe, ancestral territory of the Kaingang ethnicity, was the target of economic enterprises promoted mainly by the increase of coffee production and the construction of the Estrada de Ferro Noroeste do Brasil. Unequal conflict between Indians and pioneers led to the creation of two indigenous villages: Icatu and Vanuíre by the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI). Grounded in Lacanian psychoanalytic approach and supported by ethnographic techniques, the method of participant listens, has been effective in hearing the dead of this process, both historically and culturally. The prohibition of Kiki ritual, central to Kaingang life, SPI as well as the practices of this body, versed in transforming indigenous rural workers tended to dismantle them ethnically. Despite the massacres, the remaining have reconstituted subjectively, and are in search of language maintenance, their customs and their religious practices. Recognizing this process is to recognize the Brazilian ancestry. (AU)