Variations of "mixture" in indigenous America

Abstract

In ethnographic descriptions, the native concept of "mixture" assumes a central role to the Tupi Guarani (indigenous population that inhabits many Indigenous lands in the state of São Paulo, Brazil). In addition to its reference to matrimonies between tupi and guarani populations, whose alliances established Tupi Guarani's origin, the idea of "mixture" is mobilized by these indigenous populations to denote an iterant practice in their contemporary experience: the matrimonial alliances with nonindigenous, understood by them as a process of "familiarization". The term's double aception indicates that the mixture with whites may only be fully grasped in light of other relations with alterity, as elaborated by the Tupi Guarani. Likewise, similar descriptions about indigenous conceptualizations of mixture have been made in different ethnographic areas in South American lowlands, such as the Guianas, Central Brazil and Indigenous Northeast. How may these other examples shed light over Tupi Guarani's case, and inversely, how may the Tupi Guarani help us understanding them? Taking as inspiration Sztutman's compairison (2012), which searches to elucidate the chieftanship among sixteenth's Tupi populations, this project aims to take the Tupi Guarani as a control of a dense bibliographic research, searching to analyze the "mixture" with whites in light of indigenous theories of alterity, paying special attention to the examples that have been described as familiarization, pacification, domestication or taming of non-Indians. (AU)