Arremendar: an ethnography of interspecific communication in the Guaporé valley, Rondônia

Abstract

Through the realization of a multispecies ethnography - and also multiethnic and multilingual - between the indigenous people that inhabit the Indigenous Land of the Rio Guaporé (Rondônia) and the non-human beings in witch they shares the universe, the main goal of this project is to investigate the so called "animal languages" and interspecific communication in the amerindian worlds, having as a starting origin and epicenter of those questions the native category "arremendar". Therefore, this will be traced as intensive fieldwork together indigenous people that's constitute the "Rio guaporé" will be tackled as a research method, privileging the participant observation, simple observation, daily living and phenomenography. Besides that, the aim at is to ethnography not only human beings, but, especially, the communicative relationships that they establish with non-human animals, considering that both co-constitute multispecific and multiethnic scenarios in this region and in the Amazon as a whole. In this way, the present project purpose to contribute to animal studies and the relationships they constitute with human beings, as well as to South American indigenous ethnology - including here the thematic of regional systems, predation and hunting, communication, of language and rituals - from an object very little explored within anthropology: namely that, the idea of "animal languages" and how they suggest events and modalities of interspecific communication. (AU)