Indigenous Blood: A Study of Indigeneity and Family in Northeast Brazil (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

Summary

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

This proposal investigates people in northeastern Brazil who claim to have "indigenous blood" ("sangue de índio"), but do not classify themselves as Indigenous people. In the southeast of Piauí state (unlike other regions), no parts of the rural population claim Indigenous status or land rights, yet many people refer to their "indigenous blood." Preliminary data suggest that this refers to kinship ties with "real Indigenous peoples," continued family conviviality, and physical appearance. My project involves ethnographic research over a seven-month period in the town of Coronel José Dias to understand how the a category of rule ("índio") forged during colonial times is entangled in the processes of building kinship, and how the production of racialized families and bodies relates to official policies on race and indigeneity, merging scholarship on indigeneity and race with literature on kinship and blood. The findings will advance anthropological discussions on: 1) the limits of modern political categories for encoding cultural alterity; 2) the mutual construction of human beings, kinship, and race; and 3) an anthropology of blood, by critically incorporating contributions by Indigenous scholars on blood as a way of constructing belonging.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

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Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

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