CEstA Duo with Julia Castro and Pedro Meniconi
August 14, 2026, at 5:30 PM
Julia Silva de Castro
PhD candidate in Social Anthropology (PPGAS/USP) under the supervision of Prof. Renato Sztutman, with FAPESP funding (2023/07123-8). Associate researcher at the Center for Amerindian Studies (CEstA). She has been conducting research with the Mebêngôkre-Xikrin since 2023, with fieldwork carried out in the Xikrin do Cateté Indigenous Territory in southeastern Pará. She holds a Master’s degree (2018) and a Bachelor’s degree (2015) in Social Sciences from UFES.
Mebêngôkre-Xikrin Cosmopolitics in the Face of Mining Catastrophe in Southeastern Pará
Previous ethnographies among the Xikrin do Cateté demonstrated how the intense influx of goods and money—stemming from environmental compensation for projects by the then-Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (now Vale S.A.)—became central enough to impact political life, kinship relations, and ceremonial activities. I am interested in examining a distinct context, marked by the progressive bureaucratization of these flows and the ongoing management of mining's harmful effects on the territory and community life. In recent decades, interactions between the Xikrin, Vale, and various state entities have come to be mediated by a growing array of management mechanisms (Basic Environmental Plan meetings, consultations, compliance conditions, workshops, reports, technical visits, projects, compensation agreements) that organize the circulation of resources and the very mediation of relations between the company and the community. I aim to discuss the extent to which this shift in the mediation regime of these relationships progressively strains the center of Xikrin political life, as the constant management of catastrophe begins to vie for the chiefs' time, attention, and priorities, squeezing the time available for the everyday production of persons and relationships, the preparation of festivals, hunting expeditions, and rituals. Taking as a guiding thread a complaint frequently heard during fieldwork in the villages—summarized by a Xikrin friend in the phrase "There are so many meetings, there’s no time to hold a festival!"—I propose to reflect on how Mẽbêngôkre-Xikrin cosmopolitics are being reconfigured in a context where managing the effects of mining projects on the territory has increasingly become an unavoidable dimension of collective life.
Pedro Almeida Meniconi
Pedro Meniconi is a PhD candidate at PPGAS-USP, in a joint-supervision program with Université Paris-Nanterre, under the guidance of Professors Sylvia Caiuby Novaes (USP) and Philippe Erikson (CNRS), with FAPESP funding. He is an associate researcher at the Center for Amerindian Studies at USP (CEstA), the Visual Anthropology Group at USP (GRAVI), and the *Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et Sociologie Comparative* (LESC). He has been conducting research with the Bororo people since 2023, with fieldwork in the Bororo Tadarimana and Córrego Grande Indigenous Territories. He holds a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from PPGAS-USP (supervised by Sylvia Caiuby Novaes) and Bachelor’s degrees in Economics (FEA-USP) and Social Sciences (FFLCH-USP).
Subject and territory: death and life among the Bororo
Death imposes an intense state of cosmological disturbance upon the Bororo. Their lengthy funeral rites require the association of people, animals, plants, minerals, and topography to give form to the *aroe*. These—alongside the *bope*—constitute the Bororo ontological subjects; they are "bodies-in-continuum" formed by entities of differing natures. Yet, while the former lend stability to the cosmos, social organization, and Bororo identity, the *bope*, in turn, embodies metamorphosis and transformation. Performing the *aroe* rituals is a way to transform *bope* into *aroe*: turning the corpse into an ancestor, the deceased into a substitute, and the end into a beginning—"inserting diachrony into synchrony" or, in the words of Caiuby Novaes, "reconfiguring the world." Rather than being antithetical categories, *aroe* and *bope* represent relational positions among associated entities. In this dialogue, I propose an interpretation of a post-funeral chant (*barogo biri bataro dodo*) performed during the act of avenging a death—specifically, when a jaguar pelt is offered to the bereaved clan. This moment affirms the replacement of the deceased by the avenger and acknowledges the territory as the path of the *aroe*, who leave behind a dead body only to return in the form of a substitute. This conception of body, subject, and territory leads us to discuss the epistemological limits that reduce nature to an object and territory to property, while also questioning the demarcation policies for Bororo lands currently stifled by monoculture fields.
In-person event
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