Resumo Este artigo recupera os eventos que envolvem a misteriosa morte de Curt Nimuendajú (1883-1945) e conduz a uma reflexão sobre as dimensões pessoais do fazer etnográfico e o tema da identidade e da subjetividade erótica no trabalho de campo antropológico.
Sociocultural transformations brought about by indigenous leaders in Amazonia have been described as prophetic, millenaristic, or messianic and contrasted with modern reformism. This article addresses new ways of describing processes of change negotiated among indigenous actors. Although these processes are mostly absent from colonial or later sources, they should not remain foreign to ethnology, as the three empirical cases analyzed in this essay show. Methodologically, the essay asks why the regulatory image of Rousseau's small community, meeting face to face to express the general will, has never had the same impact in the anthropological imagination as that of the “noble savage.” Thematically, these case studies raise the question of how peace is made and suggest that, while peacemaking demands “magic,” the invocation of extrahuman powers, the social forms and values on which peace is based are contained as objective possibilities in the present. Making peace actual requires creative choices.
Translated from the Portuguese by Luiz Costa Curt Nimuendajú (1883-1945) was a German ethnographer who became a naturalized citizen of Brazil and spent most of his life doing fieldwork among the country's indigenous people. He gained the attention of the anthropological world when he began producing his studies on the Gê-speaking peoples of central Brazil. These sparked an ongoing correspondence with Robert Lowie, who secured American funding for Nimuendajú, advised him on research sites and topics, and translated and edited his manuscripts. Nimuendajú also maintained a brief correspondence with Claude Lévi-Strauss when the latter was a rising anthropologist and the former a mature ethnographer. Together the letters illustrate one form taken by the relations between anthropologists located in global centers and peripheries during years between the two world wars. This introduction contextualizes Nimuendajú's correspondence with both scholars by tracing relevant aspects of his life, his involvement with Brazilian indigenous people, and his impact on lowland South American anthropology.
Entre novembro de 1938 e abril de 1939, financiado por Robert Lowie, Curt Nimuendajú viajou pelos estados da Bahia, Minas Gerais e Espírito Santo, com o propósito de pesquisar os povos Jê setentrionais. O presente artigo recupera um conjunto de cinco cartas inéditas enviadas por Nimuendajú a Lowie no contexto de realização dessa viagem, tendo como objetivo não apenas a apresentação das informações etnográficas produzidas pelo autor sobre os grupos do nordeste, especialmente os Kamakã, Maxacali e Botocudo, mas também refletir sobre a sua relação com seu principal interlocutor teórico.
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