Histórias-míticas e construção da pessoa: ambiguidade dos corpos e juventude indígena em um contexto de transformações

Abstract

Representations about youth vary historically and culturally. In the Upper Rio Negro, there are indigenous groups with over three centuries of contact with the non-indigenous world. In recent years, male initiation rites were suppressed and formal schooling was introduced. These events led to a redefinition of significance in forms of representation at different stages of life. This work sought to understand the construction of the Indian representation of youth; how they correlate with the other life cycle phases and how they contribute to configuring structured social practices in this social group. Several mythical stories dealing with intergenerational relationships have been reviewed; these were correlated with significant stages of life, with other local narratives, and with data gathered from direct observation. The study concludes that the representations about youth have been configured by the social roles of the initiating/initiated, in a currently contradictory fashion, under a generic and lengthy student phase, deprived of its own sociological markers, prolonging the threshold condition of this phase of life.

Mortalidade por suicídio entre crianças indígenas no Brasil

“…Outra questão refere-se à dificuldade de transposição de conceitos do universo ocidental para o indígena 32 , tais como os próprios conceitos de suicídio, algo que já discutimos em publicação anterior, como o de infância. Definir infância como um intervalo etário específico, embora estando em consonância com a literatura, e sendo operacionalmente necessário, é algo com certo grau de arbitrariedade.…”

La educación de sí mismo y la producción del niño indígena en el noroeste amazónico de Brasil

“…En Amazonas, la relación entre comunidades indígenas y el Estado pasa, más que todo, a través de enfermeras, médicos, agentes de la FUNAI y profesores. La poca preparación de los profesionales es un tema constante en las evaluaciones que los indígenas ofrecen a los sistemas del Estado (Garnelo, 2006;Souza, deslandes y Garnelo, 2011;Luciano, 2006).…”

Jurupari se suicidou?: notas para investigação do suicídio no contexto indígena

“…To do this, we decided to take a myth that is widespread among the indigenous of the Upper Rio Negro region in the northeast of the state of Amazonas as the initial anchoring point: the myth of Jurupari. We made this decision taking into account the following aspects: the experience of previous research in this region Garnelo, 2006, 2007;Souza, 2009;Souza et al, 2010Souza et al, , 2011; evidence that suicide is a significant public health problem in this context, in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, a municipality in the region, between 2000 and 2007, the suicide rate was 16.8/100,000, four times that of the state (Souza and Orellana, 2012b); and as we will show, important elements of the above mentioned myth that allow us to construct symbolic bridges with the topic of suicide. It is therefore necessary to contextualize and describe, albeit briefly, this myth and the ethnographic context in which it was produced.…”