Juliana Salles Machado

I believe that to think about the lives and ways of thinking the world of indigenous people today, to understand their personal and social choices, their political and cultural situation, it is imperative that we  consider their historical trajectories. In this perspective, the past is in the present, as it has been mentioned by several authors.

The Anthropological discipline, having developed deep theoretical discussions to think indigenous peoples and their different perspectives and ontologies, provides us with a theoretical and methodological apparatus, essential to that practice. In addition, the character of inherent reflexivity, characteristic of the making of anthropology, seems to me highly favorable for the development of frontier approaches, such as the interdisciplinaries, which I have particular interest. It offers as well a fertile ground for transdisciplinaries approaches that I believe are necessary to a deeper construction of a decolonial indigenous deep history.

As a brazilian women archaeologist, I also intend to strengthen the partnerships with Universities and Community Associations, creating a valuable exchange of ideas and peoples and allowing opportunities, both for students and researchers to access local communites and institutions, as for community members to engage in academic activities. I believe that the living immersion experience within different contexts is a unique opportunity for promoting a more profound comprehension of the cultural, social and racial diversity. It also has an important impact in how one produces knowledge.

My personal research plan is to continue and deepen my research recently started, which aims to contribute, from an interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective, to a still scant reflection on the practices, their effects and meanings of indigenous women and traditional societies in territorial processes. The aim is to consolidate an existing network of collaboration between historians, archaeologists, social anthropologists and indigenous women (Machado and Wittman 2017), in a joint attempt to understand the practices, roles and processes of identification/recognition and representation, conquered and assigned to women, particularly in contexts related to use, maintenance and meaning of their territories. The development of this research, attempts to decrease the invisibility of women in historical narratives, colonial and pre-colonial time, present in the Brazilian context (Ribeiro 2017). This absence is opposed to their constant presence in myths and their importance in the forms of organization, leadership and social indigenous representation since the European conquest to the present day, particularly in territorial management, agriculture and the struggle for land (LEA 1999, Murrieta WinklerPrins 2006). Although this picture is changing (Ribeiro 2017), yet very few studies turn to the subject of indigenous, riverine or quilombola’s women in the past (CEPAL 2013, Sachi 2012, Wolff 2011). It is only with a larger number and greater diversity of perspectives on women, a growing reflection on our roles as researchers and scientists and the methodological challenges that we must overcome to achieve such approaches, that will we be able to build a more symmetrical perspective about the past and the present and traditional Amerindian societies, and about our role as professionals who work in the construction of a decolonizing history.

For the development of this research use three main methodological approaches: a) the compilation and writing of biographies of women (contemporary research through autobiographies, biographies made through face-to-face interviews (and/or written) with current indigenous leaders and by compiling ethnohistorical sources); b) analysis of data already collected in the field by ethnoarchaeology researches already carried out by the author, one among a riverside context in the Amazon delta (Machado 2012) and another among the Laklãnõ Xokleng Indigenous people (Machado 2015, 2012); and, finally, c) the systematization of archaeological, historical and ethnographical data published on the subject related to amerindian women and their relationship with the processes of territoriality.

The activities fall into a broader search for the understanding of the forms of long-lasting use and transformation of territory and cultural and political resistance by traditional peoples, dialoguing with the knowledge and practices shared among women in traditional populations and the knowledge produced about them through scientific research. It is the purpose of these actions to stimulate a reflection on the relationship between current practices of creation of territoriality. In other words, the meaning of the use and environmental management practiced by the local populations, and the settlement patterns identifiable in archaeological contexts and its surroundings in pre-colonial and colonial times. To do so, I explore the knowledge, use and transformation of landscape components, especially focusing on the recognition of the so-called “cultural landscapes” (Posey 1998, 2006; Balée 2006, Neves 2008, Clement 2010, Clement and Junqueira 2010, Machado 2012). That is, the identification of man-made environmental factors, dialoguing with the notion of “places of people” (Machado 2012), and sharing the assumptions of historical ecology more commonly applied to the Amazon region, but recently discussed in the context of southern Brazil mostly regarding the so-called “Floresta de Araucárias” (Machado and Peroni 2015, Reis et al. 2014, Iriarte et al. 2012, 2013, Iriarte and Behling 2007), and that could be expanded to the Atlantic forest as a whole (Levis in press).