Worlding a Mbya-Guarani heritage: from dissonant heritage to ontological conflicts

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the ontological conflicts implicit but not addressed during the process that registered the ruins of the Jesuit-Guarani Mission in São Miguel (Brazil) as intangible cultural heritage: ‘Tava, Place of Reference for the Guarani People’. The process can be understood as an appropriation of the tools of modernity that provides an indigenous and dissonant narrative of the missions, counters discrimination and affirms the Mbya-Guarani when they negotiate with the state. However, the research also revealed that the conceptualisation of tava is based on a different ontology from modernity – on which the category of heritage is still based – that is related to the importance for the Mbya-Guarani of building good and beautiful bodies and social relations by wandering through the land left to them by the gods and following the precepts and signs of the latter. Instead of perpetuating the hierarchies between ontologies, the article brings to light the ontological conflicts with the objectives of overcoming the limitations of the policies of recognition and enhancing the perspective of heritage as a regime of care not only for objects, places and practices, but also for the people and worlds for whom these things are heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Mbya-Guarani
• indigenous heritage
• ontology
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Any shortcomings remain my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Western history’ is here understood, following Palmié and Stewart (2016, 210), as ‘historicism’, that is, the ‘principles of historical research espoused by the history profession and taught in schools and universities in many parts of the world (in and outside the West)’ and that ‘occupies a hegemonic place within it’.

2. During the meeting that decided on the designation of intangible heritage, the Mbya concluded that it should have the more inclusive ethnonym because other Guarani also visited the place.

3. However, the use of the term ontology is not new in anthropology and can be found in several monographs throughout the twentieth century. Similarly, the ontological turn is also not entirely new as it builds on, expands and clarifies many important previous contributions from social sciences and philosophy.

4. Without, as Kohn (2015) argues, reducing all anthropology to ontology.

5. In this sense, ontology should be thought of as a verb and never as a noun (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017).

6. In fact, these proposals have gained traction at a time when the earth is facing a life-threatening crisis – the impact of humans in the Anthropocene –, which is revealing that the nature-culture divide is a historical construction and currently inadequate, and is opening a crack through which other worlds are making themselves increasingly heard.

7. It can be argued that there is an essentialist or ideal-typical heuristic approach to both modernity and other ontologies, which we can also find in studies outside of the ontological turn. However, as Strathern (1988, 12) stated, ‘My account does not require that the latter [Western] are orthodox among all Western thinkers; the place they hold is as a strategic position internal to the structure of the present account’. In this sense, if we refuse the monistic ontology based on the unchanging identity of the world and adopt ontology as enactment (as the Amerindians do, for example, as we will see, in terms of their bodies, the social and the cosmos), we can understand the moderns and the many others as those that enact certain worlds produced by heterogenous assemblages of entities. Thus, for example, the discourses, practices and policies of institutional heritage are not enacted by all the potentialities that could be actualised in modernity.

8. The multivocality of the people, who defines the people and who speaks in their name remain important issues. Regarding this case study, see (Lacerda 2019).

9. As in the Mbya concept of porã.

10. Affinity is, however, a much more complex theme in the lowlands of South America (Viveiros de Castro 2015, 97–138).

11. As certain critics point out and Viveiros de Castro (1998) himself admits, perspectivism is an ethnographic concept, i.e. a concrete abstraction that is not found in ethnography in such a schematic way and that does not necessarily exist in all the peoples of the lowlands of South America. However, this proposal has proved relevant to understanding several aspects, such as kinship, predation, shamanism, bodily adornment, mythical narratives and even the daily contemporary stories that the Amerindians tell about people that became confused about their perspective (by, for example, finding an animal in the forest and eating its food thinking it was human food) and turned into animals.

12. Here, ‘nature’ is a bit of a play on words that has escaped some readers. On the one hand, it is a subtle critique of Levi-Strauss’ analysis of the Amerindian myths as the construction of the separation between nature and culture. On the other hand, and more importantly, this ‘nature’ does not oppose ‘culture’ but is a synonym of ontology.

13. The concrete example in this text of the multicultural and multinatural translations of the Huni Kuin term txai cannot be developed in the article but it is recommended reading to better understand the proposal of controlled equivocation.

14. But see the more plural development on the ontology of the moderns in Latour (2012).

15. I do not wish, however, to invisibilise plurality, including those indigenous peoples who state the opposite.

16. To better understand this and how difficult it is to enact it, I emphatically suggest the reading of the unique collaborative work of Kopenawa and Albert 2010, 2013).

17. The concept of the property of land is anathema to the Guarani.

18. In fact, one of the anxieties most often voiced by the Mbya is the difficulty of obtaining their food from the forest, leading them to buy the white man’s food, which may affect their body-person.

19. There is some evidence that the Mbya may have retrospectively englobed (Ardener 1989) the Jesuits. Litaiff (2009) has found evidence of a Mbya mythical hero named Kesuita, Kechuíta, Kerusu or Keiruçuita, which he argues is a corruption of the term ‘Jesuit’. According to the author, the Mbya do not consider the Kesuita to be a Catholic priest, but rather a Nhanderu Mirim. However, there is little more ethnographic evidence to pursue this research route.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) with a PhD grant (PD/BD/52265/2013) obtained through the PhD program in Anthropology: Politics and Practices of Culture and Museology (NOVA FCSH, ISCTE-IUL [Portugal]; 2013-2019).

Notes on contributors

Rodrigo Lacerda

Rodrigo Lacerda is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the New University of Lisbon (NOVA FCSH) and coordinator of the Centre for Visual Anthropology and Art (NAVA) at CRIA. He has been Invited Assistant Professor of NOVA FCSH since 2017 and held that same position at the University of Coimbra from 2019 to 2020.