Wind’s interpellations: Guarani Mbya reflections on distancing and vulnerability during and beyond the pandemic

Maria Paula Prates, Valéria Macedo, Bruno Huyer & Kuaray Poty Ariel Ortega
In this paper, reflections and experiences of Guarani Mbya’s interlocutors are reunited to address the topic of vulnerability in the pandemic context and beyond it. Particularly, Covid-19 and other illnesses are thematized based on reflections on spaces and the relationality they enact (involving people, spirits and other agents or materialities) through the flows of the winds. Our interlocutors brought up issues that have crossed them since primordial times. However, during the pandemic period, these questions became more poignant within its political, sanitary, and environmental adversities. As part of a collective investigation engaging indigenous and non-indigenous, we also elaborate our argument from guarani questioning about individualized and indiscriminate distancing. Instead of “staying in your own home”, the village’s collective life was strengthened in parallel to distancing from the urban centers, rising reflections about vulnerability management in these spaces.
Maria Paula Prates is a social anthropologist working on health, illness and care subjects. In general terms, she works on conceptions of person, body, health, life, and care relations. (Re)productive health and the Anthropocene, including midwifery knowledge(s), the medicalisation of childbirth and its connections to environmental devastation, as well as pollution, toxicities, and obstetric and environmental racism, are at the core of her current research themes. She joined the UCL Department of Anthropology to work as a Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology of the Anthropocene for the EIA project in 2021. Currently, she is a Collaborating Professor at the Postgraduate Programme of Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAS/UFRGS) and a Research Affiliate at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography (SAME) at the University of Oxford. Valéria Macedo has been an Associate Professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) since 2011. She is the director of the Intercultural Indigenous Degree, and over the last two decades, she has been working with Indigenous Guarani-Mbyá and Tupi communities in São Paulo. She holds a master’s and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo. She is a CNPq researcher (PQ2 – Brazilian Research Council) and an associate researcher of the Centro de Estudos Ameríndios (CEstA), USP. Bruno Huyer is a PhD candidate at the Postgraduate Programme of Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAS/UFRGS). She holds a bachelor’s degree in social sciences (UFRGS) and a master’s in social anthropology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (PPGAS/UFSC). He has worked with the Guarani-Mbyá from southern Brazil and northern Argentina for over a decade and is currently working for the Yvy Rupa Association. Since 2016, he has collaborated with the Video Nas Aldeias Project as an editor and filmmaker. Kuaray Poty Ariel Ortega is an Indigenous Guarani-Mbyá handcraft, filmmaker and thinker that is dedicated to the cinema since 2007. He has directed the Mokoi Tekoa, Petei Jeguata film, which was awarded by the ForumDoc BH. He has also directed other awarded films such as Bicicletas de Nhanderu (2011), Desterro Guarani (2011), Tava, a casa de pedra (2011), Mbyá Mirim (2013), No caminho com Mário (2014), Ours Spirits Keep Coming (2021) and Canuto’s Transformation (2023).

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