Age and social identity among the Xavante of Central Brazil (Welch 2009)

Recursos » Teses e dissertações online » Age and social identity among the Xavante of Central Brazil (Welch 2009)

Autor:	Welch, James R.
Data:	2009
Título:	Age and social identity among the Xavante of Central Brazil
Detalhes:	Orientação: William L. Balée Ph.D., Tulane University

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Welch_2009_Age_and_Xavante.pdf	PDF document	1.79 MB	Info

This dissertation examines age organization as an aspect of social identity among the Xavante, an indigenous people in Central Brazil. The Gê-speaking Xavante are among Brazil’s most populous indigenous peoples, with over 10,000 individuals in indigenous reserves located in Mato Grosso State. Xavante society, particularly its dual structural aspects and ceremonial expressions, factored importantly in anthropological discussions regarding social structure of Central Brazilian indigenous societies. The objective of this research was to investigate ethnographically how notions of age are implicated in the contemporary experience of daily social life. In this dissertation, simultaneously emphasizing structure and praxis, I seek to show that multiple configurations of age engage in a lively and specific manner a complex field of perceptions of sameness and otherness with important implications for other ethnographic issues of broad relevance in Xavante society. It is based on fourteen-months of fieldwork carried out in the Pimentel Barbosa/Etênhiritipá community, with a total population of over 575 people. This community comprises descendants of the same population studied by David Maybury-Lewis in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that age is a conspicuous and multifaceted feature of the social experience that attests to the mutuality and non-opposition of similarity and difference in its diverse manifestations. Thus, Xavante social organization is considered to be profoundly contingent, with age statuses and other aspects of social identity being plural, simultaneous, and interdependent. Evidence to that effect may be found in how the social experience implicates multiple systems of age reckoning, including informal age grades, secular and spiritual age group systems, age set moieties, and genealogical seniority in conjunction with gender and other aspects of social identity. This presentation involves an ethnographic reassessment of the Xavante life cycle that takes into account both its formal and informal properties, attending to previous scholarship regarding the Xavante and other Central Brazilian and Gê societies by demonstrating that age is implicated in diverse aspects of Xavante social life, such as dual organization, notions of relatedness, and cultural traditionalism.

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