Corpo e imaginação em práticas rituais: um estudo comparativo em sociedades ameríndias

Abstract

This dissertation revisits debates in ritual theory, particularly from the second half of the twentieth century onward, in light of recent Amerindian ethnographies that emphasize the role of the body, ritual, and multispecies relations. Drawing on Krahô agricultural rituals, articulated comparatively with materials primarily from Guarani contexts, as well as Kaxinawá, Barasana, and Xavante, it investigates the relationship between body and imagination by treating ritual as a relational technology. Within this framework, practices such as song - understood as an operator of animation and of the circulation of perspectives - along with bodily restraint (resguardo) and naming, are analyzed as central procedures in the fabrication of bodily and imaginative capacities. These practices operate through regimes of repetition and performance that indexicalize bodies, positions, and relations, articulating humans, plants, animals, ancestors, and deities within specific ontological regimes. By connecting body and land, the study shows how ritual efficacy also involves the maintenance of ecological and multispecies conditions of existence, in which health, joy, and the continuity of life depend on sustaining alliances among different beings. The analysis demonstrates how ritual procedures modulate bodily permeability, regulate the circulation of affects and powers, and reinscribe subjects, in an indexical and corporeal manner, within networks of positions, prerogatives, and obligations, producing effects that are not exhausted at the level of the human social but are realized through a transformative repetition.