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Paper short abstract:

By linking two different understandings on what vulnerability means, we discuss the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects, highlighting points of inflexion between the Guarani-Mbyá and biomedicines' narratives. For the Mbyá people, the ending of the Juruá's world might be a sign of new beginnings.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we draw attention to an imminent and long heralded end of the world. Not any world, we must say, but the Juruá world ("Brancos" or non-indigenous) in accordance with the Guarani-Mbyá cosmology. By linking two different understandings on what vulnerability means, we discuss the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects, highlighting points of inflexion between the Mbyá and biomedicines' narratives. For many Mbyá, this invisible threat has the Juruá people as target, not the indigenous peoples. From their understanding, Covid-19 comes to make the Juruá bodies weaker, and to force the Juruá to calm down. However, to most international and national health agencies the indigenous peoples, among others, are considered "vulnerable populations" - a polysemic category that justify, for example, rapid access to care settings and vaccination. The Mbyá seem to not agree with this, pointing out that, from their perspective, it is just the opposite. We therefore propose to explore how the Guarani-Mbyá understanding of vulnerability and ending of the Jurua's world intersect with global and public health concepts of crises and intervention. In this objective, we question how Guarani-Mbyá's experience from past epidemics and huge knowledge about having survived many "permanent" crises can contribute to creative and imaginative beginnings that might emerge from the so-called global emergency. The present work is part of the ongoing research Indigenous Peoples responding to Covid-19 in Brazil: social arrangements in a Global Health emergency, which is funded by the MRC/UKRI.