Contribution short abstract:

The presentation describes some individual and collective trajectories among the Mebengokré people in the Brazilian Amazon to show how they actively and creatively face non-Indigenous society and how these actions affect their relations with anthropologists.

Contribution long abstract:

In the last decades, the Mebengokré people in the Brazilian Amazon have faced different challenges and creatively responded to them in plural ways. The construction of the Belo Monte hydrodam dramatically affected the socio-environmental panorama, while constituting the background for the Mebengokré’s engagement in the growing Indigenous movement in Brazil. The arrival of internet, as also for non-Indigenous people, concomitantly brought the danger of fake news and the possibility of creating new alliances and partnerships. Moreover, new educational policies in Brazil that support Indigenous people’s access to universities resulted in the enrolment of the first group of Mebengokré in academic studies, also shaping their relations with anthropologists. Together, these dynamics affect the the Mebengokré’s individual and collective choices and options of self positioning. My paper introduces some of these trajectories, including women’s engagement with economic and cultural projects as a form of authonomy and resistance, university students’s appropriation of non-indigenous knowledge in local schools, and the use of the internet and digital tools to form friendships and relations with non-Indigenous actors. As the paper shows, despite these wide-ranging dynamics, the Mebengokré’s choices are consistently grounded in a social life shaped by the commoning of the different outcomes of these different approaches in economic, epistemological and political terms. All the while, they also shape the possible collaborations with anthropologists. In this light, the paper also reflects on how these dynamics have shaped our twenty-year-long relation, and how they led us to reciprocally create innovative scientific and political partnerships.