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Paper long abstract:

One of our main challenges in contemporary anthropology is to find intermediate categories that reflect different worlds of knowledge in relation. In this paper, I will discuss this issue by reference to the lived experience of contemporary indigenous peoples that fight for rights over a territory. Based on the situation of indigenous land claims by the Tupinamba of Olivença (south of Bahia, Brazil), the paper will discuss the advantages of a category such as 'territorial belonging' in dealing, on the one hand, with the contemporary claims for a territory and, on the other, with the long-term processes of inhabiting a land and a country where the model of private property of land became hegemonic. The paper argues that 'territorial belonging' gives an accurate description of how people are historically engaged in the world in long-term relational processes. To that extent it corresponds to a contemporary need in anthropology for intermediation.