Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses how the decision of taking seriously the advice of a fellow indigenous anthropologist affects my practice as a white anthropologist researching and lecturing at a design school. Such practice seeks to provide a ground for the emergence of encounters in difference, in confluence.

Paper Abstract:

In 2017, I began collaborating with the Museu do Índio, in Rio, Brazil, at the time directed by a non-indigenous anthropologist. In the midst of the initial movements in this partnership, an indigenous anthropologist who attended the design school where I work warned me: "If you want to get closer to indigenous issues in this correspondence with design, please don't just invite white anthropologists to come here. Involve indigenous people above all”. From then on, I tried to take this warning seriously, setting up a series of actions combining teaching, research and extension, in order to invite indigenous researchers and artists to be with us at the design school. In this paper, I discuss the extent to which this decision has affected my practice as a white anthropologist researching and lecturing at a design school. What anthropologies can be realised when we take seriously what our peers, indigenous anthropologists, put to us? What anthropologies can be done in confluence with design and with indigenous anthropologists? Here, it's not a question of approaching indigenous people in order to study their ways of living and making things, but rather of collaborating with fellow indigenous anthropologists. Spending time together, we seek to support the different perspectives, approaches and interests at stake. Such an anthropology seeks to place itself as a ground for the emergence of encounters in difference, betting that other possibilities for imagining our stay in the world, in confluence with design and with our indigenous colleagues, can emerge from this.