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Paper short abstract

The presentation discusses how the engagement with ideas and experiences of futures proposed by Brazilian Indigenous people can impact anthropological doing and its potentialities for promoting a plural commitment to the time to come.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, Brazilian Indigenous people gained global visibility by offering alternative possibilities for the future in a world merged in a time of polycrises, crossing various arenas, including debates on climate change, new technologies and multicultural societies. Despite their diversity, these Indigenous proposals share a reframing of hegemonic unilinear temporalities toward an “ancestral future” which claims for the connection of past, present and future. Based on ongoing collaborations with Indigenous people, the presentation reflects on the potentialities and challenges raised by these proposals for ethnographic experiences and educational practices. It interrogates how the commitment to such proposals of futures redefines a shared temporal experience in the field and in writing, how it reshapes the positionalities of the subject involved in the ethnographic doing, and how it affects the possibilities of realisation of collaborative experiences. It also reflects on how the inclusion of Indigenous futures not only as objects of investigation, but as proper political and epistemological tools stimulate the emergence of creative suggestions for redefining expectations, foresights, and fears in the teaching and learning of anthropology in academia. The presentation closely analyses if and how Indigenous proposals of futures can promote the emergence of innovative suggestions beyond polarised utopias and dystopias. The thesis is that the creation of a symmetric dialogue between multiple proposals of futures, anthropological and Indigenous, in ethnography and in the classroom, can incentivise a critical reflection on the collective responsibility for a shared future that is respectful of plural lives and experiences.