New Native Leaderships and Forms of Power in Amazonia

Research summary

In Latin America indigenous peoples have turned into significant political actors. This project examines how the new forms of indigenous leaderships connect to the questions of power, and consider how they are interpreted from a native point of view. The studied groups are two Arawak-speaking groups living in Western Amazonia, Brazil. In looking at the way these two groups view their spokespeople and create new political, cultural, and economic partnerships, the aim is to explore the Amerindian way of producing different bodies, authority, and agency. The research also addresses historical changes of leadership as part of other social and political processes in the past and present.
The main research questions are the following:

1) What are the new forms of leadership in Amazonian native communities?
2) How can acting in new interethnic networks be understood as a new type of human-to-human relation in Amazonian sociocosmology?
3) How have social roles hold by the young indigenous people changed their communities?
4) What are the differences between young female and male native leaders?
5) How have Amazonian leaderships changed taking into account environmental changes, economic, political, social, and legal processes?

Description

Research info

Research title
New Native Leaderships and Forms of Power in Amazonia

Research timeline
1.12.2009 - 1.12.2014

Keywords
agency indigenous people knowledge leaderships politics

Region
Latin America

Countries
Brazil, Finland

Institution
Helsinki University
Department of World Cultures
Helsinki, Finland

Head of research
Pirjo Virtanen

Partners
the Centre EREA - Enseignement et Recherche en Ethnologie Amérindienne/CNRS, Université de Paris Ouest - Nanterre la Défense, France UFPA, Brazil

Contact information
Pirjo Virtanen
+358407455121
pirjo.virtanen@helsinki.fi
Open link

Record last updated
7.1.2014