Espaço Ameríndio (Dec 2011)
THE “VÍDEO PARTICIPATIVO” (PARTICIPATORY VIDEO) AS A WAY TO REFLECT AND SELF-REFLECT ON IMAGE AND IDENTITY OF REEMERGENT INDIANS FROM BRAZIL’S NORTHEAST
Abstract
Crises and change have affected the Brazilian indigenous population for more than 500 years. While for centuries their struggle against colonialism and the dominant national society had resulted in an ever shrinking population, the last decades have seen an unfamiliar phenomenon: the rise of “new” indigenous tribes in areas which, by the state and public opinion, were long considered as “acculturated”. These “reemerging” Indians, in their pursuit of both legal and actual recognition by authorities and their fellow Non-Indian citizens, face and undergo a peculiar re-elaboration of their “image” as Indians, being torn between romantic ideas of Indianness, and the demands of full integration within national society. Drawing on recent fieldwork experience in northeastern Brazil, the paper discusses how the visual-anthropological method of “participatory video” can be used as a means of reflecting on, and catalyzing, processes of individual and group identity formation of minority groups within a local-global context.
