Abstract
Following boom-and-bust economic cycles provoked by Brazilian governmental attempts to integrate Indigenous peoples into national society, it is approximately since the beginning of the 2000s that Brazilian Indigenous peoples came to be viewed officially as “poor” and victims of “hunger.” Consequently, the national indigenist agency and other State entities started to conceive and implement diverse initiatives that ultimately injected money and resources into Indigenous communities. In 2019 we undertook an ethnographic study in three A’uwẽ (Xavante) communities in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Reserve, Central Brazil, with the objective of analyzing how people understand and pursue food security. We propose that in the studied communities the complex network of A’uwẽ food reciprocity is a fundamental strategy for mitigating hunger and acute lack of food. We show that among the A’uwẽ, the hybrid economy that developed since the 1970s has proved resilient to dramatic transformations and uncertainty in the availability and characteristics of external government inputs.
Highlights
Hunger, food insecurity, food production, and economic self-sufficiency have been recurrent themes in Brazilian indigenist politics, associated with the colonial process of “pacification,” which involves the attraction and fixation of an Indigenous group to an indigenist post or religious mission and, subsequently, opening of the greater part of their original territories for the implementation of developmentalist projects [1, 2]
Following boom-and-bust economic cycles provoked by Brazilian governmental attempts to integrate Indigenous peoples into national society, it is approximately since the beginning of the 2000s that Brazilian Indigenous peoples came to be viewed officially as “poor” and victims of “hunger.” the national indigenist agency and other State entities started to conceive and implement diverse initiatives that injected money and resources into Indigenous communities
We show that among the A’uwe, the hybrid economy that developed since the 1970s has proved resilient to dramatic transformations and uncertainty in the availability and characteristics of external government inputs
Summary
Hunger, food insecurity, food production, and economic self-sufficiency have been recurrent themes in Brazilian indigenist politics, associated with the colonial process of “pacification,” which involves the attraction and fixation of an Indigenous group to an indigenist post or religious mission and, subsequently, opening of the greater part of their original territories for the implementation of developmentalist projects [1, 2]. This policy, based in antiquated notions of acculturation, was a primary orienting principle of the Brazilian indigenist agency (the Indian Protection Service [SPI] followed by the National Indian Foundation [FUNAI]), which always tended to the side of the government aspirations to develop and “integrate” Indigenous peoples into Brazilian market-oriented society [2,3,4,5]. This boom-and-bust governmental approach to Indigenous people’s economies and food security prevailed throughout the twentieth century and continues in different forms in present times.
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