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Over the past three decades, films made by the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó people of Brazil have shown a distinctive and remarkably stable cinematic aesthetic, manifest in a set of filming, framing, and editing conventions first documented by Terence Turner. These films diverge significantly from Indigenous film productions documented elsewhere in Latin America, which tend to borrow more heavily from commercial cinematic codes and film genres. This contrast raises important issues about the personal, social, cultural, and political motivations behind such aesthetic and genre choices among different Indigenous peoples while posing the more fundamental question as to what exactly makes Indigenous media "Indigenous." In this article, we describe what we identify as a Kayapó film aesthetic and discuss reasons for its continuity over time. We also consider the influence of hybridity, widely discussed by Indigenous media scholars elsewhere, but turn instead to the notion of anthropophagy as a more powerful root metaphor for understanding Kayapó film production. Although anthropophagy as an actual cultural practice and cosmological metaphor is generally associated with Tupi-speaking peoples of Brazil, culturally and linguistically distinctive from the Kayapó, the concept as applied by scholars of subaltern cultural productions helps us better understand the maintenance of Indigenous authenticity in Kayapó film production as the group navigates technological and sociocultural transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the notion of "beauty" as a socially constructed value among the Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazon and how this value reflects relations within society and between humans and animals. Kayapo society is divided into two status groups, people who have received beautiful names from certain kin during elaborate village rituals, and those who have not. The ritual bestowal of such names counteracts fissive tendencies produced through the developmental cycle of Kayapo households. "Beautiful people" tend to have wider kin networks with access to greater resources and leadership roles than do ordinary "commoners." These distinctions are correlated with categories of animals and forms of behavior, and reveal parallels to the socialization and death of the person. However, certain contradictions in Kayapo society are epitomized in the figure of the jaguar, an animal that embodies beauty and power as well as fierceness and bestiality. Similarly, leaders mobilize resources for the well-being of the entire community, but they are also at risk of reverting to bestial behavior and running amok. Anthropological theories of animism and perspectivism would do well to consider the more nuanced Kayapo concepts of the complex interconnections between animals and humans, the natural and the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smith (2011a) proposed a model of environmental engineering which includes six discrete categories of resource management believed to be universal within small-scale, pre-industrial societies. Through examination of the resource management practices of the Kayapô in the Amazon Basin and the Blackfoot on the Northwestern Plains, this paper will test the validity of Smith's model. The evidence presented will show that, with slight variations due to differences in mobility, Smith's model is largely appropriate. Additionally, although the management and use of "wild" or semi-domesticated resources is often seen as a step on the road to agriculture, resource management and the domestication of landscape can, in fact, be a specifically chosen subsistence strategy in and of itself. This type of resource management can also continue after agriculture has been adopted by a group, particularly if wild species continue to be an important part of a group's subsistence regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sexual practices among the Mebengokre Indians, also known as Kayapó Indians, from the Brazilian Amazonia. Particular focus is given to the development of ethnological research on the sexuality of Indian peoples. Subjects discussed include generational differences regarding romantic love and marriage, fertility rites, and interethnic marriage.

In this article, I suggest that a critical analysis of Kayapo' participation in resistancestrategies should be inclusive of negotiated politics, everyday resistance and microscalestrategies of contestation along with the public and highly dramatic. In particular,I interweave theories of gender, resistance and space to analyse women's strategiesof resistance and spaces of negotiation in a Kayapo' village. I not only emphasizethe performative politics of activism, but also highlight the gendered facets ofperformance and resistance. I suggest that a critical analysis of women's participationin resistance strategies should be inclusive of but not overshadowed by the highlyvisible, spectacular forms of social movements. Drawing upon more than 12 months ofethnographic research in a Kayapo' village, I note the importance of examiningeveryday experiences of discord and resistance in Kayapo' villages. This micro-scaleperspective is especially salient if we consider that women might be unevenly includedor not have routine access to leadership roles and protests. Finally, I draw attention tothe power-laden spatial politics of contestation in order to trace the way in whichwomen are using distinct facets of village landscapes for performative practices andpolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the Brazilian Indigenous formal educational policies through two ethnographic cases (Karipuna and Mebengokré-Xikrin) that allow us to approach the Indigenous perspective on schooling. We first discuss the possibilities and limitations of past and current legal references and educational policies. In the analysis of the two experiences, we use the notions of cultural boundary and the “openness to the other” to understand the dialogical and interactional spaces that emerge through Indigenous schooling. [Indigenous schooling, Mebengokré-Xikrin, Karipuna, Indigenous protagonism, cultural boundaries, openness to the other] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a meeting between FUNAI (the Brazilian Indian National Foundation) and the Kayapo in the Kayapo village of Aukre, in October 2005, the Kayapo Indians requested support to increase the culture of coconuts ( Cocos nucifera) in their lands. The introduction of exotic species is a cause of biological diversity loss throughout the world. However, this is by no means applicable to all kinds of exotic species. We argue that the culture of coconuts may actually be a useful tool for the conservation of this country’s indigenous lands, despite criticism to the contrary. It may also be useful as source for raw material for the indigenous people who are presently experiencing a population boom. For the Kayapo of south-eastern Amazonia, such a demographic explosion, coupled with their increasing dependence on money to purchase industrialized goods, tend to substantially increase the pressure on their lands, which still contain a substantial amount of well-preserved seasonally-dry Amazonian forests. We investigated the actual economic relevance of coconuts for the Kayapo by measuring human and coconut populations and found that this exotic palm is not important for the subsistence of these Indians, due to coconut scarcity, and that such importance is not forthcoming. In the Amazon, coconuts may be particularly useful for the Indians’ nutrition due to the high energetic value of the solid endosperm of the mature fruit. Therefore, given the importance of indigenous lands for the conservation of the Amazonian forests, the encouragement of subsistence coconut cultures in indigenous lands is defensible as a measure for the conservation of biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the opposition of the Kayapo and other indigenous people to the development projects by federal and state governments which would have effects on their communities and environments in Brazil. The Kayapo was forced to reach out for support to non-Kayapo indigenous allies and non-indigenous organizations to combat the projects. Kayapo mend their relations with other indigenous groups of the Xingú valley to build a movement of resistance to the Xingú dams.

In the 1990s, Terry Turner produced some of the most conceptually and ethnographically important research anywhere in the anthropology of media, apparently without having intended to do so. This article reviews the impact of his collaboration on the Kayapo Video Project both in terms of its effects in Kayapo communities and in terms of the debates it catalyzed in anthropology over the relationship of human productive powers with representation and social mediation in its broadest sense. Turner's anthropology of media (and indeed his anthropology more generally) emphasizes that human production always contains a historical excess within itself, which is the potential to transcend and to transform fundamentally the dominant social relations of production and reproduction in a given time and place. As such, Turner's work challenges what I describe as more 'Hegelian' theories of media that emphasize the inaccessibility of social mediation to human agency. In conclusion, I celebrate Turner's own historical excess and his vehement rejection of the pure/applied split in anthropological knowledge and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the fabrication of beautiful people and the ceremonies of great name confirmation of the Mebengokre of Central Brazil. The Kayapo or Amerindian Mebengokre are indigenous peoples of Brazil that are famous for geometric body paint designs and body adornments. An analysis of the interrelationship between power, ritual and hierarchy among the Mebengokre is undertaken. The ritual of naming the babies with beautiful names is investigated. The language, religion, hierarchy, power and wealth of the Mebengokre people are explored.

Ongoing alliances between indigenous peoples and conservation organizations in the Brazilian Amazon have helped achieve the official recognition of∼1 million km2 of indigenous lands. The future of Amazonian indigenous reserves is of strategic importance for the fate of biodiversity in the region. We examined the legislation governing resource use on indigenous lands and summarize the history of the Kayapo people's consolidation of their>100,000 km2 territory. Like many Amazonian indigenous peoples, the Kayapo have halted the expansion of the agricultural frontier on their lands but allow selective logging and gold mining. Prospects for long-term conservation and sustainability in these lands depend on indigenous peoples' understandings of their resource base and on available economic alternatives. Although forest conservation is not guaranteed by either tenure security or indigenous knowledge, indigenous societies' relatively egalitarian common-property resource management regimes—along with adequate incentives and long-term partnerships with conservation organizations—can achieve this result. Successful initiatives include Conservation International's long-term project with the A'ukre Kayapo village and incipient large-scale territorial monitoring and control in the Kayapo territory, and the Instituto SocioAmbiental (ISA) 15-year partnership with the peoples of the Xingu Indigenous Park, with projects centered on territorial monitoring and control, education, community organization, and economic alternatives. The recent agreement on ecological restoration of the Xingu River headwaters between ranchers and private companies, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists, brokered by ISA, marks the emergence of an indigenous and conservation alliance of sufficient cohesiveness and legitimacy to negotiate effectively at a regional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kayapo people continue to surprise the international community with their ability to interact with Western society while maintaining their own culture. Contrary to most portrayals, Indigenous peoples have not been the hapless victims of colonialism and globalization. Through analysis of Kayapo cultural ideology, it is possible to reveal the beliefs that have enabled the Kayapo to interact with and defend against Western imperialism while maintaining much of their traditional way of life. The success of the Kayapo may have implications for other Indigenous groups facing similar circumstances around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses great name rituals among the Gê–speaking Kayapó (Mebengokre) of central Brazil. Ritual organization compels a temporal and spatial co–ordination of exchanges between diverse categories of relations so that nuclear family ties are differentiated. As the fundamental site of this process of differentiation, the House undergoes various transformations in its organization during the ceremonial period and its centrality in Kayapó social thought derives from this, rather than from the attribution of an enduring corporate identity. Analysis of Kayapó ritual allows us to extend Rappaport’s ideas about the relation between the invariant and variant messages in ritual, since the production of sentiment is a central task of ritual activity and such sentiments are necessary for the reproduction of formal order in ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines a case of conflict over resource use between Brazil's Gorotire Kayapo and external interests seeking to develop, gold, timber, and hydroelectric resources on traditional Kayapo territory. Potential for indigenous agency in situations of threat; Transformation of the traditional indigenous resource regime.

Reports results of research conducted in the village of the Gorotire Kayapo Indians of the Brazilian Amazon in 1984 and 1987 that depart significantly from those published by Darrel Posey. Study area and population; The apete; Their significance; Making an apete; Classification, internal zones, and transplants; Ecological diversity and adaptive solutions; Methodology and results of apete research; Plant collection analysis; General informant interviews; More.

Once again, the indigenous peoples of the Xingú valley in the Brazilian Amazon are planning to make the long journey to the town of Altamira, where the Trans-Amazonica highway crosses the Xingú. Their ultimate destination will be the island of Pimental a short distance downriver from the town, where the Brazilian government plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam they call Belo Monte after the nearest Brazilian village. The Indians' bold plan is to prevent the construction of the dam by building a new village directly on top of the proposed dam site and maintaining their occupation until the government abandons its plans for the dam. The planning for the encampment is being led by the Kayapo, the largest and most politically organized of the indigenous nations of the region, but other indigenous groups are also participating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the findings of Darrell A. Posey from the Universidade Federal do Maranhao in Brazil about the influence of spirituality on the agricultural and ecological practices of the Kayap ó Indians in the Amazon Basin. Belief of the Kayap ó Indians about the spiritual dimension of eels; Ways by which the people appease the spirit.