In Xavante Territory, the Researched Recruit the Researchers
By: Rosanna Dent, Assistant Professor of History
Every year, with the dry season, come the researchers. They arrive with audio recorders, microscopes and glucose meters. They bring backpacks filled with GPS recorders, cameras and field notebooks. They ask endless streams of questions about how to live in the Cerrado of Central Brazil. The Xavante community members who receive and host us are long accustomed to these visits.
My scholarship on the history of research in Xavante territory asks: What would it be like to be studied again and again? Why would a community consent to host sometimes-hapless outsiders year after year? What I find is that, over time, Indigenous subjects have developed creative strategies for engaging and directing researchers and our resources. They have learned to capitalize, when possible, on the potential of our presence to help address the dire political, cultural and health implications of colonialism. It is a precarious strategy, as peddling soft influence is far from foolproof, but over time Xavante villagers have learned to influence their researchers, drawing us in unexpected directions and changing our fields of study.
Non-Xavante scholars have been traveling to the Indigenous Territories of Pimentel Barbosa and Wedezé since the 1950s. The first anthropologist, David Mayberry-Lewis, arrived shortly after the community there accepted diplomatic relations with the Brazilian government. He appeared in the wake of a violent and continuing process of “pacification,” implemented by the federal government to open up the Brazilian interior to colonization and agricultural production. Brazilian expansionism was an ambitious project, predicated on the elimination — through assimilation, disease, informal violence or extreme containment — of the hundreds of Indigenous groups who claimed and continue to claim the territory as their own. So-called pacification also opened paths for those interested in extracting knowledge from the cultural, linguistic and biological human diversity that Indigenous peoples hold.
Building on Mayberry-Lewis’s first accounts of Xavante society, a stream of academics followed. They hailed from across the disciplines of health and human sciences. They turned their attention to Xavante genes, bodies, culture and language, convinced their studies of an Indigenous group they saw as “more natural” could reveal universal laws about being human. In the 1960s, Wedezé village hosted geneticists as they developed an interdisciplinary methodology for human genetics research that would be replicated around the globe. The 1970s and 1980s brought anthropologists who used ecological and sociolinguistic approaches to human societies to contest portrayals of Indigenous societies as self-contained social systems, insulated from colonial impact. Public health researchers followed, elucidating mechanisms of infectious disease and providing the most comprehensive studies of social determinants of health in lowland South American Indigenous societies.
But as the scholars arrived to observe, their subjects were also becoming experts in research — perhaps more specifically in researchers. Attentive to scholars’ interests and habits, villagers began to construct their own ideas of scholarship. They considered what it was that set this brand of outsider apart from the government officials, missionaries, neighboring ranchers and even tourists who often visited. Leaders, embroiled in long and tiring political struggles to protect their lands, started to see visiting scholars as potential allies. They began to make political demands. They began to recruit their own researchers.
I, too, was willingly recruited. I first made the trip to the nearby town of Água Boa, Mato Grosso in 2014, to meet with a group of leaders from the village of Pimentel Barbosa. I had been studying the Xavante’s scientists, tracking their correspondence with one another, examining their transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations. I was hesitant to engage directly with the communities they studied. There is too long a history of Western scholars objectifying Indigenous people. Their scholarship often failed to benefit the people they studied. But evidence mounted that Xavante leaders and community members actively cultivate their relationships with those who study them. Far from passive participants, over time they have learned strategies to direct their academic visitors to projects that better — though not always — serve their interests.
In Água Boa, I asked them if and how my work might be of interest to them. They spoke of their desire to access the research that had been done about them. “I want to learn about researchers’ work through our conversation, through you,” leader Tsuptó Buprewen Wa’iri Xavante told me. “You can access this material. As [the elders] said, they think this work is important.” My interest in understanding their experience of research — the conflict, hope, disappointments and close personal relationships at the undocumented core of human subjects research — suddenly became a resource for them to recover the materials that outsiders had collected about them over decades of visits.
My ongoing work, in collaboration with colleagues from three Xavante villages and academic institutions in Brazil and the United States, is reassembling the dispersed archive of research. We are recuperating and digitizing photographs, audio recordings, publications and other documentation of Xavante families, social life and the territories of Pimentel Barbosa and Wedezé. Village residents are reunited, sometimes for the first time, with images of their grandparents or other loved ones who have passed away. Elders are narrating Xavante history not only for their grandchildren or for a single curious anthropologist, but for digital recordings that will link and annotate historical images with the histories Xavante want to tell.