Locating sovereignty in the auto-ethnographic-political poetics of daily existence in two amazonian films

Abstract

The theme of daily life is a common one in the Brazilian Video in the Villages (Vídeo nas aldeias) filmic archive. I analyze the diversity of cinematic treatments of and approaches to the theme of daily life in an Indigenous village by comparing, contrasting, and examining how two films construct, embody, and experience communal life through culturally specific methods of inquiry. In particular, I explore concepts of time, the senses, creativity, and the relations between the individual and the collectivity as all of the above are cinematically rendered in the intimacy, the performance, and the ritual of daily life. Specifically, I look at how these two VNA productions, Shomõtsi (2001) and Kiarãsã Tõ Sâty, The Agouti’s Peanut (2005), repoliticize the everyday through sovereign practices. I discuss these cinematic works as they relate to imperfect media (Salazar & Cordova, 2008), decolonial pedagogies, and the “cosmological embeddedness of the everyday” (Overing & Passes, 2000, p. 298).