Brazilian indigenous peoples and socio-environmental conflicts: ethnographic suggestions on new protagonisms and emerging perspectives

Abstract

Within the Brazilian indigenous movement, recent years have witnessed the emergence of young representatives whose protagonism extends into the national and international political arenas especially in relation to the defense of lands of traditional occupation from socio-environmental threats of increasing intensity. The ethnographic data collected, predominantly during a recent campaign of denunciation and awareness-raising that swept through Europe, compared with theoretical reflections devoted to the study of Brazil's indigenous movements allowed not only to shed light on features of discontinuity from the past, but to discern unprecedented contributions that indigenous peoples can offer in the environmental justice debate. The analysis of activists' rhetorics and practices offers stimulating suggestions for decolonizing Western imaginaries related to the relationship with the environment