This is not like a village: encounters between indigenous people from the Xingu Indigenous Territory in the city of Canarana, Mato Grosso, Brazil

Abstract

This article analyzes encounters between the indigenous people from the Xingu Indigenous Territory (TIX) who inhabit the city of Canarana (MT). Most of this city’s indigenous population comes from villages in the Upper Xingu, but at all times there are indigenous people from all regions of the TIX. Canarana is marked by a specific sociality and offers indigenous people a chance to experiment with other modalities of social proximity beyond kinship, which is the main relational nexus in the villages. Within this context, people usually deny visiting other indigenous people in the city, except for a few close relatives who live in Canarana. But ‘Going to someone’s house’ is not the same as ‘visiting relatives,’ and the ritual of this situation is not limited to only behavior in the villages. This article focuses on indigenous descriptions of these encounters in which people from different regions of the TIX mobilize degrees of kinship, alluding to the notion of a ‘good distance’ but also making efforts to access relational language specific to the city environment that differ from those typically established in the villages.