Cantos, curas e alimentos: Reflexões sobre regimes de conhecimento Krahô

Abstract

This article proposes a comprehensive approach to systems of knowledge of the indigenous people Krahô. Like the drawing of tangled paths (prỳ) that connect the villages, mehim thinking can be seen as a network that connects people, animals, plants, personal names, privileges, rituals, spirits (mecarõ), dead people and many Others. The aim of this article is to capture concepts and practices that endow specificity to some of these “paths” as systems of knowledge that, in an interethnic field, make us closer to the Krahô notion of what we have been calling “intellectual property”. In fact, we intend to show that a notion of “ownership” of knowledge, as our society understands it, does not correspond to native forms of ownership, transmission and validation of knowledge, and that generates unique effects when – in a scene of interethnic negotiations – these two systems are set to interact. We will look for ways of production and circulation of agricultural, shamanic and ritual knowledge, and the sensitive codes underlying their establishment. Finally, we will verify how the indigenous agency behaves in a comparison between two research projects that have recently sought to access such knowledge - that is considered “traditional” – and the cognitive mismatches generated in these interactions.