Indigenous Peoples and Vital-Toxic Relations in Brazil (In-VITAL)

This research project aims to examine how vital and toxic substances intertwine in shaping Indigenous conceptions of reproduction and kinship relations within an emic understanding of the 'living.' Among Indigenous collectives of lowland South America, bodily substances ground kinship relations, especially blood, semen and breast milk. However, mercury and pesticides have become materialised in the bodies and territories of Indigenous peoples. They are currently made visible through the impairment of reproductive health and children's cognitive-neurological development. Although chemical exposure is an issue that affects both human and other-than-human beings in the era of the Anthropocene, already vulnerable and marginalised collectives are disproportionately impacted. This project asks what happens when substances deemed toxic become entangled with those conceived as vital. Or, in other words, what happens when what is considered vital becomes a weakening agent? What kind of colonialities become material - and how – in this context? Alongside the Guarani-Mbyá, the Kaiowá, the Yanomami, and the Munduruku Indigenous peoples in Brazil, the In-VITAL will generate a robust ethnography of reproduction, kinship, and their socio-material relations with vital-toxic substances, and develop collaborative methodological techniques to investigate the feedback loops between environmental devastation and the embodiment of health inequalities across diverse spatial-temporal scales.