“Cada panela com o seu texto”: casamento, relacionalidade e diferença no mundo Kariri-Xocó

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography about the marital relationships between the Kariri-Xocó and the non-indigenous, the “cabeça-seca”. The Kariri-Xocó inhabit the village of the same name, located in a small municipality in Alagoas in the Lower São Francisco region (Brazil), in close proximity to the non-indigenous people, with whom they establish countless relationships. The thesis deals with the marital alliance among the Kariri-Xocó and the nonindigenous in the context of the daily relationships in the village. Through an ethnographic study about relatedness, corporeality and production of difference, it explores the forms, motivations and ways in which these marital relationships were constituted and how these experiences are manifested in the daily life of the couples and the indigenous relatives. The ethnography went through vernacular theories, learned during a year of fieldwork and discussions involving daily life aspects that talk about relatedness. The thesis concluded that although the mixture with the “cabeça-seca” and the displacement of these non-indigenous to the village are actions that are discursively fought, it is precisely these processes which enable the dynamism of the Kariri-Xocó sociality, once that these marriages activate the difference, demarcating a specific indigenous identity, manufactured in the ritual world of Ouricuri and its secret is in the heart of the Kariri-Xocó relatedness and the production of “differentiated people”.