Agência feminina, terra e multissensorialidade: a mitopráxis Tikmũ’ũn no cinema

Abstract

This thesis is about the agency of women in the cinema of Maxakali/Tikmũ’ũn people. Through the analysis mainly of the films "Yãmĩyhex: the spirit-women" (2018, 76') and "Nũhũ Yãgmũ Yõg Hãm: Esta Terra é Nossa!" (2020, 70'), it seeks to comprehend how the maxakali cosmology and aesthetic complex influences their cinema. By dialoguing with the methodologies of film analysis and filmic ethnography, we seek to understand, in and through the films, the agency of indigenous women as part of a set of alterity relations in the daily/ritual of this people, which involves another group of "Others", the yãmĩyxop (spirit peoples), with whom the Tikmũ'ũn/Maxakali maintain an ancestral relationship. The thesis is divided into seven chapters. The first introduces the maxakali people according to their origin myths and their recent history, introducing also the women filmmaker Sueli Maxakali (co-director of the mentioned films); the second chapter is a general comment on indigenous cinema as an expression of cosmological dimensions of indigenous people through the influence of the "out-of-field" in the films; the third is specifically about the maxakali cinema and its connection with the concept of image (kuxex) which in maxakali language means "soul" and "image". The fourth chapter is an analysis of the film "Yãmĩyhex: the spirit-women" (2018, 76'), and makes a gender approaches of elements as fluency between ritual and daily, domestic and public in maxakali sociality, the importance of commensality and feminine shamanism among the maxakali people and how they are expressed on the film. The fifth chapter is an analysis of the film "Nũhũ Yãgmũ Yõg Hãm: This land is ours!" (2020, 70'), in which we found an expression of the binding between ritual chants, relation to the territory and the construction of person among the maxakali; also we connect the maxakali origin myth of "Putõõy" (of the woman who was born from a vagina carved in clay) to these other aspects, which leads us to glimpse a cosmopolitics of the earth in the film. The sixth chapter deals with sensory elements in Maxakali cinema, in which we analyze how visuality in films is connected with sound and a tactile sensoriality, expressing in Tikmũ'ũn cinema the multisensory dynamics of Tikmũ'ũn cosmology. And, finally, in the final chapter, we start with a reflection in the scope of feminist studies, inspired by the way bodies and "nature" cross the films, and we propose to review a separation, in feminist theory, between nature and culture as founding reflections on gender; we point, then, to a feminist theory that is situated in dialogue with the Latin America's Amerindian and indigenous thought. This theory is being woven by indigenous women - with their art, political and academic reflections - and has epistemological bases that dialogue with feminist anthropology inspired by the ontological turn of this science in recent decades. With the cinema thrown in the midst of the dynamics of Tikmũ'ũn sociality, the filmic texture is touched by the encounters that occur in the Tikmũ'ũn cosmos, by the relationships with the yãmĩyxop and by a perception of the earth as central to the consubstantiality of the Tikmũ'ũn person. The Tikmũ'ũn/Maxakali cinema thus expresses a myth-praxis that integrates Tikmũ'ũn daily life and rituals, involves a series of careful acts that build and maintain the Tikmũ'ũn/Maxakali person and collectivity, which are also carried out by women.