Taynã Tagliati

(Dis)Entangling Bodies: Kayapó becomings with other-than-humans

In a pluriverse where partial connections are established between worlds and modes of existence (De la Cadena and Blaser 2018), my research explores the becomings of the Kayapó Indigenous people at the intersection of the arc of deforestation and green belt in Central Brazil. Utilizing multispecies relations as a framework, I illustrate how the Kayapó define and construct themselves through bodily interactions with other-than-humans. How the Kayapó shape, sustain and defy interspecies (asymmetrical) dependencies is key to understanding such interactions and entanglements. This research is based on embodied ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories centered on encounters with both other-than-humans and humans.

Kayapó ways of relating to other-than-humans are often materialized in objects made from the body parts of Others. In museum collections, these Others may be animal and vegetal forms (feathers, tusks, claws, seeds, palm fiber, etc.), whereas in Indigenous villages, the partial connections between worlds can be observed in objects combining acrylic, plastic, vegetal fibers, and bird feathers. This perspective reframes German museums not as mere "contact zones", but as sites of multispecies encounters, where humans, animal and vegetal body parts, and living bugs engage in relations often shaped by colonial and capitalist issues. Meanwhile, in the Kayapó villages, such encounters are mediated and enacted through human and other-than-human embodied entanglements. I am particularly interested in the exchange of substances, in embodied and sentient knowledge, and in the technologies developed by the Kayapó to relate to, engage with, and co-respond to other worlds and Selves. The utmost contribution of my research is to present creative and innovative ways developed by the Kayapó to live in a disappearing world and resist capitalist devouring lust in the Amazon forest.

since 2020
Ph.D. in Anthropology of the Americas, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2018–2020
M.A. in Anthropology of the Americas, University of Bonn, Germany

2012–2017
B.A. in Social Sciences (focus on Anthropology), Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil

since 2020
Research Associate in Research Group Marking Power: Embodied Dependencies, Haptic Regimes and Body Modification, University of Bonn, Germany

2020
PROMOS Scholarship, fieldwork in Trinidad, Bolivia

2019–2020
Research Assistant, Department for Anthropology of the Americas, University of Bonn, Germany

2016–2017
Erasmus+ Scholarship, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

since 2020 
Organizational Committee of the journal "Notas de Antropología de las Américas (NAA)"

2019
Curation "500 Jahre Eroberung Amerikas," Intervention in the Permanent Exhibition of Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, Germany

2019
Coordination of Curatorial Committee, Exhibition "1519–2019: Colonialism and Survival Strategies," University of Bonn, Germany