Abstract

SILVA, Verone Cristina da. Making compadres: godparenting among the Chiquitano indigenous people. Etnográfica [online]. 2017, vol.21, n.3, pp.599-612. ISSN 0873-6561.

The article is focused on the role of relationships established through the godparenting of one’s children within the socio-cosmological life of the Chiquitano indigenous people, who speak their own isolated language and live in southwest Mato Grosso, Brazil, close to the border with Bolivia. Based on ethnographic inquiry, the article shows that, in these indigenous people’s view, godparenting (compadrio) is a constructed relationship, guided by certain rules and practices of commensality, ritual and sociability, and operating in the passage between “nature and culture” as well as in the person’s humanization processes.

Keywords : chiquitano; godparenting; person; cosmology; Mato Grosso; Brazil.

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