Abstract

IUBEL, Aline  and  LEIRNER, Piero. Hierarchy politics and political shifts in upper Rio Negro: some indigenous transformations. Etnográfica [online]. 2019, vol.23, n.2, pp.391-413. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.6783.

This article aims to reflect on some transformations that different indigenous groups of the upper Rio Negro (Amazonas, Brazil) have been experiencing especially since the 1980s, with regard to their understanding of a “hierarchy” between them. Fundamentally, this is happening as that “hierarchy” is shuffled with a set of elements that they might call “political,” especially upon the consolidation of indigenous movement in the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of Rio Negro (FOIRN). From the FOIRN, we see how new “leaderships” open a parallel path to traditional positions, while at the same time they dialectically work for their maintenance in a place of “cultural tradition,” assuring an original status. With this, our argument turns around the fact that the side-effect of this double-way agency is an “inflation” of a new political class corresponding to certain positions of “middle status,” while simultaneously there occurs a rectification of “higher hierarchy” positions in the multiethnic complex

Keywords : hierarchy; politics; indigenous movement; upper Rio Negro.

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