Is Collaboration a Diversion in Anthropology? Experiences Between Amerindians and Academics

Introduction: Becoming Friends

We met each other in 2005 at Mrõtidjam village, in the Trincheira Bacajá Indigenous Land in the Brazilian Amazon, where the Mebengokré people live (Bollettin, 2020). At the time, one of us was a bachelor’s student in anthropology while the other was a young adolescent. We began to teach and learn from one another about our lives and experiences. The first author asked many questions, and the second author, along with relatives in Mrõtidjam, were willing to respond. They also asked questions about Europe, as it was the first time someone from there had visited the village. It was not the first time anthropologists had come to the Indigenous Land (Cohn, 2005; Fisher, 1991), however, so the Mebengokré were used to the curiosity of such visitors. For the first author, this was his first experience spending time with Indigenous people, marking a crucial moment in his life. Nearly 20 years later, much has changed in our lives; we both have children, completed school, discovered the internet, and witnessed significant transformations in our environments. Nevertheless, we continued to meet and had the opportunity to redefine our questions, answers, and perspectives. Over the years, we also began to work together on various initiatives, thus commencing a collaboration.

Collaboration is not trivial. In recent years, growing attention has been dedicated to rethinking and reshaping academic production to be more inclusive and dialogical. Since Tuhiwai Smith (1999), who emphasised the importance of recognising Indigenous methodologies as legitimate in academia, many proposals have emerged (e.g., Almeida, 2021; Bollettin, 2023; Borofsky, 2023; Kovach, 2009; Sillitoe, 2015). These discussions also included Indigenous scholars in Brazil. For example, the Tucano anthropologist Paulo Barreto (2018) highlights how, from the Tucano perspective, theory is practice and consequently the dialogues between different epistemologies should be grounded on collective experiences. The collaboration between academics and communities, to be effective, should have an impact on both involved parties, redefining academic practices, as suggested by Tuxa anthropologist Felipe Cruz (2017). In this context, we contribute to the debate by sharing our experiences and suggesting how collaboration can serve as a diversion. We discuss how collaboration begins with a direct interpersonal connection, and we propose that focusing on our practical actions allows us to acknowledge reciprocal influences and to pluralise the sense of agency.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, diversion is a polysemous term (Cambridge University Press, n. d.). It refers to “an activity you do for entertainment,” “a different route that is used because a road is closed,” and/or “the fact of something being sent to a different place than originally intended.” In fact, we enjoy our time more when we collaborate than when we are alone, as we have the opportunity to share ideas, jokes, and fun. Meanwhile, we discover alternatives when access to hegemonic and structured formats of research and actions is precluded. Finally, we encounter unexpected answers to specific concerns that emerge from lived experiences. In the examples that follow, we describe how these three dimensions are interconnected in the collaborations we have developed since we first met, highlighting how our joint trajectories have been affected by and affected the sharing experiences of a transforming reality.

Images and the Digital

When we first met, and for some years afterwards, no one at Mrõtidjam had a camera, and the first author brought one, an analogue tool with film rolls. We were excited by the chance to capture our meetings. Many people would ask, “kube, mekaron kabá” [“foreigner, take a picture”], and we were taking photographs, more or less spontaneously. In the following meetings, usually, after a year when lucky, we would look together, both in collective screenings and in private contexts, at the images printed on paper outside Mrõtidjam (see also Cohn, 2020). Several years later, the second author and other friends introduced smartphones, which were already known and used at Mrõtidjam, to the first author, who still had an old cell phone without a camera. The cameras embedded in the phones allowed us to share images we recorded in each other’s absence, transferring them to each other’s devices using memory cards. After some time, we finally gained access to the internet, which also provided us with access to Google Drive, where we created shared folders to share the scanned copies of the photographs we had taken over the years, sending the direct links.

In 2015, we made a collective decision involving the community to develop a photo-ethnographic exhibition to represent the Mebengokré to the non-Indigenous society, to be exhibited in São Paulo, Brazil, where the first author lived at the time. With a similar aim, since our first meeting, people at Mrõtidjam were already donating artefacts to the first author for assembling a collection in a museum in Perugia, Italy (Bollettin, 2022). In Italy, the organisation of the exhibition was the responsibility of the first author alone due to the difficulty of communication without the internet at that time. However, on this occasion, we chose to approach things differently. We gathered at Mrõtidjam and reviewed the images taken over time by the community members and the first author. Then, we selected some of these images to create a series of panels to depict various aspects of Mebengokré social life, as deemed significant by the community. We portrayed daily actions such as bathing in the river, preparing food, playing, gardening, fishing, and more special moments, such as the parties, the body painting, and the use of body ornaments. When the exhibition was inaugurated, three mebenghete, elder men, travelled to São Paulo to present it to the public in an open event. The images later travelled to Italy and were included in the exhibition at the museum.

In 2022, we moved the panels once more, this time to Brno, Czech Republic, for presentation at Masaryk University, and concomitantly also online (https://anthro.sci.muni.cz/en/exhibitions/amazon). In this other opportunity, due to the limitation of available space, we had to select only some of the images. Thus, we engaged in a close dialogue using WhatsApp, a tool that was again appropriated first by the second author and the Mebengokré friends who later taught the first author how to use, and now we use it for daily conversations and exchange. We shared the scanned copies of the images through both this platform and the folders in Google Drive. For the selection of images, we brought them to a participative discussion involving everyone at Mrõtidjam about which ones to include and their order, and the decisions were then communicated to the first author again via WhatsApp. In addition, we debated the explanatory text, in which we highlighted the activities carried out by the memy, men, and by the menire, women, and the vitality of the Mebengokré kukradjá culture. We also included the current socio-environmental struggles faced at the Trincheira-Bacajá Indigenous Land, and the projects addressing these issues, to give visibility to these and to promote online access to these (https://www.menirexikrin.com.br/). All communications between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean were taking place in our private accounts; the first author being responsible for the collaboration in Brno, and the second author at Mrõtidjam.

The choice of creating exhibitions responded to concomitant preoccupations and possibilities. On the one side, the Mebengokré emphasise the materiality of their kukradjá (Bollettin, 2020; Lea, 2012), and through presenting artefacts to the first author, they reaffirmed their relations with him. After finding out about his collaboration with the museum in Italy and inspired by an increasing Indigenous protagonism in museum spaces in Brazil, they became interested in disseminating their experiences through these artefacts, creating an exhibition available to the wider public. The arrival of smartphones and the consequent possibility to produce their images moved further this interest in giving visibility to the lives of the Mebengokré on a broader scale. The images enabled us to horizontalize the participation of community members in the selection of visual materials because unlike artefacts, which require a larger time investment, or written materials, which require a proficiency in this specific format of expression, images are more easily made and shared.

Reappropriating Territories and Voices

The current socio-environmental struggles have been a frequent topic of conversation for us, and more and more so recently. In 2005, our discussions centred on the various methods used by the Mebengokré to cultivate their gardens or to fish along the river compared to those used in Italy; how social relations differ across both locations; and what we might learn from both their similarities and differences. To share these experiences, we engaged in activities together – venturing into the forest, to the river, to the gardens, sharing food, and participating in the metoro, parties, and rituals. These conversations often included many individuals at Mrõtidjam, and when some elder men or women detailed the reasons behind specific practices, we would transcribe and translate their explanations together into written form. The results of these tasks were presented in Mrõtidjam by the first author during subsequent visits, usually in the form of written texts, and they were also collectively debated. In June 2011, the same occurred with the first author’s doctoral thesis. Many members of the community participated in the public presentation of the work, passing it hand to hand, flipping through the 400 pages, and commenting on figures and topics. Everyone was pleased, and the community decided to archive the work in the school. A few months later, when the first author returned to Mrõtidjam, no one knew where the thesis was. After some time, we eventually discovered that someone had used the pages to roll cigarettes, much to everyone’s amusement.

More recently, our concerns about the environment have become more serious. Since the construction of the Belo Monte hydro dam in 2016, various impacts have been affecting the Trincheira-Bacajá Indigenous Land (Bollettin et al., 2024; Mantovanelli, 2016). The river’s flow has changed, becoming faster and lowering its level, which has consequences for the region’s vegetation and wildlife, reducing fishing and hunting for food provisioning. In addition, other pressures on the Indigenous Land have also increased, and in 2018, an invasion of the territory began. This is a big concern since from some villages, it is possible to hear the noise of the chainsaws deforesting the territory or to meet fishermen along the river. The invasion still continues despite the measures taken by the competent institutions, due to the policies of the Brazilian government under President Jair Bolsonaro and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and negotiations with the invaders are ongoing. In September 2011, meanwhile, the Mebengokré finally reappropriated part of the invaded area. On that occasion, the second author shared via WhatsApp a series of videos, pictures, and audios documenting the event with the first author, asking him to write about it to raise awareness.

At that moment, we decided that the best way to document the facts was for the second author to do so since he was there. We began to record and transcribe the descriptions of the events and to select representative images, which included the recording of the metoro organised to commemorate the event, the collective walking to the area, and documentation of the environmental destruction. In sequence, we created a hybrid document composed of visual and textual elements, again by exchanging opinions via WhatsApp. The second author presented the work to the other Mebengokré, who offered suggestions that we incorporated. We finalised the document and submitted it for evaluation to a visual anthropology journal. After a while, we received the peer review comments. One of the comments noted that some images were quite similar, depicting the Mebengokré people walking in a single file through the forest, and recommended replacing them. The second author, after further discussion with the community, observed that the images represented the Mebengokré perspective in these moments and that each one was showing a different forest that had been destroyed, highlighting how these images are significant for offering the specific experience. We responded to the reviewers based on the answers in WhatsApp. Ultimately, the paper was accepted and published without any changes to the images (Xikrin & Bollettin, 2022).

Visiting Each Other and Making Futures

Over the years, we mainly spent time together at Mrõtidjam, where we both enjoyed various activities together. We boat along the river to fish, wander through the forest in search of animals and birds, and participate in the many social activities taking place at Mrõtidjam. In 2006, for example, the Mebengokré organised a collective fishing event in a small branch of the main river that runs through the Indigenous Land. The men, and the second author with them, entered the water shaking bundles of lianas, which remove oxygen from the water, causing the fish to dart onto the banks, where girls, women, and children were waiting to fish them by hitting them with machetes and sticks to catch them. On that occasion, the first author was on the bank video recording the fishing when, unexpectedly, a girl struck him on the foot with a stick, mistaking it for a fish. When he let out a loud cry, and after verifying that it was nothing serious, the rest of the people burst into laughter. The situation became so amusing that the Mebengokré decided to name that stretch of river “Paride” The name still endures today at Mrõtidjam and in other villages of the Indigenous Land, and each mention always brings much fun among us.

The same place is now endangered by the aforementioned illegal invasion of the area, as some external fishermen occasionally go there to fish. This situation is an indirect consequence of the Belo Monte hydro dam. These socio-environmental impacts, including the example of “Paride,” have been central topics that we had the opportunity to discuss together in March 2023 in the city of Salvador, Bahia. It was our first meeting at the university, the village of the first author, and another friend, Kataprore, President of the Bebo-Xikrin of Bacajá Indigenous Association, joined us (Xikrin et al., 2024). The occasion was the conference “Communities of Research, Communities of Practice. Towards a Transforming Transdisciplinarity” organised by the National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution of the Federal University of Bahia and the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group of Wageningen University. This event aimed to bring together diverse communities to share the potential and limitations of collaborative research with academics. The second author had the opportunity to discuss our shared journey and how we collaborated over the years. It also offered us the chance to reflect on the experiences we are accustomed to at Mrõtidjam; this time, however, they included sharing food in non-Indigenous houses and restaurants, visiting museums and other attractive places, bathing in the sea, and debating the similarities and differences of lives and places while integrating into non-Indigenous society.

Meanwhile, the event also provided an opportunity to develop plans for enhancing the support that academics can offer in response to the needs expressed by the Mebengokré. During the meeting, we involved other academic friends from different disciplinary backgrounds in considering the current socio-environmental challenges faced by the Mebengokré. After continuing our discussions via WhatsApp, we finally gathered again at Mrõtidjam in March 2024. While debating the possibilities for the Mebengokré to realise a self-evaluation of the environmental impacts of the Monte hydro dam, another concern emerged. At Mrõtidjam, there is currently only a primary school; however, a secondary school is planned as part of the compensation measure for the impacts of the hydro dam on the local people and environment. During our collective talks, the Mebengokré highlighted their willingness to incorporate local knowledge systems into the students’ curriculum in the future school. As many Indigenous people emphasise, schools can effectively empower communities to advocate for their rights in broader society (i.e., the Baniwa [2019] anthropologist Gersem Luciano). However, due to the reducing number of mebenghete and mebengere, older men and women, in the Indigenous Land and the increasing socio-environmental pressures, the inclusion of the Mebengokré knowledge system in the school becomes even more urgent. On this basis, we implemented a work plan in which the second author, along with other friends at Mrõtidjam, recorded the mebenghete and mebengere, both their practices and their explanations, sharing these materials with academics through WhatsApp and other digital tools. Subsequently, we collectively edited these materials into formats suitable for inclusion in the pedagogical activities of the future school. These formats, approved by the mebenghete and mebengere, as well as by the Mebengokré working at the school as teaching assistants, comprise both audiovisual and written presentations.

However, this is not the only initiative related to the school that we developed in March 2024. In 2019, the Mebengokré invited the first author to bring his sons to Mrõtidjam because they wanted to meet them, but more importantly, they wished to give them proper names: Tedjuare and Krãinre, respectively. For this reason, in December of that year, they organised a metoro, a naming ceremony, to collectively celebrate the kids, which was recorded by another anthropology student present (Foltram, 2024). Naming among the Mebengokré signifies the recognition of a person’s insertion into the social network of the community (Fisher, 2003). Consequently, many people emphasised that the two children – the first non-Indigenous ones to have Mebengokré names at Mrõtidjam – from then on would have to maintain constant relations with the community. On that occasion, the second author, due to our insertion into kinship and social networks, had the crucial task of painting, along with his wife, the two children’s bodies with annatto. This is the final act of the metoro, which highlights the public recognition of the names.

When discussing the experiences of the schools, our children clearly took priority. We recalled the metoro for Tedjuare and Krãire, along with many others in which we participated together, moved by the emotions these memories stirred. Therefore, we arranged a video call via WhatsApp between the pupils of the school at Mrõtidjam and those in Italy at the school that Tedjuare and Krãinre attend. This had the aim of allowing the two groups of students to greet each other reciprocally, emphasising the importance for Tedjuare and Krãinre to maintain constant relationships highlighted during the nomination metoro. In addition, this idea arose from discussions about the future school at Mrõtidjam, intending to promote mutual understanding with the school in Italy and to initiate further potential dialogues and collaborative pedagogical projects. Consequently, with support from the aforementioned museum in Italy, other actions are being planned, such as exchanges of audiovisual materials. The goal is to enable the involved students from both locations to collaborate on joint activities, thereby building friendships, similar to the one we share.

Collaborations and Diversions

The various events and experiences described here span a significant period during which many changes occurred, shaping a redefinition of our relationships. As highlighted by the Xakriabá Indigenous intellectual Célia Corrêa (Augusto et al., 2022: 314), “relationships are also epistemic.” Consequently, we perceive it as important to reflect on how, as bikwa, friends, we foster our collaborations in knowledge exchanges, something we enjoy together, a diversion. As pointed out earlier, diversion has different meanings: to have fun, to deviate from a given path, and to go elsewhere.

In this vein, we follow the suggestion of the Karipuna anthropologist Ana Manoela Primo dos Santos Soares (2022) to conceive of knowledge as the outcome of doing together. According to her, doing together is based on a communal embodied relation, which allows joining in the practical knowing (see also Barreto, 2018, mentioned earlier). Through the collaborations we described, we enact our experiences in shared practices. As something shared, our collaborations enable us to teach and learn from each other, while also accessing knowledge, ideas, and solutions that we would not have the chance to discover on our own and that arise from this collective effort. Transiting through multiple spaces, from Mrõtidjam to the university, from analogical images to digital exhibitions, from the printed text (before being smoked) to school dialogues with virtual tools, we gain firsthand experiences that please us, offer alternative paths, and lead us to unexpected situations.

In this instance, Nelly Barbosa Duarte Dollis (2018), a Marubo anthropologist, emphasises that through collaboration, we are creating worlds and realities together. She highlights how collective actions shape the future by engaging people in the encounters between tradition and innovation, valuing plural knowledge systems that are realised in practices that create something new. By working collectively, we are showcasing life at Mrõtidjam, providing visibility to current struggles and projects, and developing initiatives for future generations of pupils. Simultaneously, we are challenging academia, such as through Mebengokré exhibitions in Europe and co-authored papers, discussing image styles in museums and scientific papers, and promoting new research projects based on community needs. By doing so, we are simultaneously engaging ourselves and our friends, Mebengokré and academics, in creatively and imaginatively addressing the demands arising from the encounter of different histories and narrators. As claimed by the Brazilian Indigenous movement during the First March of Indigenous Women, “It is not enough to recognise our narratives; it is necessary to recognise our narrators” (Marcha das Mulheres Indígenas, 2021: 343).

Recognising the narrators shifts the concept of collaboration towards embodied and personal experiences, moving away from the abstractions of generic communities and academics. It values individual trajectories, challenges, and struggles that align with joint collaborations. These collaborations are grounded in the recognition of responsibilities that accompany the embodiment of knowing and doing, as emphasised by Guaraní anthropologist Sandra Benites (2020). Thus, they destabilise the hierarchies of knowledge practices reflected in canonical research and action frameworks (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Our experiences adhered to these suggestions, resulting in a series of concomitant joyful and creative encounters. We laugh together, even if not always or in the same way, as in the case of the stitch on the foot or the smoked thesis. We seek solutions to challenges posed by an established canon, such as when we transitioned from academic authorship to co-authored writing, or when the second author painted the bodies of non-Indigenous children. Furthermore, we also found ourselves in unexpected experiences, navigating together to uncover the potential of digital devices, bridging schools across continents and cultures, and walking around the university.

The activities undertaken along the years that we described here provide the basis for rethinking power structures of hegemonic academic doing. Moving beyond the single authorship of canonised formats, in which the academic works alone in creating theories materialised in papers, a co-authored format is not merely crediting the contribution, but it shifts the academic doing towards the collective production of knowledge, as suggested by Indigenous scholars. It indigenises academic doing and re-routes it to the inclusion of plural epistemologies and experiences. The controversy about the visual understanding of the images in the paper described earlier illustrates the alternatives raised by the caption of the forest. They can be different views of an “objective” forest, or they can depict differently the forest(s) as spaces of experience. The final acceptance of these images points towards the effective possibility to multiply epistemologies and experiences of academic doing. They illustrate not only the reappropriation of land from the invaders but also the Mebengokré’s reappropriation of narrative possibilities about their experiences.

In this way, collaboration as diversion suggests new paths that shape the trajectory of involved subjects at personal levels. It creates the possibility for new experiences, such as the first visit at the university, which for the second author also was the possibility to travel for the first time to a new place, allowing him to share new experiences with the other Mebengokré. However, not always is this adequately acknowledged, and the hegemonic system of evaluation of universities still does not recognise, for example, the activities with primary schools and exhibitions as proper “scientific” tasks. Despite this difficulty in academic recognition, the engagement with these actions can stimulate an opening of academia and, through the Mebengokré experiences, to the wider society. The continuation of the dialogues among the schools and the co-curated exhibitions will stimulate the de-exotisation of Indigenous people on the other side of the ocean towards a symmetrisation of the relations in a plural world.

A final question arises here: Why make this effort? We suggest that embracing the diverse facets of diversion as intrinsic to interindividual collaborations is forward-looking. It is a way of recognising collaborations as a tool for designing futures. The exhibitions, the papers, the activities with the schools, and so on are the result of a personal relation which involves entire communities. On the one side, they affect the Mebengokré enabling their access to universities in a process of “counter-colonisation” (Santos, 2015); meaning their appropriation of these spaces in the first person and with their own epistemologies in a transformative process. On the other hand, bringing these collaborations inside academia affected this other community in stimulating the interest of students supervised by the first author to engage in research and collaborate with Indigenous people for their studies.

Clearly, much more is needed to face the multiple socio-environmental struggles faced by the Mebengokré, and other Indigenous people, in their daily lives as a consequence of the growing pressures on their Indigenous Lands. Similarly, much more is needed to face the increasing neo-liberal financialization of universities, and to promote these as spaces for the effective recognition and inclusion of plural experiences. The examples we described here are experiences that can inspire similar actions in other contexts, multiplying the effective participation of Indigenous people, and of other marginalised and invisibilised sectors of the society, in the collective construction of a more inclusive future. As noted by the Potiguara Indigenous writer Graça Graúna (2014, p. 56): “Because we are one of many, we are here, amidst great transformations, confident in what is happening now; our dreams will return to reality. We are attentive to the horizons.” Collaboration as a diversion ultimately defines a way of joining together, where we effectively come together cooperatively to create new worlds in which our children will meet and learn from one another beyond the social and epistemological hierarchies.