Memories of the Oyapock: Crossed Accounts on the History of Indigenous Peoples

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Antonella Tassinari for a reflection on the history and transmission of knowledge among the indigenous peoples of the lower Oyapock, based on a combination of ethnographic sources, historical documents, and the researcher’s own experiences.

Presentation of the project

"This presentation aims to bring together different perspectives on the history of the indigenous peoples of the lower Oyapock, drawing on ethnographic and historical sources: the accounts of elder Karipuna collected in their villages during the 1990s; the testimonies of Jesuit and Spiritan missionaries who travelled through the region in the 18th and 19th centuries; and finally, my attempts to relate these sources to my own recollections as a researcher, including through a science outreach blog. Taking into account the growing interest of indigenous teachers in working on their history in local schools, as well as the efforts they make as students and researchers to record and transmit the memories of their elders, the session will explore both the constraints and possibilities of dialogue between these different sources, and the role of anthropology in the recording and transmission of local memory. I propose that the processes of indigenous knowledge transmission — as analysed by Lévi-Strauss (1991) in relation to kinship and myths — are organised around an openness to the other, understood as a dependence on exteriority for the reproduction of the same. The aim is to understand how anthropologists, their academic productions, schools, and universities now form part of these indigenous networks of knowledge transmission and are inevitably integrated within them."

Speakers

Antonella Tassinari is a Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil) since 1999. She holds a PhD from the University of São Paulo and specialises in anthropological theory, the anthropology of education, and indigenous peoples. She has been a visiting researcher at EREA/CNRS (2005) and at the University of Montreal (2014–2015), and is currently on a research stay at the University of São Paulo.