A voz dos povos originários ecoa na web (original) (raw)

Latin America| Indians on the Network: Notes about Brazilian Indigenous Cyberactivism

International Journal of Communication, 2013

Information and communication technologies form the bases for contexts that are increasingly global, and through which the expression of differences is found in the informational environment and the visibility of its own cultural dynamism. That is, the interactions between digital informative interfaces and architectures and the exchanges between distinct cultural universes, which transcend geographical boundaries, stimulate the emergence of new and recognized ethnic identities.

CHAVES, Leslie; COGO, Denise. Racial equality activism in Brazil, communication via networks and internet: Afropress News Agency.index.comunicación Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicación I - Universidad Rey Juan Carlos - Camino del Molino, s/n - 28943 Fuenlabrada - Madrid - España

The objective of this article is to analyze the processes of establishing activist social communication networks by black social movements in Brazil related to Afro-Brazilians' struggles for citizenship. Recently, these struggles have culminated in the approval of the Racial Equality Act and government affirmative action policies for Brazilian university admissions. Within the scope of these processes, we analyze a specific contemporary experiment in networking by the black movement, developed by Afropress news agency. Initially, we review historic processes of inequality, resistance and mobilization of black populations in Brazil, identifying the establishment of social-communication activist networks starting with the uses black movements make of information and communication technology in their struggles for racial equality and citizenship for Afro-Descendents in the country. Second, from a Latin American cultural studies perspective, we analyze a specific case of internet use by Afropress news agency (www.afropress.com.br), which uses network communication as its main strategy for generating communicative flows to build and add visibility to the socio-cultural experiences of Afro-Brazilians and the agendas of struggles for racial equality. Key words: Afropress; Afro-Brazilian; communication in networks; black social movements; black press; internet.

Brazilian Afrofuturism as a Social Technology

Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, 2023

Officially called Monument to Goiânia, the sculpture is known in the Brazilian city as the "Monument to the Three Races", or "the big negroes". It sits proudly downtown with its three statues representing Black, European, and Indigenous peoples raising a column on which rests the Goiás state capital's seal. The seal depicts colonial explorer Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, who first surveyed the region, and a gold miner, representing the first business in Goiânia (Cabral and Borges). The statue is a celebration of settler colonialism and its extractive tendencies but also codifies an idea of racial democracy conceived by Brazilian intellectuals to explain the country and later used by the state as a tool of biopolitical control: everyone in their place and working together to build the nation. Throughout a year of iconoclastic demolishment of other statues as activists put pressure on countries to finally begin atoning for the wrongs of history, Goiânia's goes on unscathed. Not so much for the notion of racial democracy, though. This false narrative is now fertile ground for the country's offshoot of the larger Afrofuturist movement, which, this chapter will argue, developed naturally from longstanding Black activism through arts and education. These efforts were growing more intersectional and digital precisely as Brazilians started adopting Afrofuturism. Gama et al. have prepared a comprehensive list of Afrofuturist works in Brazil for the Handbook (see Chapter 26), and this chapter leans on that survey to focus more on theorizing futurism while pinpointing examples of the movement's production that show its intersectionality with environmental and queer issues. By analyzing the historical context that led to Afrofuturism's broad adoption in the country, evaluating the state of its reception and problematization there, and interpreting the discourse of representative works, this chapter contends that earlier activism may as well have always been futurist in the broader sense of an organic, politically oriented movement aiming to change social conditions. This proposition, in turn, can provide new pathways to understand futurism's interplay with science fiction (SF) and its mass-cultural genre framework as a social technology within the sense that has emerged in Brazil more recently.

Crioulas Media: Technology, language and identity in a Quilombola community in Brazil.

inter-disciplinary.net

In this article we intend to discuss issues around the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by info-excluded communities, using the example of the experience of a Quilombola community in Brazil (http://www.conceicaodascrioulas.org) and the intercultural movement Identidades (http://www.identidades.eu). The community is located in Conceição das Crioulas in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The struggle for land possession, led primarily by women, represents 200 years of the community history. Depleted at various levels, organized around a subsistence economy, the community additionally faces gender equality problems and the severity of a dry and arid land. With a history of conflictincluding the construction of their Quilombola identity -their tradition of participatory decision-making, which transformed them into a nationally studied model, created in the population the need to access the means to tell their own history and also to serve their struggles and collective aspirations. That need brought the community together with Identidades. From the shared experience emerged in the community, in 2005, the Crioulas Video (http://www.crioulasvideo.org), a group of young people who then began to contact with ICT. Nowadays they are the first Quilombola producers, who use in an autonomous and independent manner, video, photography and the web as a means of expression. This article will examine the impact of ICT and the consequences in terms of power, culture, language and identity using Conceição das Crioulas collective experience as a reference. It will question the implementation of technologies that were developed from Western models, ignoring and excluding other societies and cultures such as the referred community. The Internet is the media that carries and expands these technologies. In this sense, we analyze the characteristics of this medium, its patterns, the distance of its apparent universality and what it discriminates by giving particular focus on the interfaces that operate within.

Digital Inclusion for Indigenous People: Techniques for using computers and smartphones among the Pataxó of Aldeia Velha (Bahia, Brazil)

Vibrant, 2019

This article reflects on information and communication technology from the perspective of the Anthropology of Technique. It provides an ethnography of technical relationships and interactions that occur through the medium of computers, smartphones and software, among the Pataxó of Aldeia Velha, in the far south of the Brazilian state of Bahia. These relations both transform and are transformed by the social morphology of the group, generating new skills, mobilizing and organizing material flows and revealing new operational sequences.

Brazilian Anthropology as seen in ABA data for the Global Survey of Anthropological Practice. From an imaginary nation to a defense of rights

Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology

The article explores the characteristics of Brazilian anthropology identified by analyzing the response of more than 300 Brazilian anthropologists to the GSAP. Even if there is a movement towards internationalization, the data shows that majority of anthropologists in the country conduct research in Brazil and are employed by universities. The article argues that the thematic foci most often chosen are due to the anthropologist's public role in combining research with defense of rights since the 70’s. Social or cultural anthropology are the topical expertise of the majority of Brazilian anthropologists, followed by ethnology. The thematic foci most often cited are: ethnicity and social identity; urban anthropology; political anthropology; Indigenous peoples and colonialism; gender and sexuality. In a Brazilian society where democracy is not consolidated, an anthropological study rarely fails to raise a political debate, either among anthropologists, as it was the case for racial...