“Vocês não podem parar a tempestade” : sobre Guaranis, brancos, distâncias e aprendizado

Abstract

“We are divided human beings, we have in our heads things from two worlds” say Guarani Indians. By this, they seem to mean they are or live at the same time as Indians and white men. In this way, we could certainly characterize the movement they undertake toward the Western world through the schooling of villages, new forms of political organizations or even artistic production in terms of the theory of miscegenation, that is, of its ultimate transformation. But this would be to neglect what the Mbyá tell about their experience with white men. Among them, instead, the experience seems to refer to a way of thinking inter-ethnic relations from the principle of non-mixing, keeping the difference as a "strategy" of coexistence. It is in this sense that this text seeks to apprehend the learning experiences of the Guarani with the white men. It is about what they learn walking – exposing themselves to the world. Walking thus presents itself as a mode of relation that bets on the instability of the Amerindian body as a possibility to execute a strategy of coexistence based on the principle of non-mixing.