Amazônia and Cerrado

This research and extension initiative, developed in collaboration with Marcelo Santos Rodrigues, from UFT, and Christine Hunefeldt, from UCSD, combines ethnographic work in riverine communities in southern Amazonian Tocantins with documentary research on the eighteenth-century gold rush. It examines territory, violence, religious festivals, quilombos, banditry, human circulation, and disputes involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.

The region between Amazonia, the Cerrado, and the old gold routes allows us to observe overlapping historical temporalities: mining, slavery, internal migration, Indigenous territorialities, popular devotions, land conflicts, and local memories. The research seeks to understand how these worlds intersect in communities, festivals, narratives, and archives, bringing together colonial history, contemporary ethnography, and a critique of rigid boundaries between documentary fields and lived experience.