Abstract
Suzanne Oakdale is an ethnologist from the USA who works with the Kawaiweté, also called the Kayabi, who have lived in the Xingu Indigenous Reserve since the 1950s. She trained with Terence Turner at Chicago, and now teaches at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Her research focusses on ritual and religion, indigenous contact, history, and narrative autobiography in the Brazilian Amazon. In the following interview, recorded in 2012 at UNM, the author reflects on her work, her training as an anthropologist, on Brazilian anthropology, on the contributions of the Kawaiweté to anthropological knowledge, and on their contact with Brazil and with researchers. The interview continues with questions of social agency, alterity, the construction of the person, identity, history, songs, and the role of children in fieldwork. In this work, we see Dr. Oakdale’s contributions to the anthropology of performance and autobiography, with special attention to the life of the Kawaiweté.
Keywords
indigenous ethnology; Kawaiweté/Kayabi; personhood; Suzanne Oakdale