Images of power: xinguano politics in ethnography

Abstract

This article reviews the ways indige-
nous leadership has been described in the ethno-
graphies of the multilingual ensemble of the Upper
Xingu (MT, Brazil). The analysis points out to an
opposition between works that delineate a hierar-
chical and centralizing socius and those that focus
on what could be called centrifugal vectors of the
local political process. Even considering that the-
se different views could correspond in some way to
different ethnographic realities – as in Carib and
Arawak perspectives, for instance - the opposition
is considered here mainly as a product of different
theoretical premises. The aim of the present work is
neither to elect the “truer” description, nor to pro-
pose an alternative description of xinguano politics,
but to articulate these etnographies with the the-
oretical premises they are drawn from and, at the
same time, to stress the need of a constant revision
of the anthropological language by confronting it to
natives’ practices.