Becoming-afroindigenous: “so let’s do what we are”

Abstract

As a result of a reinterpretation of ethnographic material on a cultural movement from the extreme south of Bahia, this article discusses the notion of afroindígena, from a pragmatic perspective. The exercise proposed here is not to fit it into known categories, but seek to analyze it while preserving the group’s characteristic ways of doing and thinking. The concept of afroindígena would not be a model from which it would be possible to recognize a ethnic group on a natural basis for identification. Afroindígena is neither something of the order of identity, even of belonging. The concept of afroindígena would be of the order of becoming, as a means traversed by ideas, political actions, works of art and beings of the cosmos and, secondly, as an unfinished product or interim effect of encounters that involve flows of “history” and “memory”; people and techniques; a relationship of alliance between African and indigenous ancestors and the creation of sculptures, understood here as a process of self-modeling subjectivities.