Luiz Paulo Garcia Bittencourt

In today’s world, the reshaping of sociopolitical forms is inseparable from the colonial dismantling of Indigenous systems and their forced incorporation into nation-states marked by inequality. This research examines Indigenous social reforms through the case of the Deni, an Arawá-speaking people of the Juruá–Purus interfluve in southwestern Amazonia, Brazil. Two major reforms stand out. The first brought together formerly warring totemic groups through the Bani Vadanaha ritual, creating mixed-clan villages even as the Deni fell under the exploitative debt-peonage of rubber bosses. The second drove out those bosses, ended debt slavery, and replaced it with asymmetric but non-exploitative partnerships with NGOs. It also marked the decline of shamanism and the rise of elected new leaders who mediated with state and NGO actors. Ritual anchored the first reform but was abandoned in the second, when political life shifted to association assemblies. Now, after two decades, the Bani Vadanaha is poised to return through the very institutions that displaced it, this time supported by state cultural policies. These shifts highlight the Deni’s creative indigenization of external political forms. They show how Indigenous peoples reinvent politics at the intersection of rupture and continuity—inviting us to rethink what political life can be.