Maria Bonome Pederneiras Barbosa

MARIA BARBOSA, then a graduate student at the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, received a grant in May 2020 to aid research on “Finding Oneself in the Loss: An Arapaso Perception of their Lost Culture,” supervised by Dr. Aparecida Maria Neiva Vila’a. The present research project concerns the Arapaso people, their conceptions of ‘cultural loss’ and its impact in their historical consciousness and in defining their bonds among other neighboring groups. This group from the Tukano language family shares the Uaup’s river region, in the Brazilian Northwest Amazonia, with another 20 Indigenous peoples interconnected by marriage through the practice of linguistic exogamy — that is, prescribed marriages between persons from different ethnic groups whose main distinctive factor is, for the indigenous population, language. In this context, the Arapaso offer a unique perspective since they tell in their mythology how they abruptly lost a large portion of their population, as well as their language and other ancient knowledge ‘ in their own words: how they ‘lost their culture.’ Thus, the Arapaso notion of loss and culture became a topic of great importance to understand their position as an exogamic group within the multiethnic Uaup’s system and sheds light on more general anthropological issues, such as conceptions of cultural property, nostalgia, and the creation of social differentiation.