Bruno Silva Santos

Bruno Silva Santos is a PhD student who works with the Guarani-Mbya people in São Paulo, Brazil. His major research interest is to draw connections between Amerindian Studies, Multispecies Ethnography and Medical Anthropology. He holds a Wellcome Trust Studentship to carry a research project which main goal is to deepen anthropological understandings of health, illness and disease issues in contexts where the Guarani-Mbya people, rodents and microorganisms become entangled through leptospirosis within the Jaraguá Indigenous Land – a small territory surrounded by the city of São Paulo. He is particularly interested in how such ethnographic investigation may unsettles colonial vestiges of epidemiological reasoning that continues to inform understandings of zoonosis.

During his Masters, concluded in the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos (2019-2021), Bruno elaborated an ethnography about the relations between the Guarani-Mbya people and small rodents – a topic poorly explored in Amerindian Studies. In this project, he was interested in understanding how indigenous perceptions and practices toward rats and small rodents could provide productive insights to understand the relationship between indigenous, non-indigenous and animals within a context highly marked by interethnic asymmetries.