Blood, Gender, and Politics in Indigenous View

A historical account of the key debates and ethnographies about Amerindian gender, politics, and social life would tell a story of how, in the anthropology of the region, the focus shifted from “society” to “sociality,” from models of kinship to the body to socio-cosmology, and from an epistemological concern with “social representations” to a firm gaze on “Indigenous ontologies” and “cosmopolitics.” This story is told, in part, in this chapter. But the main concern is to shift the gaze and explore Indigenous South American women’s understanding of the integral links between gender, sexuality, and land by highlighting the emerging narratives of a new generation of Amerindian female intellectuals, leaders, and activists, who have learned to use academic language to speak about their own people’s knowledge. Many choose to study rituals they have personally experienced, such as female bodily practices, childbirth, and menstrual seclusion, since in their understanding, body flows create memory and connect to a body-territory, which, in turn, sustains women’s strength and involvement in the current politics of land. Thus, the chapter provides an account of the intersections between their work and that coming from Amerindian ethnology, feminism, and queer anthropology.