Zoonotic divergences

: humans, rats and microorganisms in Guarani-Mbya villages in the Terra Indígena Jaraguá (São Paulo/SP, Brazil)

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of the relations between Guarani-Mbya people, rats and illnesses in the Terra Indígena Jaraguá (TI Jaraguá), a 532-hectare Indigenous territory surrounded by the city of São Paulo, Brazil. According to epidemiologists, rats are the main reservoir of leptospirosis in urban centres – a zoonotic disease with high prevalence among people living in settlements with poor sanitation and inadequate waste management. The TI Jaraguá has recorded a couple of cases of the disease in recent years, including the death of a child as a result of this zoonotic infection in 2017. Drawing on discussions developed in the fields of Amerindian studies, medical anthropology and multispecies studies, this thesis addresses the socio-cosmological and historical processes through which illnesses, health, ways of living and human-animal relations embed and are embedded in discourses and practices defining, governing and/or producing human and non-human bodies. This thesis shows how rats, their behaviours, habitats and role in zoonotic transmission are understood by the Guarani-Mbya as associated to the world and the lifeways of the jurua (whites), who are reputed to not have the capacities and knowledge necessary for sustaining a proper social life as understood by the Guarani-Mbya. On the other hand, beings like whites, animals and spirits are also forms of alterity whose capacities, knowledge and powers are integral to the production and reproduction of Indigenous sociality, persons and bodies. This thesis concludes that the ethnographic concept of bagunça (messiness)—emerging from Guarani-Mbya relations with human and non-human alterity in the TI Jaraguá—expresses a relational condition and modality of becoming-Other through which body and territories become entangled, offering a contribution for debates on transformation and difference in social anthropology.

Date of Award	2 Dec 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Christos Lynteris (Supervisor) & Cecilia Anne McCallum (Supervisor)