Guarani-Kaiowá: forging indigenous identities in Mato Grosso do Sul

I propose to conduct research among the Guarani-Kaiowá populations of Mato Grosso do Sul, Central
Brazil, in order to examine the relation between land dispossession, indigenous cosmologies, and local
concepts of sustainability. The extensive dispossession of ancestral Guarani-Kaiowá land has left
thousands of families living in abject poverty, denied the means to exercise their traditional way of life,
in a humanitarian crisis that has recently been described as a genocide (Survival International 2010). The
multi-species ecologies which land affords are central to Guarani-Kaiowá lifeworlds, grounding local
concepts of the world and their place within it (Mura 2014). I argue that the challenge presented by
agri-businesses to these human and nonhuman ecologies is not only a challenge to indigenous
economic subsistence, but to the life-worlds that are articulated through it, and thus the denial of land can be
seen as a denial of cosmos.