Tomás da Cunha Tancredi (2024)
- Research Title: Autonomy and sovereignty in northern Amazonia
- Supervisor: Dr Natalia Buitron
Contact
About
I am a Gates Scholar and a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. I hold a five-year degree in Clinical and Social Psychology, and I have training in Lacanian psychoanalysis. From 2016 to 2018, I worked within a government transitional justice project on state violence, using audiovisual memory practices and intercultural psychoanalytic clinical work with people affected by state violence. Between 2016 and 2019, I returned to my training in Indigenous ethnology (UFRJ) and Visual Anthropology (Cinema School Darcy Ribeiro). From 2019 to 2024, I lived in Roraima, in northern Brazilian Amazonia, working for three years with UNICEF alongside migrant and Indigenous populations in contexts of land dispossession and illegal mining. From 2023 to 2024 I worked on Indigenous rights strategies, climate change, and Indigenous politics for the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR).
Research
During my master's, I researched the topic of indigenous suicidè in context of dispossession. My current research explores indigenous politics in the northern Amazon (Guiana region). By describing individual and group Autonomy, I seek to understand how the perspective of body and space relates to indigenous social movement forms, from village conviviality to non-indigenous institutional politics. Building on recent debates inspired by Amerindian thought, this study aims to nuance our understanding of interconnected concepts such as asymmetrical relations, sovereignty, dependency and freedom. Within a broader political framework, this study seeks to situate and contrast Amazonian perspectives on the body, space, and autonomy within anthropological debates on race, ideology, primitive accumulation, and decolonial thought.