João Kelmer (2021)

My ethnographic research focuses on time, memory, and grief in the mortuary rituals of the Boe (Bororo) Indigenous people in Central Brazil. More specifically, I examine how ritual technologies of grief both trigger and shape experiences of time and acts of remembrance, fostering transformations in personhood while offering forms of collective reflexivity. Themes such as generational succession, life-cycle transitions, cultural identity and change, nostalgia, and the making of prestigious persons are explored as I investigate time-saturated practices of making and unmaking kinship with the dead.