Tecendo alternativas ao desenvolvimento: como povos indígenas contribuem para repensar o mundo a partir da América Latina

Abstract

This master’s thesis aims to discuss how Latin American indigenous peoples drive a rethinking of development, departing from their territories and day-to-day praxis. As a theoretical-empirical research, it has resorted to literature review from indigenous and non-indigenous writers, a semi-structured interview, and a case study. Development is portrayed as a universal and unidirectional concept which relegates ways of thinking and living different from its own to a subordinate position. In contrast to these fundamental characteristics, alternatives to development have arisen, aiming for the pluriverse, whose construction resembles the deed of weaving. Indigenous peoples are protagonists in entwining this fabric of the pluriverse to the extent that their ways of life break the nature-culture divide that underpin development and propose involvement (envolvimento, in Portuguese) as an alternative to development (desenvolvimento, which can be read as des-envolvimento, meaning lack of involvement). By doing so, indigenous peoples build a future based on ancestral technologies which do not degrade nature. This is what Guarani people in São Paulo do when they conceive the Guarani Green Belt (Cinturão Verde Guarani) that embraces the metropolis and cherish the coexistence of ways of life radically different from those prevalent in the city. The case is representative of the broader experiences of indigenous peoples across Latin America, but withholding specificities, as does any other initiative that builds the pluriverse, since they are grounded on territories with diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds. The research concluded that the universality and unidirectionality that characterize development are countered in practice by the daily lives of indigenous peoples, whose technologies allow for a rethinking of development, creating alternatives to it. Besides that, the debate carried out throughout the thesis contributed in at least two ways to the field of International Relations. First, it emphasizes the theoretical and conceptual contribution of indigenous thinkers to a critique of development, one of the central concepts in the field. Second, by discussing the notions of involvement and pluriverse, it leads the discipline to open up to the understanding of international relations as relations between worlds.