The year was 2016, I was living in Rio de Janeiro and indigenous culture was beginning to come closer and closer to me, to us, those who had the sensitivity to let themselves be affected, eyes to see and ears to hear.
In the garden of Parque Lage, an Oca had been built. A space that dialogued between contemporary art and ancestry opened paths for other seams, other enchantments. The Huni Kuin invited us to a meeting of music, body paintings and healing. They provoked all the spectators to let themselves be affected by a collective dance, to the sound of a rhythmic beat, one after the other, celebrating the transformational power of the serpent. The bodies of the spectators, strangers to each other, formed a single new being, a single energy, in a meeting of enchantments and meditation.
At Casa da Águia, in the middle of Tijuca forest, the Fulniô welcomed us to a healing ritual, where they evoked the strength of the white jaguar, with paintings on their bodies, headdresses and maracás. Outside, the July rain fell cold, but still, the cacique led us to a collective dance, where we entered a great circle in movement, as if our bodies could provoke a whirlwind, a vortex of energy, amidst the fluids of air, water and our energetic bodies. The painting of the indigenous bodies was confused in our skin, as the rain fell on us and melted the colors of the white jaguar, as we danced white and fulniôs side by side.
In São Sebastião, the pajé of the Guarani Rio Silveira village invited us to participate in the enchantments in the house of prayer. He prepared us with rapé so we could clean ourselves and invited us to make our offerings with tobacco to the ancestral beings that accompanied us. Throughout the ceremony, between chants, maracas, flickering candle lights, Tupã, the god of lightning and thunder, appeared with his transformative storm outside the house and transformed that encounter, in the middle of the forest, into a completely timeless day.
These three experiences, among so many others possible, speak to me about our capacity for affectivity. About how, when we strip ourselves of our concepts, our rational rigidity, we are capable of letting ourselves be enchanted. These three moments are already far from my chronological time, but the enchantment provoked by the generated affect makes the experience come alive, resistant to the passage of days, as if it gained a category of aging in memory very different from ordinary facts. These memories simply do not age, they are so strong and true that I can relive the emotion felt, even now, years later.
Recently I read a text by Jeanne Favret-Saada, "Being Affected," recommended by Juliana Diniz from IDR. In the text, Jeanne reflects on the studies of ethnology and the ability of ethnologists to allow themselves to be affected by the field of study. She uses her experience in a region of northern France known for its witchcraft practices as an example. For her, it is not enough for the ethnologist to only observe the evidence, facts, or reports of people involved or not. This is not enough to understand what the object of study is about. Reports may be biased views of people averse to or fearful of an ancestral religious practice. For the researcher, the ethnologist can only understand what witchcraft (in that context) is about when they allow themselves to be affected by it. Participating and getting involved, taking a place, a position, to be so inside the object of study that they would become the object of study themselves. There is no difference between me and them, it is necessary to be one.
To be affected by something is to allow that something to transform a little bit of your own life. It's about trusting that no matter the walls you've built to strengthen your personal beliefs in the image you've constructed of yourself, you have to let yourself be affected, without fear of abandoning who you were, or simply trusting that the transformations to come will allow the essence of who you are to still remain. With each immersion into a new culture, I let myself be affected by the encounters, by the life stories of each territory. With each encounter, perhaps with affection, I can break down a little more of the walls of my self-image.
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