The riverside boy anthropologist and the Opará: creative ways of narrating and describing landscape, human, and more-than-human transformations in the waters and banks of the São Francisco in fractured worlds.

Abstract

Opará — river-sea — is the name given by the Tupi-Guarany peoples to the river that, since 1501, has come to be known as the São Francisco. For more than two billion years, this ancient river has carved through the earth, transforming landscapes and shaping lives and relationships. Winds, erosion, droughts and floods, sediments, diverse species, more-than-human beings, and Indigenous peoples compose its continuous existence, marked by lentic flows, without major ruptures or confinements.

This work proposes to narrate the river through my own experiences, memories, practices, and bonds, in what I call “riverside anthropology.” Beyond Western and canonical conceptual frameworks, I adopt as methodology encounters with dreams, with knowledges inscribed in the body, and with a form of writing born from diving, swimming, fishing, and canoeing.

This writing also emerges from dialogues and counsel woven through relationships with entities, orixás, chants, rites, and incorporations, as an initiate of Umbanda. The aim is to affirm life of the river and in the river without subjecting it to continuous colonial appropriations, and to refuse an anthropology that participates in the violent domestication of worlds and knowledges.