Contradualismos no Opará: Lideranças Tuxá no Comitê da Bacia Hidrográfica do Rio São Francisco

Abstract

This is an ethnography whose protagonist is a relationship - and aren't all ethnographies about relationships? - which, in turn, is made up of so many others, namely: among the Tuxá, indigenous people from the Bahian sertão of Brazil directly affected by the construction of the Itaparica Dam in 1988, and Opará, a watercourse that white people name São Francisco river. The reason for placing them, the relations between Tuxá and Opará, in this leading role is justified by one of their leaders, Dinamam Tuxá, who predicted the ultimate event: “If Opará dies, indigenous peoples will also die”. The analytical focus is on the participation of Tuxá leaders as indigenous representatives in the São Francisco River Basin Committee, a state agency of consultative and deliberative character responsible for the management of the waters of the São Francisco river basin. The objective is to ethnograph the efforts of the leaders to maintain Opará alived and, thus, the Tuxá themselves, since there will be no Tuxá people without Opará. That said, this dissertation is an analytical description of leadership ways of resistance. Unlike the forces in the state agency that strive to stop indigenous participation through the imposition of different types of simplifications and separations, these indigenous leadearships carry out their actions in the Commitee creating alliances and engagements, including basilar elements of the western world imagination, especially what they call white people scientific knowledge codes. Indigenous ways of resistance that are not restricted to a mere impulse of reaction, but that widen and deepen, like the river waters themselves, towards the creation of possibilities to produce concrete political actions. Therefore, it is a matter of presenting how these indigenous leaders move between the dams imposed on the ways of life of their people through actions in this water management Committee, which operates by building dams and establishing dualisms with the objective of carrying out separations between elements and relationships that are inseparable from a Tuxá perspective, among them: Politics and Science, Land and Water and, mainly, Tuxá and Opará.