Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: KARINA RACHEL GUERRA BRAGA

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : KARINA RACHEL GUERRA BRAGA
DATE: 22/05/2026
TIME: 10:00
LOCAL: Google Meet
TITLE:

Frojando worlds: art, cosmotechnics and agency in the ceramic making of Kariri-Xocó women in Alagoas

KEY WORDS:

Agency; anthropology of art and technology; cosmotechnics; indigenous aesthetics; Kariri-Xocó women.

PAGES: 102
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Antropologia
SUBÁREA: Etnologia Indígena
SUMMARY:

This thesis emerges from a concern within the field of Indigenous art in Brazil, particularly regarding the ways material productions in the Northeast have been understood. Following these practices reveals the need to reconsider conceptual frameworks that separate art and utility, aesthetics and social life, and thought and technique, in order to grasp the complexity of the practices that give them form. In this context, the guiding question is: why do some Kariri-Xocó women make pottery?The study approaches ceramic making as a situated practice through which different dimensions of collective life are enacted in working with clay. Among the Kariri-Xocó, in the state of Alagoas, pottery making constitutes a simultaneously aesthetic, technical, and cosmopolitical practice, in which relationships between humans and non-humans are forged. Ceramics thus emerge as a technique inseparable from moral orientations and worldviews, constituting, in the terms of Yuk Hui (2023), a cosmotechnics that situates technical practice within a specific cosmos and moral order.The ethnographic research was conducted through engaged participation, with the researcher acting as both assistant and apprentice potter. This position enabled learning through practice, by closely accompanying Kariri-Xocó women across all stages of ceramic production. Such immersion grounded the research in experience, where knowledge was produced through the entanglement of body, technique, and social interaction. This approach allowed the operational sequence (Lemonnier, 1992, 2013; Coupaye, 2017, 2021) to be described as a lived process, permeated by aesthetic, affective, and cosmological meanings.The theoretical framework brings together authors who, from different perspectives, converge in challenging the separations between art, technique, and ontology. The notion of cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2018; De la Cadena, 2024) guides the understanding of relations between humans and other beings as part of an expanded field of existence in which multiple agents participate in world-making. In dialogue with this approach, the idea of correspondence (Ingold, 2022) emphasizes making as a relational process, in which technical gestures are forms of attention and engagement with materials. Within this horizon, aesthetic agency (Gell, 2020) and the concept of body-art (Lagrou, 2003, 2008, 2010, 2018) allow ceramics to be understood as mediating between social and spiritual dimensions, highlighting its capacity to act and produce effects in relationships. Finally, the aesthetic regime of the sensible (Rancière, 2009) foregrounds the political dimension of these practices by showing how forms of visibility and the distribution of the sensible are implicated in the production of worlds. Together, these approaches support an understanding of ceramic making as a relational, situated practice constitutive of modes of existence.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1337383 - JOSE GLEBSON VIEIRA
Interna - 1868152 - GESLLINE GIOVANA BRAGA
Interna - 1215344 - JULIE ANTOINETTE CAVIGNAC
Externo à Instituição - ARISTÓTELES BARCELOS NETO - UEA