Banca de DEFESA: Maryelle Inácia Morais Ferreira

BEING A WAITËRIYÕMA: ABOUT THE YANONAMI FEMALE AGENCY AND THEIR POLITICAL EXPERIENCES.

female agency; daily; policy; gender.

This work proposes a reflection on female agency among the Yanomami in the Maturacá region, located in the part of the Yanomami territory that lies in the Amazonas state. The ethnographic analysis of the research was based on the forms of political participation of Yanomami women, taking as its focus their experiences within an organization
constituted from non-Indigenous models, but intertwined with the daily lives of these women in the production of social life. Despite the challenges faced during the research, this thesis addresses the monitoring of the expansion of Yanomami women's political activities, including their strategies of resistance to the ongoing threats suffered within their territories. The results suggest that female agency is projected from everyday life into the functioning of the association, causing women to assume, without strangeness, the management of new political relations as they previously did in caring for the crops, food, the formation of the Yanomami person, and in neutralizing unknown forces. Through the construction of a political space that articulates different alterities, Yanomami women have shown skill in navigating non-Indigenous models. They face new experiences aiming for dialogue with diverse knowledge, contradicting limiting and crystallized views regarding the Yanomami as a whole.