Case Study

Faced with the above-mentioned reality, we will conduct a brief study, from the pespective of Prof. Egon Schaden, the first Brazilian anthropologist to study the Guaraní Indians in depth. It became necessary to recuperate these studies for their ethnological importance. Studying the kaiowá of Amabaí, south of Mato Grosso between 1949-50 and returning in 1963, na ethnographic survey can be made in one of most important moments of the colonization of this region, before the conquest of the Braziliaan west.

Concerned with question of " acculturation" the key concept of all his research, he tried to analyse the process this certain group was undergoing. Making a comparative work with other indigenous groups, he tried to study up to what point the symbols os a certain culture managed to coexist ou succumb to the inavasion of another. Immersed in a functionalist vision, he would affirm in all his writings, that the nucleus of a culture’s resistence in contact situations persists as doctrine and ritual expression while it enjoys a minimum of support in the social organization of the group. Its exercise requires a cmmunal conception of life( Schaden 1982:21).

Thus, the question would be: how a group can maintain its cultural identity without the mechanisms of its representation, a consequence of the destruction of social organization?

It is this question that we try to answer in the course of this work, from the pespective of the theories and suicides of Prof. Egon Schaden.


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