Menire Making Movies: Participatory Video Production Among Kayapo Women in the Brazilian Amazon

Ingrid Carolina Ramón Parra, Purdue University

Abstract

The growing field of Indigenous media has contributed greatly to theorizations around digital appropriation, self-representation and political advocacy, and the importance of media to Indigenous People’s movements. However, these theorizations and scholarly works tend to primarily focus on Indigenous men’s media practices and contexts. This dissertation presents findings from the Mẽnire Making Moviesproject, a participatory media project that explores Kayapó women’s digital worlds through a case study that merges ethnographic research and onsite media training in the village of A’Ukre in the Kayapó Indigenous Lands in northeastern Brazil. This project trained 4-6 Kayapó women in introductory audiovisual production and editing and is the first project to focus exclusively on Kayapó women’s engagements with digital technology. Through a decolonial and participatory methodology, this media project centers Kayapó social values of accountability, relationality, and conviviality, to analyze how Kayapó women’s mediamaking speaks to gendered and generational dimensions of personhood through an Amazonian social lens. Drawing from literature on feminist geography, Amazonian social theory, and Indigenous media in Latin America, this project presents findings that broaden the current literature on Kayapó media by introducing the conceptual framework of accompanied media. As an analytical and theoretical framework, accompanied media approaches Indigenous media as both a product and a social practice, centering the relational dimensions of production, consumption, and circulation. Scholars and media facilitators can apply the accompanied media framework to design inclusive media workshops with Indigenous communities that takes into account barriers that can limit women’s participation like language, gender, social and behavioral norms, and other practical elements of participatory media work.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Zanotti, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Dance|Language|Agronomy|Astrophysics|Latin American Studies|Linguistics|Organizational behavior|Performing Arts|Pharmaceutical sciences

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