International Symposium
Indigenous Atlantic
University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo
Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Santos
Guarani Tekoa Mirim Village, Praia Grande
March 11-13, 2026
Support: EDGES Project
Organizers:
Susana Matos Viegas (ICS-ULisboa, EDGES)
Valéria Macedo (UNIFESP)
Marta Amoroso (USP)
Maria Inês Ladeira (CTI)
Thiago Mota Cardoso (UFAM/EDGES)
Organization: EDGES, CEstA, CTI, LINDI - Kaapora Chair/UNIFESP, BNDS / FAM
Locations:
March 11 – USP - LISA (morning) and CEstA (afternoon): Rua do Anfiteatro, 181, Colmeia favo 8, Cidade University, São Paulo - SP
Day 12 – UNIFESP - Technological Park: Rua Henrique Porchat, 47, Vila Nova neighborhood, Santos - SP
Day 13 - Tekoa Mirim Village - Rua Serra da Leoa, s/nº, parallel to the Governor Mário Covas Highway (Padre Manoel da Nóbrega), Praia Grande - SP
Presentation:
This symposium aims to bring together indigenous and non-indigenous researchers to reflect on territorialities, meanings, and relationships involving the sea and indigenous peoples who currently inhabit the long Atlantic coast of Brazil. Contrasting the modern view of landscape as an external entity destined for contemplation and/or of land as soil destined for extraction and occupation, the symposium calls for reflections on the Atlantic and its territorial borders or, for some peoples, its folds with other cosmic levels. This implies, first and foremost, addressing the multiplicity of lives in the landscapes of the Atlantic Forest, the wetlands, the confluences between rivers and the sea, the passages from the sandy land of the plains to the fertile land of the mountains, the crossings of highways and goods in tourism and ports, and the multiple ways of conceiving the ocean neglected by a historiography on the Atlantic marked by conquest, domestication, and slavery. What we call the Indigenous Atlantic serves as a counterpoint to the framework of research on the Atlantic as a "civilizational" space, and complements, in a reverse (and not an opposite), the studies on the Black Atlantic that, since the 1990s, have been bringing to the scene the violence of the displacement of lives across this ocean.
By reflecting on the Indigenous Atlantic, we want to address the invisible landscapes of the Atlantic, also seeking its invisible dimensions. Specifically, we will focus on the connections between the Atlantic Ocean and the forest that bears its name, as well as the multiple ways of life that connect it on land with rivers, mangroves, and other edges, composing cosmo-existences and cosmopolitics. As Guarani ethnology points out, increasingly strengthened by Guarani researchers, the Atlantic Ocean is a crossing point of intensity to other time-spaces, connecting sea and sky. And, also, the Atlantic Ocean as a mass of sand that borders the Brazilian coast and has been appropriated as a territory for leisure, consumption, and contemplation, but which is, first and foremost, a place of lives marked on the earth by light beings, such as crabs and other inhabitants of the subsoil. What kind of Atlantic Ocean will this be from the indigenous point of view? This is the general question we bring to this symposium.
Following up on a long and long-standing anthropological debate, the symposium mobilizes the perspective of bodies in motion, which enable and find parts of land in the Ocean, where the islands constitute landscapes that report ontologies at the opposite extreme to what the Atlantic of globalization and conquest has served the history of the last centuries. For indigenous lives, this Atlantic of globalization has meant invasion, destroying or threatening their ways of life. But there is still much life and knowledge there where the gaze of globalization does not reach or does not recognize.
Born from a reflection on the indigenous Atlantic coast in the Northeast, the symposium aims to promote dialogues between Guarani visions and experiences on the shores of the Atlantic with those of peoples who live in the Northeast. A second symposium is also planned in Manaus in 2027 to integrate the visions of the Atlantic from the point of view of indigenous peoples of the Amazon, namely the Upper Rio Negro. Starting from a publication by Viegas and Cardoso (2024) on the landscapes of the Indigenous Atlantic in the Northeast, and referencing the work of Maria Inês Ladeira (2007) and Valéria Macedo (2009) on the Atlantic coast for the Guarani, the symposium aims to expand, multiply, and foster a dialogue between non-Indigenous anthropologists who are involved in these relations with the Indigenous Atlantic and Indigenous researchers from the universities UNIFESP, USP, and UNICAMP.
The symposium is organized into five thematic axes that promote Roundtables, with presentations of up to 15 minutes followed by debate.
March 11th, USP, LISA Auditorium, 9:00 AM
Opening with Susana Matos Viegas (ICS-Ulisboa) and Thiago Mota Cardoso (UFAM)
Panel 1, 10:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Water in the Atlantic Forest (USP)
Moderator and discussant: Anaí Veras Brito (PPGAS/USP)
Carlos Papá (Selvagem, Projeto Escolas Vivas): Nhe’ēry – the Atlantic Forest as a place where our