Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia

In Latin America, young indigenous people have become visible subjects in ethnic and interethnic encounters. Their engagement with the global world, institutions, technology, religious ideas, and politics tells us how indigenous groups adapt, transform, and innovate in relation to wider social and cultural trends, and how resilient modes of thinking and practices are. We need to consider their transition to adulthood as a core dimension of personhood. Equally, if we are to understand young people, we must know how they shape their values, actions, and identity. So how do Amazonian native young people perceive, question and/or negotiate the new kinds of social and cultural situations in which they find themselves? Virtanen looks at how current power relations constituted by ethnic recognition, new social contacts, and cooperation with different institutions have shaped the current native youth in Amazonia. Using detailed ethnographic account of the Manchineri community, the study examines at indigenous youths' new transition to adulthood, their responsibilities, and experiences related to, for instance, urbanization, and global youth cultures.

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen is a Finnish Academy research fellow in the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki. She is also an associated researcher in the Centre EREA of Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazilian Amazonia and India and her publications include articles on notions of indigenousness, mobility, embodied alterity, shamanism, youthhood, human-to-human relations, indigenous leaderships, and ethnohistory in the Amazon.