Comida auwe comida, waradzu e ressignificação: o sistema alimentar dos Xavante da aldeia Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe, Mato Grosso

Abstract

Recognizing the lack of information about the diet of the Xavante as well as the subjectivity associated with it, the topic of this dissertation is the dietary system of the Xavante who live in the Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe village located inside the Terra Indígena (TI) São Marcos, Mato Grosso, Brazil. We intend to discuss specific practices related to the diet of the members of this community, showing the limitations of purely biological and medical approaches in contrast to the beneficial relationship between nutrition and the social sciences to produce relevant and contextualized information useful to health professionals. Because the diet of a culture is a complex subject, we pursued appropriate theoretical and methodological resources to explore such cultural richness, in this case, ethnography. To organize the empirical material we used the five phases of dietary activities proposed by Jack Goody in the book Cooking, Cuisine and Class. We describe how the Xavante produce, distribute, prepare and consume their food and how they dispose of their garbage. Included is a discussion of the Xavante diet reflecting traditional and new practices as well as contemporary adaptations. The Xavante of the Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe Village, as in any other society, possess a consistent cosmology related to their diet and the way they deal with the transformations inherent to the process of social interaction with non-indigenous society. We understand that any intervention in the health education of the residents of the village should consider unique aspects of Xavante thought and its local peculiarities in order to respect their cultural values and the previous transformations that have already been incorporated by the group