Thiago Ávila

Department of Social Anthropology

Universidade de Brasília

Brasil

The Timbira  are six indigenous ethnic groups located in Central Brzil, specifically in the savannas in the states of Tocantins and Maranhão. These indigenous groups consist of aproximately  8.000 individuals living in six separate community lands. These groups are connected by the "Forma Timbira", a concept that expresses their shared way of life, shared ideas about sexuality, myths, rituals, spatiality of the village, language, politics and historical background. 

Despite 200 years of contact with Brazilian society, the Timbira people still maintain their cultural and social system autonomous. This paper focuses how these indigenous people are dealing with the interiorization of the epidemic of AIDS which increasingly confront their villages and territories. 

In this paper,  I wil explore the cultural and symbolic forms of the sexuality, formation of life, birthing, body and construction of the person, with an deep dialogue with the sexual diseases and AIDS, stressing how these questions are understood withn Timbira society. 

I will also show how the Timbira specific sexual system is profoundly influenced by other indigenous people from Amazon, reveling an interesting door to anthropological analyses of the ethnosexuality and the relation between culture and sexuality in an Amazonian society.

About Thiago Ávila

I am an young brazillian anthropologist currently working with Timbira people from Central Brazil (since 2001). I have coordenated the Project "Social Control in Sexual Disease and AIDS among the Timbira Amerindians in Maranhão and Tocantins. I have also worked as an adviser of the Indigenous Tradicional Medicine for the National Health Foundation of Brazil