Corporeity, Image, Engulfment and Alterity: Mbyá-Guarani Communication in Facebook

The Mbyá-Guarani indigenous communities located in the municipalities of Estrela Velha (Tekoá Ka’agui Poty) and the Salto do Jacuí (Tekoá Porã) in Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil, use the social network Facebook as a special means of communication. In an ethnographic research (Geertz, 1989), carried out between 2014 and 2015, in these villages and in Facebook, the established communication processes with other indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, such as engulfment, are highlighted (Kusch, 1986). We emphasize communication through alterities in cultural relations, the abundant presence of the body evidenced through narratives constituted by images, and the sacred name in the constitution and mode of communication of these Guarani communities. We also studied the re-signification of the sense of objects as the smartphone and how alterities affct and are affcted by the relations, stimulating the recovery of ancestral processes of alterities, which are conformed in a phagocytosis of knowledge.