Media and A’uwẽ Xavante Identity: Myth, Ritual and Politics in Central Brasil

In this article, we present part of the results of a doctoral thesis. The thesis was the case study of Digital Village, a project of media education and digital inclusion with training workshops of the A’uwẽ Xavante people for the production of their own media. The research used multiple methods such as interviews, focus groups, action research, participant observation and ethnography, highlighting the use of photography and audiovisual material as methods of observation in the fieldwork. In the text, we reflect about the participation, influence and impact of the audiovisual media in the construction of A’uwẽ Xavante identity and their multiple identification processes: the personal, social, political and cultural processes. We analyze how the A’uwẽ Xavante self-represent themselves in the audiovisual media and the mediatization between the A’uwẽ Xavante and the ‘others’. In addition, we demonstrate how the traditional forms of self-representation are reflected in the media contents that they create. The results of the investigation show that the transformations of A’uwẽ Xavante identity in the media have as a basic principle the A’uwẽ Xavante mythology and its notion of person based on change.