Kurâ-Bakairi Roça de Toco: Territory, Cosmology, and Transformation

Abstract

This paper draws on the ethnographic and reflective experience of a Kurâ-Bakairi Indigenous researcher, articulating traditional knowledge and anthropological theory to discuss the roça de toco (slash-and-burn garden) as a territorial, cosmological, and political practice. Situated within the Indigenous Lands of Bakairi and Santana, in the state of Mato Grosso, the analysis demonstrates that processes of clearing, burning, vegetal decomposition, and soil regeneration are not understood as decay in the sense of decline or ruin, but as constitutive moments of a vital cycle that integrates humans, non-humans, and enchanted beings. Within this system, the garden operates through negotiations between Tâensein (the visible world) and Todoneim mondo (the enchanted world), revealing a relational ethic of care for the land. A comparative reflection began to emerge from the encounter promoted by the Karib Alliance project, when Macuxi and Kurâ-Bakairi youth gathered at MAC USP to share cultural and territorial experiences. Although belonging to distinct peoples, both share a Karib linguistic matrix and inhabit partially comparable ecological landscapes. While the Kurâ-Bakairi live in the southwest of the Upper Xingu, in a transitional region marked by cerradão and cerrado ecosystems, the Macuxi inhabit the lavrado and transitional zones with the Amazonian forest. In this context, the garden appears as an important point of convergence. In both cases, practices such as coivara (controlled burning), combined planting of species, and the collective organization of labor reveal a true moral economy of the garden, in which production, care for the land, and social relations are closely intertwined. At the same time, the garden constitutes a central space for the transmission of knowledge. The time spent clearing and cultivating is also time for conversation, exchange of experiences, and moral formation. Collective labor integrates agricultural production, social reproduction, and cosmology, promoting the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and reinforcing Indigenous knowledge systems. By reflecting on these processes, the paper suggests that phenomena often interpreted as decay, such as vegetal decomposition or the abandonment of cultivated areas, may instead be understood, from Indigenous perspectives, as moments of productive transformation and renewal within the cycle of life. In doing so, it offers elements for a critical reassessment of Western notions of heritage, preservation, and temporality.