Pessoas e Plantas em um Mundo de Pontas: uma crítica feminista e decolonial aos estudos de povoamento inicial das Américas

Abstract

In the 1980s, feminists drew attention to the fact that when researching elements of material culture, archaeologists worked with a paradigm in which the sources used to deduce their implicit notions of gender arrangements in the past were rarely made explicit. Based on a binary and oppositional epistemology (nature/culture, sex/gender, female/male), public roles and different activities performed by men and women from past populations are often inferred from modern Western narratives and values. This is the case of the man-the-hunter paradigm, where man is presented as the only person responsible for hunting, an activity that would be the engine of human evolution, relegating women to collecting activities. Although these paradigms based on a masculinist view have been criticized, their legacy remains in formulation of archaeological discourses. This research seeks, through a theoreticalmethodological discussion, to analyze the Brazilian archaeological literature on past hunter-gatherer peoples, calling into question the supposed neutrality of interpretive models that privilege the analysis of projectile points to reconstruct early settlement dynamics in the Brazilian territory. Based on feminist and decolonial theoretical perspectives, it is understood that part of these investigations, of an evolutionistDarwinist nature and linked to hegemonic currents of knowledge production, reproduce dominant masculinist biases in their research. Other possible ways of formulating archaeological/scientific knowledge about the first peoples to occupy the Americas are also discussed from the perspective of traditional peoples and their relationship with plants. Finally, I hold that by incorporating counter-hegemonic practices, it is possible to build not only other archaeologies, but also other worlds.