INDIGENOUS TERRITORIALITY AS AN AUTOPOIETIC PROCESS

This paper investigates the intricate relationship between people-environment interactions and Indigenous territorial experiences. Drawing from psychological and anthropological traditions, we explore theoretical efforts that provide insights into the interplay between biophysical, social, and cosmological aspects of inhabiting an ancestral land. Additionally, we propose a social psycho-anthropological understanding of people-environment relations as a historical lived experience within specific landscapes, following key concepts such as Piaget’s schème and Toren’s autopoiesis. To illustrate our argument, we turn to the Tuxá people—an Indigenous group from Northeast Brazil who were displaced from their traditional land due to dam construction in the 1980s, but whose ancestral territory was reclaimed by them in recent decades as a political act. Co-inhabiting the land with their ancestors and more-than-human entities called encantados, contemporary Tuxá people offer a glimpse of a people-environment relation that is simultaneously environmental, social, and cosmological, inviting us to reconsider boundaries and recognize the entanglement of diverse beings within specific environments.