Volume 18, Issue 1 (2022) Mediating care: Amerindian health agents across worlds, bodies and meanings

This volume has been edited jointly by the previous and the current editors. The special issue puts Indigenous health care workers in focus. Our authors span a number of countries in lowland Amazonia to bring us vivid descriptions of individuals and groups of specialists dedicated to the health of their communities. Description and analysis of their experiences requires a sensitive ethnographic approach that enables us to follow the action between and within different structures and institutions. In her introduction, guest editor Johanna Gonçalves Martín persuasively argues that the Amazonian experience of Indigenous health care workers has much to bring to the public health literature on community health workers worldwide. She and guest co-editor, Alejandro Reig, acknowledge the challenge of describing practices of care that are complexly situated, and they propose the idea of a poeisis of care as a framework for grasping the genesis of Indigenous community health worker actions. Together the papers engage history, biography, ethnography, and institutional and political analysis in creative ways to bring their subject matter into bold relief. It is measure of the vitality of the Tipití journal that we can commend this collection of papers to our readers. William H. Fisher, editor.

The book forum also published in this volume is an initiative of Tipití’s current directorial board to mark October 2022, the turbulent month of elections in Brazil. In order to offer a plurality of perspectives on the many difficulties faced in putting into effect constitutional rights to traditionally occupied land, we invited several anthropologists and lawyers to contribute to the forum. They were asked to comment on the comprehensive edited collection Traditional Peoples and Biodiversity in Brazil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Sônia Barbosa Magalhães and Cristina Adams, which brings together many authors’ contributions. In particular, we called for our invited authors to reflect on Section 3 of the book, Difficulties in the Implementation of Territorial Rights. The forum opens with a text by Samara Pataxó, an indigenous lawyer, and includes six other anthropological voices. Together, they offer a plural understanding of the interlinked causes that have led to a dismantling of the effectiveness of those rights, bringing into focus key ideas about feasible revitalization of the implementation process. It closes with a contribution by the Observatory of Indigenous peoples in isolation and initial contact, which makes a timely homage to Bruno Pereira and Dom Philips. We join our voices to theirs, to face together the challenges of the somber times in which we are living.