Relações de sangue e afinidade: violência sexual, família e parentesco na Amazônia

Abstract

This thesis is the result of a trajectory in research that involves practical expertise, social demands, reflections and theoretical discomforts about sexual violence, family and kinship in the Amazon. As the first arguing point, I reflect on the motivations around lynching of sexual aggressors outside the families, in contrast to movements aiming protection of aggressors by their relatives, in cases of rape by relatives, analyzing the differences in resolutions between cases of sexual violence, especially against children and adolescents in Amazonian contexts. Cases of family rape are presented as a pathway to understand different meanings of “family” and “moralities” among men, women and children in the Amazon. In a complementary effort, the crossing between the supposed “intrafamilial sexual violence” and theories about incest and kinship, allow a critical approximation amongst the concepts of “rape” and “incest” in Anthropological Theory. Based on Schneider’s and feminist authors' criticisms about kinship, this thesis argues that Anthropological Theory of kinship emptied the notion of incest from dimensions of violence it embraces in different societies. In a second moment, the thesis seeks to understand the repercussions of colonial and developmental experiences in the Amazon upon sexual violence occurred in different generations of the same family, pointing out that the multiplicity of cases of sexual violence in different generations is not linked to the individual transmissions of a relative over another, but by historical and collective dimensions of how kinship was marked and re-elaborated in assimilation projects, either by kidnapping or by forced marriages. Finally, the thesis pursues to relate colonial effects to acts of governing, which produce the erosion of policies to combat sexual violence and begin to corroborate the false idea that family is the privileged space of protection against sexual violence.