Povo Krenak

entre histórias de morte, vida e resistência

Abstract

This study examines conceptions of death among the Krenak people, articulating historical processes of territorial expropriation, funerary practices, and a relational cosmology. Based on a literature review and a theoretical-ethnographic approach, the study seeks to understand death not as an isolated event, but as a transformation inscribed within a network of relations among humans, non-humans, forces, and the natural landscape. The work engages in dialogue with Amerindian perspectivism as proposed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, not as an explanatory model, but as a critical tool to problematize rigid categories that separate nature and culture, isolated identity and collective belonging. Within the Krenak horizon, the sacred does not appear as a transcendent instance detached from the world, but as an immanent dimension that permeates the landscape, bodies, and multiple forms of existence. In this context, the notion of personhood is not reducible to an individual unit, but is composed of animic dimensions that remain in circulation even after the dissolution of the body. In contrast to the Western Christian tradition, which often associates death with moral judgment and with an afterlife dissociated from sensible reality, it is argued that, among the Krenak, dying entails a reconfiguration of presence within the world itself. Death, therefore, does not project a separate “afterlife,” but operates as continuity and transformation within the relational fabric of existence