A’UWE-XAVANTE CHILDREN′S SOCIETY: REVISITING AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY ON CHILDHOOD

This article aims to introduce the A'uwe-Xavante children (Brazil). Through them we enter the vast and complex universe of social relations of this Brazilian indigenous people and get to know them better. We go through the meanders of a society that has its own rules of dealing with expectations, boundaries, constraints and compromises that involve highlighting particular concepts and solutions for individual and collective challenges arising over time. This research developed between 1991 and 1996, in a period when the European/North American academic movement proposing a anthropology of children and childhood, was not yet known within Brazilian Anthropology, nor the bibliographic production was available for reference. The theoretical dialogue takes place within the field of Indigenous Ethnology studies and alludes to the potential of anthropological studies on children and childhood, still unexplored in this country at that time.