Fabiana Maizza is an assistant professor in anthropology at the Federal University of São Paulo.
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Among the Jarawara, snuff is more than a daily ritual—it’s a source of pleasure, power, and connection, shaped by the care and agency of women.
By Fabiana Maizza in Philosophy | English
More about this author
Fabiana Maizza is an assistant professor in anthropology at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Brazil. She obtained her Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of São Paulo (Usp) and a master of arts from the University of Nanterre (Paris X). Her current research focuses on relations between humans and cultivated plants, as well as on gender relations among the Jarawara. She has published various articles on female agency, feminist politics of life, ecology and feminism, and human-plant relations. She is an associate researcher at the Center of Amerindian Studies (CESTA) at the University of São Paulo and a member of the Societé des Americanistes (Musée du Quai Branly), Paris.
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Treasures of the Forest
Jarawara Women and Plants They Carry
Chacruna | January | 2022
Maizza meditates on snuff in the life of Jarawara women, and how it represents significant concepts affecting their daily life, particularly the active tasks of carrying and taking.
Some Thoughts About Gender in Amazonia
Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online | 2018
Based on the author’s ethnographic research with the Jarawara, speakers of an Arawá language inhabiting the middle course of the Purus River in Brazilian Amazonia, this article explores how a particular notion of the agency of Jarawara women may be linked to dream activity and shamanic knowledge.
Maizza examines the festival held when girls emerge from their seclusion at menarche, the mariná ‘ritual’ and its effects on the composition of a ‘takeable’ agent. The idea explored here is that ‘sleepiness’ (nokobisa), ‘tiredness’ (mama) and ‘beauty’ (amosa) are forms of ritual action that aim to develop (or better, draw out) the capacity of women’s bodies to be ‘takeable’ (towakama) or ‘carriable’ (weyena). This capacity is also associated with shamans. Through this exploration of the Jarawara ‘female initiation ritual’, the author also questions the public/domestic and man/woman dichotomies.
Human-Plant Relations in Southwest Amazonia
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America | 2017
Based on the author’s ethnographic research with the Jarawara people, an indigenous society in the Southwest Amazonia, the article explores the idea of thinking kinship as persuasion.
Among the Jarawara, children can have more than one father, which is well known in Americanist literature, but there would exist as well an original practice what we could call “multi-maternityˮ. The Jarawara can have diverse parental relations—some of their children are human, while others are plants. This occurs in a system of raising (nayana) in which children and plants are raised by a father and/or a mother who are not their “biologicalˮ parent—and sometimes do not even form a couple. This system takes place through a “seductive agencyˮ that both humans and non-humans can mobilise.
In this article Maizza examines how Jarawara kinship, like other aspects of the Amerindians’ worlds, evoke a multiplicity that destabilises our concept of sexual reproduction and associated parenthood, and query our man/ woman dichotomy.Publications by this author
Espaco e Relacoes de Afinidade Entre os Jarawara da Amazonia
Nankin Editorial | January | 2000
In this study (written in Portuguese), anthropologist Fabiana Maizza studies the world view of the Jarawara ethnic group. In five chapters, she interweaves accounts of their “dangerousˮ cosmography with scenes from their contemporary life.
