The Mahku: Huni Kuin Artists Movement and others Becomings- Huni Kuin of University

Abstract

Comments from two films, O Sonho do Nixi Pae – O Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (The Dream of Nixi Pae – The Huni Kuin Artists Movement) (Amilton Mattos, 2015) and Nixpu Pima – Rito de Passagem Huni Kuin (Nixpu Pima – A Huni Kuin Rite of Passage) (Pãteani Huni Kuin, 2015), are taken into account as a starting point for this article to deal with the challenges posed by Amazonian university settings where indigenous peoples are no longer objects of knowledge. Instead, they start to make use of the resources of academic research to create new spaces, new compositions, and new languages, in order to keep on practicing their own minor and indisciplinary science. Thus this article aims at pointing out that the conceptual autonomy of Amazonian peoples, that is, their autonomy of thought, takes place by the assertion of their own ways of investigating, of giving meaning to research, of inventing new becomings. The practice of producing collective knowledge and the constitution of groups of indigenous researcherartists reveal new fields of power for educational institutions, being these academic or not, which seem to get more and more apart from Amazonian reality. In these groups that are in and outside university, the production of knowledge occurs as a machinic agency, where the minor knowledge embraces the major as a condition for the assertion of difference, possibility of becoming, and thus does not wait to be given the rights it deserves. The old knowledge of the huni kuin rites and of ayahuasca chants are associated with Art and audiovisual apparatus, in order to create machines, machinic agencies not meant to be read or interpreted, but to engage university itself in huni kuin processes of becoming.