Abstract
Observing the Canela Apanjekra elaborations about the covid-19 pandemic and their strategies to contain the disease during the first months of virus dissemination, this essay draws a parallel between indigenous seclusion rituals and social distancing protocols. In doing so, it foregrounds native notions of health, indicating how the production of healthy bodies depends on the constant renovation of personhood through the control of the actions of non-human agents through ritualized closings. The essay also contrasts the temporality involved in seclusion rituals with the debate on the “return to normalcy” after a possible end to the sanitary crisis, enquiring how the planetary crisis posed by antropocene evokes a more systemic conception of the end of (a certain) world.
Keywords
Pandemic; covid-19; indigenous ethnology; ritual; antropocene