QUANDO TRADUZIR SE TORNA UMA TAREFA DIFÍCIL

COPYRIGHT BY KADIWÉU E O DESENHO “ROUBADO"

Abstract

In this article, I propose to reflect on the encounter between some Indigenous and non-Indigenous conceptions of Ejiwajegi/Kadiwéu designs, when they underwent the copyright registration process to be printed on decorative tiles for the walls of a complex of buildings in Berlin, Germany. In this historic event that took place in 1998, knowledge and practices from distinct cultures engaged in a difficult process of translation: the Ejiwajegi/Kadiwéu, the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI), the Yellow Neighborhood Housing Association, the German Institute for Urban Research and Structural Policy, and the Brasil Arquitetura firm in São Paulo, São Paulo. By describing and thinking about what happened, I aim to reflect on how different beings see “the same things” differently, while at the same time seeing “different things” in the same way (VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, 2007), putting pressure on the translational equivocalities of both the “object” and the “means of observing the object,” by the parties involved with whom I had contact during my doctorate, carried out in the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo, between 2013 and 2017. The outcome of this story is not very different from what we generally face: the perception that the closer we get to Others, the closer they seem to us, even though they remain distant.