Dr Maria Paula Prates

My first book, Of Instability and Mbyá Affects: Pacifying Relations, Taming Others, published in 2019 by the UFCSPA - University Press, addressed the way the Guarani-Mbyá produce differences and alterities between the living and the dead, the men and the women, the Mbya and the Juruá ("whites") throughout six chapters focussed on affective states, bodily substances and women everyday lives. Narratives and embodied knowledge of a generation of three beautiful Indigenous Guarani-Mbyá women, Pará, Kerechu and Yva, were the main sources of inspiration. These three friends-interlocutors welcomed me in their villages for years, and I continue to go to enjoy time with Yva and her family wherever possible. Pará and Kerechu, Yva's mother and grandmother, have passed away in 2017 and 2023, respectively.

I aim to publish my second monograph in 2025, which focuses on the Indigenous women's understandings of body-territory and explores the extractivism of vitalities from both Earth and women's body fleshes relating obstetric violence to pollution and mining in South America.

In recent years, after coordinating projects on Covid-19 and Tuberculosis among Indigenous Peoples and joining the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene research project at UCL, I have been working on health inequalities and the incommensurability/compositions of Indigenous and biomedical understandings of life and health. I'm currently writing papers that demonstrate the intertwined connections between environmental devastation, the over-medicalisation of Indigenous women's bodies and the "obstetric violence" occurring in hospital settings, such as non-consented episiotomies. Despite structural and systematic colonial violence, it is worth mentioning that for the Indigenous women with whom I work, it is crucial to live with joy and try to postpone the "end of the world" while caring for their children and grandchildren. They are a sign that things are still going well. I'm coordinating projects in and with Indigenous peoples' inhabitants of territories that today are geopolitically conceived as Argentina, Brazil and Peru.

Beyond academic work, I'm the designated coordinator of a team in charge of comprehensive technical reports to identify and delimit three Guarani-Mbyá territories for the Indigenous Peoples Foundation (FUNAI), Brazilian Government, and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The team counts on environmentalists, anthropologists, cartographers and Indigenous leaders. It started in 2009, and the study is still ongoing.

Furthermore, between 2022 and 2023, I coordinated a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers working on a comprehensive technical report on Indigenous women's sexual and reproductive health in Brazil for the Centro de Culturas Indígenas del Perú (CHIRAPAQ) and The Continental Network of Indigenous Women of the Americas (ECMIA). This is part of an ongoing study also encompassing Peru, Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico in partnership with the United Nations (UN).

At the University of Oxford, I teach on the MSc in Medical Anthropology and convene the Anthropology of the Body paper.