Dr Maria Paula Prates

Research Affiliate

Bio

I am a Brazilian-Uruguayan social anthropologist who grew up in the Pampa biome in South America and was trained in Brazil (PPGAS/UFRGS) and France (LAS/EHESS). I came to the UK as a Newton International Fellowship (British Academy and Newton Fund) in 2018. I was an Associate Professor in Anthropology of Health in Brazil at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre (UFCSPA) between 2014 and 2022. I still have an institutional attachment to the Postgraduate Programme in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), also in southern Brazil, as a Collaborating Professor.

Research Interests

In general terms, I am interested in conceptions of person, body, health, life, and care relations. (Re)productive health and the Anthropocene, including midwifery knowledge, the medicalisation of childbirth and its connections to environmental devastation, as well as pollution, toxicities, and obstetric and environmental racism, are at the core of my current research themes.

Throughout my career, I have been working with and among Indigenous Peoples in Lowland South America and on a long-term basis with the Guarani-Mbyá collectives of the Brazilian far south. I situate myself as an implicated anthropologist who has personal and political commitments to Indigenous Peoples' rights in general and those of Indigenous women in particular. Indigenous 'midwives' or ‘those who bathe’, as say my Guarani-Mbyá friends, have been my main interlocutors since my bachelor thesis in Social Sciences; and, until now, most of my research projects are related to birthing practices and ontological questions concerning or raised by the encounters between biomedical and shamanic knowledge(s). Public health systems and how "culture" and "differentiated care" policies are put in practices and framed within them are also part of my research interests.

In recent years, after coordinating projects on covid-19, Tuberculosis and reproductive health, I have been working with more emphasis on health inequalities and the incommensurability/compositions of Indigenous and biomedical understandings of life and health.

The papers and the second book I am at the moment dedicated to are focused on demonstrating the intertwined connections between environmental devastation, the over-medicalisation of Indigenous women's bodies and the obstetric violences occurring in hospital settings, such as non-consented episiotomies. Through slow-pace, careful, deep, and long-term ethnographic studies, my work intends to make visible connections that only the handcraft gathering of ‘data’ alongside trustful relations in the field makes possible to grab. I advocate for grounded ethnographic theories that pay serious attention to what matters for those we establish relations with as anthropologists. Anti-colonial ethics guide my anthropological savoir-faire, accompanied by constantly reflecting on the historical colonial power practices that Euro-American universities have played in building hegemonic epistemologies.

My current projects are focused on i) long-covid and the “white diseases” in the Anthropocene (Brazil), and ii) Indigenous women, (re)production, climate change, pollution and extractivism (Argentina, Brazil and Peru).

Teaching and Research Interests

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 and racism to pollution and mining in South America.

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).