“Prophethood of the Animals”

visions and reminiscences of trips in search of the Goiás backlands

Abstract

The work throws reflections on the direction of a research, carried out exactly 10 years ago in the northeast and southeast of Goiás. Initially journalistic and photographic, guided by romanticized representations of the "daily life of the man from the countryside of Goias" that did not materialize during the trips, The experience of fieldwork gradually distanced us from both the pursuit of the idealized image and the markedly factual interest of journalists, resulting in the discovery of the ethnographic look and anthropological ways of thinking and doing science. In trying to understand the symbolic universe of a Goian farmer, his existential interrogations and his ways of representing nature in profusion, we come across the fantastic and poetic properties of what our lonely interlocutor Neco Mendonça called "the prophecy of animals", in fact. that living beings announce the world, time and its transformations. Only now, after the long journey, is the theme reviewed and analyzed, in the dialogical relationship between nature and culture that feeds the idea of ​​"sertão", always beyond. The researcher's own conversion, initially motivated by the search for his cultural origins, also becomes the object of (self) reflection.