Between ancestral knowledge and women's voices: interethnic dialogues and resistance by AMISM in urban Manaus

Abstract

This research analyses the role of the Association of Sateré-Mawé Indigenous Women (AMISM) in the city of Manaus, focusing on cultural resistance practices led by Indigenous women in urban settings. It investigates how AMISM articulates ancestry, ethnicity, and gender as interdependent axes of territorial and political production within the exclusionary dynamics of urban space. The study aims to understand the strategies employed by the members to reaffirm their identities, reterritorialise cosmologies, and dispute narratives of belonging and citizenship. The investigation adopts a qualitative ethnographic approach, combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and bibliographic review. The empirical material is analysed through analytical categories drawn from applied anthropology, intersectional studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. The observed practices reveal that the city does not operate as a space of rupture, but as a territory of symbolic re-existence, where the body, word, and memory are inscribed as political technologies. The association functions as a cosmopolitical device for listening, care, and visibility, organising solidarity networks that sustain Indigenous presence in urbanity. The protagonism of the Sateré-Mawé women demonstrates that resistance occurs not only through institutional confrontation but also through everyday practices that combine traditional knowledge and political action. The research concludes that AMISM plays a key role in shaping an urban Indigenous citizenship, in which ancestry, care, and female agency intertwine as constituent forces of new ways of inhabiting the city.