Além da pilha de corpos

Beyond the corpses pile: Pilling up women, shamanism, ethnocide and feminicide.

Abstract

In a socioanthropological approach, this article analyzes Patrícia Melo’s novel, Mulheres Empilhadas [Pilled Up Women] (2019) by means of three axis: the work of writing between the file and the document, reality and fiction; the relation between colonialism, gender, violence and shamanism; and the notions of ethnocide, feminicide and femigenocide through the imagery of “pilling up” that structures the book. Thence, theoretical references on Benjaminian’s file works, shamanism and colonialism anthropological accounts and conceptual framings on feminicide and ethnocide are mobilized. The chapters describing the protagonist’s experience with ayahuasca are considered as not to be read only as oneiric, symbolic or hallucinogenic, as they are instantiations of the cosmopolitical contact with Amerindian universes, a contact that is marked by colonial experience, from which the possibility of cure and counternarratives in face of gender violence emerge.