Unsettling Gender and Ownership: Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó Menire and Relational Governance

Abstract

Unsettling Gender and Ownership: Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó Menire and Relational Governance examines how Kayapó women (menire) enact governance through everyday and ceremonial practices that challenge settler-colonial assumptions about gender, property, and environmental management. Drawing on long-term collaborative research with the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó village of A’Ukre (southeastern Amazon/Cerrado region), the dissertation combines ethnographic analysis, collaborative event ethnography, policy/document analysis, and remote-sensing data (MODIS/VIIRS, 2014–2023). Chapter 2 shows how material care and ceremonial labor, including weaving, adornment, infant care, and naming, constitute political authority by reproducing persons, Houses, and obligations that bind social and ecological life. Chapter 3 situates relational governance in the Cerrado, demonstrating how cultural burning is practiced as timed, collective care aligned with seasonal cues and parakeet nesting cycles; these fire regimes synchronize kin-based responsibilities with seasonal regeneration, challenging technocratic framings that misrecognize Indigenous burning as a driver of deforestation, rather than ecological renewal. Chapter 4 follows Indigenous women into an international policy forum (2018 Declaration of Belém+30), tracing how their interventions reframed knowledge and responsibility in the declaration process and advanced terms such as community protocols, FPIC as an ongoing practice, and commitments to data return and benefit-sharing. Across the chapters, the dissertation advances three arguments: (1) gender is constitutive of governance, expressed through embodied responsibilities rather than formal office; (2) ownership is best understood as responsibility and stewardship for persons, materials, and prerogatives within networks of human and more-than-human relations; and (3) these relational principles travel from village to global arenas, where they expose and sometimes transform the ontological limits of dominant environmental governance. The study contributes to debates in environmental anthropology, Indigenous feminisms, and global environmental governance, and outlines practical implications for policy and research, including community-led Indigenous data sovereignty and the co-creation of research protocols that honor relational authority.