The Ethnofootball of Brazilian Indigenous Women

Abstract

Indigenous women’s ethnofootball represents important social changes in behaviour and an achievement for them in Brazilian society. It is a phenomenon embedded in networks of interdependencies or figurations of events that are intertwined in broader historical processes. The aim of this article is to contribute to the debate about indigenous women in ethnofootball in Brazil. This expression incorporates the mimetic representation of ancestral games and European football. The mimetic concept is based on anthropologist Michael Taussig and sociologists Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning. Such mimetics can be observed in the trajectory of women’s struggles in the conquest of different social spaces and in ethnofootball, in a society that still insists on the opacity of indigenous women, sportsmen and sportswomen in Brazil. The method of this work was based on content analysis and information obtained through historical research publications, and ethnographic and journalistic data. Indigenous women face the same precariousness as their men partners, and yet they must fight not to be subjugated in this practice. They must break even more barriers to achieve a resilient female identity in ethnofootball, for at this point, these women still struggle beyond the men who play the sport.