Darcy Ribeiro’s valuable gaze - Part 2: The Kadiwéu

It was among the Kadiwéu that Darcy Ribeiro carried out his first field research, between 1947 and 1948, shortly after joining the Study Section of the Indian Protection Service - SPI as an ethnologist. Darcy became known among them as Bet'rra-yegi ("Little Doctor", in Portuguese), for his supposed kinship with the Italian ethnologist Guido Boggiani (Bet'trra), who had lived among the Kadiwéu at the end of the 19th century.

Darcy's photographs are straightforward, candid, mostly well-resolved portraits. The result is a rich panel of the human dimension of the indigenous peoples with whom he lived, in which the intense fraternal relationship that linked him to his interlocutors stands out, a characteristic that defines his unique way of doing Anthropology.

Darcy said that it was with the Kadiwéu that he learned a lot about the subtleties of ethnography. In his photos, it is possible to perceive his search for indigenous intimacy, whose scope is, in his view, the condition for what he defines as the highest aspiration of Anthropology: to see the world through the eyes of the people he studies.

An anthropologist who photographs seeks to capture the permanent in the transitory, a centuries-old custom in the gesture of an instant. Darcy moves between this ideal of objectivity and the personal experience he was living. His camera click overlaps the scientific fact and the human moment.