The Cultural Politics of Economic Development: mapping the Xikrin-Mebengôkrê political participation in environmental politics – The Belo Monte case

_{Tracking the way in which development politics are asserted among indigenous communities – through the fortification of “indigenous sovereignty” materialized on a legal and constitutional program that aims to empower indigenous institutions to accompany environmental policies applied to the infra-structural project of Belo Monte (a Hydroelectric Power Plant on Xingu river, north Brazil) –, we will try to show how new political positions have been edified and engaged by postcolonial political subjects. In the context of implementing infra-structural projects such as Belo Monte, "politics" or anti-politics (Ferguson) works through ways that would make the project viable. Project-affected people must be compensated by the social, cultural and environmental injuries caused by impositions of river flow regimes, changes in fisheries habitats and species, compromising fluvial accesses, anthropic pressure over indigenous territories, etc. In this way, money and infrastructure investments over land properties, boats, automobiles, fish and agricultural equipments – legally imposed and induced by government organisms and private institutions –, become a reality and a local exigency among indigenous communities. But, within development and environmental discourse, place is also given, in political representations, to demands of livelihood rights and traditional ways of live endanger. And, although these claims have been encouraged and articulated by NGOs and environmental social movements, a local perspective is, no doubt, identified from the indigenous point of view. How can political anthropology deals with these local/global forms of political articulation when, in some way, both are personalized and experienced by indigenous subjects? What position should anthropology hold when a knowing local organic political economy structure (the Xikrin-Mebêngôkre cultural and political economy) is crashed by a global bureaucratic political form of participation and vice-versa? Within and beyond these questions, which would be the grounds for the construction of a politic of recognition and empowerment of contemporary indigenous society?}