ANTI-COLONIAL ARCHIVINGS: THE MUCKER WAR ON THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER AND TRACES-OF-WHAT-ONE-DOES-NOT-KNOW

This essay unearths the Mucker War, the first messianic uprising in modern Brazil, which took place among German-Brazilians in 1874 and was left to impunity and relegated to the dustbin of history. The fratricidal conflict unfolded against the backdrop of a neo-colonial expansionism that connected Europe to the country’s southern frontier, also reflecting the dynamics of racialization and the necropolitics of the ruling classes, as well as a silenced grassroots anti-colonial insurgency: spaces-times and entanglements of which I am an accidental descendant. Though cursed, a certain communal way of caring for oneself and one’s loved ones remained alive in this southern landscape as a wandering non-knowledge, manifesting the plastic power of internally colonized people. By paying ethnographic attention to this non-historical dimension, the essay delineates another place that dislodges the known and makes possible different capacities for tuning in and storytelling, and, for the Mucker and their descendants, alternative ways of conceiving the body and the world open to the spirit of nature. The ethnographer-storyteller is one of the many entities that pulsate in the poetic-prismatic palimpsest of traces-of-what-one-does-not-know, always on the verge of becoming something else: a collective of co-presences that anthropological praxis can let rot and continue to vanish – like a way of life grafted onto nature – or that can be revived by these flashes, even without language.