Daniela Alarcon

Daniela Fernandes Alarcon (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2020; M.A. Social Sciences, University of Brasília Brazil, 2013) works at the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as a General Coordinator in the Department of Mediation of Indigenous Land Conflicts. From 2021- 22, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Project “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present”, at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, from 2017-18, she was a Visiting Scholar at the LLILAS Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past 15 years, she has developed in-depth studies among Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities in Brazil, focusing on territorial rights and the mobilizations of these groups to defend their territories, lifeways and collective projects. 
 

Her master’s thesis earned the Norm and Sibby Whitten Publication Subvention Award for Anthropological Monographs on Lowland South America by the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. It was published in book form in 2019 (in translation, The Return of the Land: The Land Retakings in Serra do Padeiro, Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory, Southern Bahia). Her Ph.D. dissertation, awarded Honorable Mention for the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s National Dissertation Award, was published in 2022 (in translation, The Return of Relatives: Mobilization and Territorial Recovery Among the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro, Southern Bahia).