Fashion and its decolonial teaching acting as enchantment technologies, preserving indigenous clothing nowadays

Abstract

This article seeks to broaden the conceptualization of the dimension of dressing by addressing indigenous clothing as vehicles of symbols, traditions and identities. Indigenous clothing also are part of the (re)existence cultural process, on societies that have undergone colonial processes of genocide. As an ethnographic approach, we will address the production form and representation of the clothing from the Marajoara and Xavante peoples, as well as the necessary adaptations to the urban context. And then place them in opposition to the constructions of the meaning and symbols consolidated in non-indigenous subjectivities, from the colonizing perspective. Through bibliographic research, image collections, oral reports collected in field research in villages and throughout the classes of the Pluricultural Fashion course, at the Ewà Poranga School, we intend to expand the understanding of original clothing and the teaching of pluricultural fashion as decolonial and anti-racist tools that are part of a set of ‘technologies of enchantment’ for the maintenance of the existences of indigenous cosmologies in contemporaneity.