Painting and dressing: the indigenous second skin

Abstract

Body painting, for most of the indigenous people who practice it in Brazil, symbolizes a second social and cultural skin, loaded with different effects and meanings, ranging from ethnicity to ethnicity. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze the people and the bodily paintings of groups that take this act as a major expression of their arts, also understanding the practice as a very peculiar type of attire; and with emphasis on the indigenous people of the Cerrado. In this sense, it is understood that the art of dressing for the indigenous is something beyond beauty, but also seeks for it incessantly; is something far, far beyond the cover of shame, but it can also have that intention in occasional, ritual or even everyday situations, which varies from people to people, from culture to culture, from specific contact histories; is something beyond the cover of the cold or the cooling off in the heat of the long dry times of the Cerrado, and the heat certainly cast the indigenous habitus of being routinely more naked than dressed.