Abstract

The main focus of this study evolved around the possibility of undue intrusions and surveillance of Indigenous tribes in Brazil by way of the Muwaji Law. The Law was developed as a response to a confrontation between secular intellectuals and conservative Christians in and surrounding the Zuruwaha people of the Amazon. The confrontation led to the creation and distribution of a docudrama called Hakani that portrayed the Zuruwaha people committing acts of infanticide. Successively, after the dissemination of the film, the new Muwaji Law was introduced to the Brazilian legislature. The study was formulated around cultural activism taking place in civil society in favor of the new law. In this study the film and the practices surrounding it are used as an example of how a morally compelling argument can bewitch society into co-opting the imposition of a certain way of life. By striving for change, old discourses, stereotypes, assumptions, prejudices, and ideological biases, such as “manifest destiny” and “exceptionalism,” are leading to the cultivation and the recasting of dominant ideology. Paradoxically, cultural activism originally a powerful tool in favor of the marginalized and the dispossessed, is being retooled, providing a continuity for hegemony in a revived form.