Indigenous Livestreaming in Brazil: A Methodological Case for Reflective Distant Witnessing

Introduction

We may think of a Zoom or Teams meeting as a Livestream; however, livestreams are public-facing and not always a webinar held on conferencing software unless the meeting is simultaneously being broadcasted on a social media platform. Yet, there’s many similarities considering that the video is transmitted in real-time between participants synchronically. Therefore, livestreams have a range of definitions in the literature, and many organizations who use livestreaming, often internally disagree on what constitutes a Livestream (Faklaris et al., 2016). This chapter defines a livestream as a transmission of audio and video across a network in real-time and explores how indigenous communities in Brazil use livestreaming on Instagram as a form of narrowcasting where videos are intended for a specific public, like the channel’s followers, whom may not be from the same community as the indigenous streamer. It subsequently sheds light on how distant researchers should be witnessing livestreams. With the increased availability of internet connectivity in the Brazilian Amazon (Gabrys, 2022), Indigenous activists are using information communication technologies (ICTs) to discuss Citizenship and environmental rights (Salzar, 2006; Kissock, 2020b). Livestreaming is a relatively new method of capturing video evidence, asserting liberties, or affirming belonging to a community (Kissock, 2020c). The technology’s lineage can be traced back to the 1980s, when researchers from Stanford University pioneering IP Multicasting to facilitate the transmission of video and audio data packets simultaneously to multiple destinations across a network. Initially, they wanted to create a new conferencing system for sharing scholarly research (Robinson, 2020). Then the 1990s saw the first commercial uses for Livestreaming when in 1993, the band Severe Tire Damage performed a livestream on the platform MBone (Alfred, 2009). In the 2000s, the invention of the mp4 video protocol theoretically gave almost everyone the capability to stream video content from their mobile phones. Until recently, this was limited to individuals who lived in urban environments and were within reach of mobile cell towers, however during the 2010’s multiple societies saw a rapid expansion of telecoms companies extending their networks into rural areas. Hence, communities like some Indigenous Brazilians are better connected to the internet and are active on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Kwai, and film events and advocacy campaigns in real-time (Whitson, 2021).

Livestreaming across indigenous communities in Brazil has thus become a pastime, with the practice and its importance for cultural preservation being mentioned by the Head Brazils new Ministry for Indigenous Peoples Sonia Guajajara at the COP27 Brazil Climate Hub in Egypt. Minister Guajajara’s comments can be placed within a contextual global push for the preservation of indigenous knowledges, for example UNESCO have declared 2022-2023 as the decade of Indigenous Languages (UNESCO, 2021). Thus, livestreaming as a cultural phenomenon coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic meant researchers had to address livestreams as cultural artefacts, the pandemic also afforded distant witnesses like myself the ability to glimpse into these digital spaces in real-time. This then raises some important questions such as: How should we be researching livestreams of distant communities and how reliable or robust is the empirical data we can gain from them?