​Following close contacts with the Potiguara Indians, I decided, since 2006, to conduct an  intensive fieldwork in  the 32 villages of this community with the goal of implementing a research project  able to merge in an  interdisciplinary perspective History, Cultural Anthropology, and Communication Theories and Politics, describing and rethinking in the framework of an ethno-history methodology a cultural group definitively opened up to the outside while maintaining in narrative and political terms cultural representations and practices presented as very arcane and singular. This purposeful interdisciplinary  has an epistemological goal: to transform the empirical research in a new contribution to the history of communication theory and of the communication research itself  – the communication  between  anthropo-historical (so-called) traditional communities  and  the 'other' and the research in which the ‘self’, in the sense give to it by Michel Foucault, incorporates and then dominates the very invention of the ‘other’.



​Having as a fundamental part of this research the 14 months of field work and the consequent organization of a large  oral  and  visual  archive, understanding also that  the information gathered  from historical sources  and oral anthropology was widing the invention of a constructed idea of past, I sought to clarify the distance between this past and the present of a  community  whose culture is invented and re-created as a sort of ‘folkloric’ representation progressively more open to the Catholic festivals, the school and the many  tourists,  the three  social and institutional intermediaries constraining the idea of Potiguara culture to be updated. Crossing systematically historical documentation, chronicles, old maps and that huge  archive build up from the interviews  with chiefs, shamans, healers  and several other candidates to the Potiguara political leadership, it was possible to understand the process of invention of their idea of land, social milieu, and mainly present-day cultural manifestations and practices that are preserved through a long term antropo-historical process associating colonial legacy and its survival and political promotion in the present Potiguara cultural discourse.