“When we play the drums and dance, my happiness grows together with yours,” says Ciany Castro, leader of a Tambor de Crioula. Unlike a material good — a pie, a chocolate bar, the stock of a corporation — joy is not a fixed, limited, dividable thing. The amount of happiness grows based on what activities we do, how happy you are, how happy I am, how happy a child around us is. In the realm of economic necessity, it might make sense to talk of a zero-sum game, but the moment that we talk about another immensely important aspect of human being — happiness — the fundamental premise of game theory just isn’t true. It doesn’t even make sense.

Everything in our culture is a type of art.

A song is art for us. Dancing is art. A prayer is art. From the moment you start smoking the ritual pipe to speak with the deities, making that connection with Nhanderu—that's art.

Body painting is art. It's making a connection with Nhanderu, so it's a type of art.

Of course, there isn't a word in Guarani for "art." But everything is related to art. It's all connected to spirituality.

The Guarani people see art, spirituality, dance, and agriculture as a way of creating the beauty tat sustains and justifies the world. And all of these activities are play, a way of bringing joy into the world. If our life rotates around play instead of profit, they ask, what would it look like?

Interviews in the podcast come from various movies made by Usina da Imaginação and directed by Rita Oenning da Silva and Kurt Shaw: The Art of Play (2026) and Brincar na Roda de Tambor (2024), and The Rhythm of Liberation (2025).

The idea that politics is really about creating and defining enemies — and that identity only emerges from hate — is not inevitable. In this episode of Learning from Brazil, we look at how some children and indigenous thinkers show other ways to think about who I am, who you are; who we are and who they are. When we see that culture connects us in an almost physical way -- one girl described music as a sort of transpersonal synaptic connection between people -- and that more than one soul can inhabit a single body, we can think politics and culture in new ways.

And when we use these other frames for thinking, conflict and difference can be something much more productive and less threatening, a way to grow instead of something to fear.

Interviews in the podcast come from various movies made by Usina da Imaginação and directed by Rita Oenning da Silva and Kurt Shaw: Arte em tempos de Pandemia: Eliz (2021), Novo Futuro (2021), Mar de Liberdade (2021) and A Infância Festiva (2024).