Etnography and translation of Krahô verbal arts

• Grant number: 18/12662-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): February 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): January 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Indigenous Ethnology
• Principal Investigator: Antonio Roberto Guerreiro Júnior
• Grantee: Ian Packer
• Supervisor: Pierre Déléage
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (LAS), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 15/00760-0 - Etnography and translation of Krahô's (Timbira) chants, BP.DR

Abstract

This project is an application for a 10-month research internship (February / 2019 - November / 2019) at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (LAS), a research center located in Paris (France) and associated to the Collège de France (CF), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Center National de la Recherche Scienifique (CNRS).The main goal of the internship is to develop, under the supervision of prof. Pierre Déléage, the linguistic and ethnographic analysis of the material collected during 12 months of field work research with the indigenous people Krahô, speakers of a Jê language. Furthermore, during this period, the work aims to broaden and deepen the theoretical and conceptual bibliographic references on Amerindian verbal arts, thematic under development in my PHD research. This material is composed of several genres of Krahô's verbal expressions (such as biographical statements, advices, ceremonial dialogues, sung myths, ritual songs, among others), from which it is possible to identify some themes, images and metaphors in common. At the same time, the material raises questions about the differences between such genres, which will be developed in the sequence of the research, such as: what are the linguistic characteristics of each of the krahô's verbal art genres and how do they relate to each other? What criteria guide the composition and performance of each expressive form? Who is the enunciator of the speech and what are the regimes of authorship in each case? What questions do the regimes of native authorship raise to the ethnographic narrative and to the ethnological research itself? Permeating all these questions, it becomes evident the need to expand the research on the theory of the translation in order to propose a poetics proper to Krahô verbal arts, an advance to which my PHD thesis is committed to pursuing. In this sense, considering this research is centred largely on the study and translation of the krahô language in its different varieties of oral expressions, the possibility of working with Prof. Déléage, an ethnologist specialized in the study of Amerindian oral translations and author of works which are reference in this field of study, will be a notable contribution to my analysis and to the final writing of the thesis. In addition, sharing the intellectual environment of the LAS and the group of Linguistic Anthropology, created and coordinated by prof. Déléage, opens the possibility to establish dialogues with other researchers involved in both groups and, through that, to enrich the discussions on expressive genres and verbal translations. Finally, the internship also aims to strengthen the relations between LAS and the Center for Research in Indigenous Ethnology (CPEI), which I am a member at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP).In the light of what was exposed, my PHD research intends, through this period abroad, to contribute broadly to the Americanist ethnology and to the studies of Krahô people, developing and consolidating at national and international levels a field of research centred on the study of Amerindian verbal arts.