A língua como preservação dos saberes Apurinã: uma análise de atos de fala na Comunidade São Francisco do Guiribé

Abstract

The Apurinã is a people that lives between the preservation of their traditions and acculturation for living by non-Indians. Their language, and their cosmology, tell us this group story over time. The Apurinã’s journey reveals their vast knowledge capable of explaining how nature works. This mythical universe full of knowledge and their spoken language as well, are being lost, because there are just some of them that still reside in small groups. The present work aims to analyze the using of the Apurinã’s mother tongue and it’s speaking at the São Francisco do Guiribé Community in the Brazilian city of Manacapuru on Amazon state, a people and laguage named Apurinã. It is proposed in this study to present the speech events and the communicative relationships between its members, phenomena that are the main mechanisms capable of creating the language in use, in which go through interactions and social relationships, considered crucial for information transferring, exchange of knowledge and language preservation . As a methodology, bibliographic surveys and field research were used based on the Ethnography of speech, a method used for ethnographic research with community participants. Within this study, we categorized two speech events in the community, in which speech acts in the Apurinã mother tongue are still practiced. The research results show that Kyynyry (or Xingane), a collective social event, has the Apurinã chant as the main source of the language in these social interactions. And the act of naming (the moment when the individual born in the community receives a name in the Apurinã language), an event still carried out in individual interactions, systematizing the preservation of knowledge among its members, contributing as a symbolic, linguistic and cultural value.

Keywords: Apurinã's Chant; Kyynyry and acts of Naming; Speech acts.