Nomes corpos e lugares na etnografia Pirahã

Abstract

This research proposal proposes a set of possibilities through the conceptions of place, body and person among the Pirahã, a group who speak the Mura language of the Maici river basin in central Amazonia. The project was developed around the way Pirahã conceptualize their own world in confrontation with other worlds, and how these specific create very different living places. It takes as its starting point the anthropological debate about the Amerindian world in the Amazon, particularly about the practical-cognitive regimes in its result obtained thought the relationships of distance and differential proximity between men, animals, plants, spirits, minerals, objects and phenomena. As a general hypothesis, the research seeks to update the specific problem through which the Pirahã think and act in the territory, in the possibilities of the dynamics of social life and the dynamics of the cosmos to be translated into a code of bodies, names, places and actions endowed with a co- extensive mode of existence of their own. In this sense, an analysis seeks to use the conceptual imagination about the Pirahã, both from ethnographic and historical linguistic works, among others, and to articulate them with the classic themes of Amazonian anthropology, with a view to improving their research instruments. Thus, we intend to highlight the so-called "native" concepts and theories with regard to their classification systems and the conceptions about the environment, fauna, flora and other "entities", in order to qualify what modern sciences usually opposed in the form of watertight dualisms: Nature / Society; Man / Animal; Subject / Object; Body / Spirit; Village / City.