Abstract
AbstractThis article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories. Analogous to the ways that speakers of many other languages who distinguish the entities that they talk to or about, the Apurinã make use of linguistic resources to establish the ways they interact with different entities. Besides these resources, the material means of mediating stories is a crucial tool to narrate the worlds of humans and nonhumans. Storytelling requires material mediation, and a specific context of plant substances. It also involves community meeting as a space of trust in order to become a communicative practice and effectively introduce the history of the people. Our sources are ethnography, language documentation, and autoethnography.
Highlights
Language can be written or oral, and may include many other forms of communication, such as images, behavior, signs, and gestures that are practiced and directed in relation to different life forms and subjective perspectives understood to exist in the world
This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia
We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories
Summary
Language can be written or oral, and may include many other forms of communication, such as images, behavior, signs, and gestures that are practiced and directed in relation to different life forms and subjective perspectives understood to exist in the world. The traditional Apurinã narratives express how things exist in the world in terms of the agency of animals, plants, and objects, and the Tsura story shows how animals are human like and do similar activities to humans, such as living in houses, taking the same medicinal plants as humans, planting, and serving food to each other. It is worth noting that as in the Tsura story, kin animals are not called father or mother, brother or sister, but grandfather and grandmother, i.e. markers of a common ancestry These terms can refer to several people, more than the two sisters’ actual birth givers The story does not say if Tsura speaks verbally or non-verbally, but for the Apurinã intuition is a very typical form of communication, and it is thought to cause certain effects in the body This includes knowing by means of specific feelings or dreams, among other corporeal sensations.
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