¿Píri mu rimúli?: la narración de los sueños en el rarámuri de Norogachi

Abstract

the topic of dreams has been extensively studied by cultural and linguistic anthropologists (graham 2001; Mannheim 1991), but what we know about this social practice from the perspective of lin-guistic documentation is minimal. this paper presents three oral texts where speakers of norogachi Rarámuri narrate their dreams. the goals of this paper are twofold, on the one hand, it documents a practice that shows an important social meaning for the Rarámuri people, and from then, the second goal focuses on presenting the linguistic characteristics of such social practice. among the formal characteristics found in this type of narrative are repetitions at the lexical and phrasal level, the use of epistemic adverbs such as niráa ‘(a)like’, the use of specialized forms for narrating dreams which have not been previously described with these functions for Rarámuri, and the use of nominalized forms, which suggest that events are presented as states in dreaming narration. this paper documents a previously unattended type of narration among linguistic studies, but one that shows particular characteristics of importance for both linguistic and ethnographic description.