On indigenous oral narratives: time and power relationships

Abstract

Since 1998, I realize projects with indigenous Tupi and contact with their oral narratives demonstrated how they are organized in different temporalities. The deletion of these colonial system imposed by the differences created the fiction of a universal time in History. In this paper, I analyze different times of oral narratives Tupi. For this, first, I develop a reflection on the naturalization process in the Western time and its importance in the writing of world history, enunciated by European languages, revisit the criticism of the ethnographic time and differences between time and representation in language studies. In the second part, I analyze an oral narrative "Kwarahy, Sahy, Sahy-Tatawai and fire Surui," related by indigenous people Suruí-suruí do pará, from Michel Foucault's formulations (2005) on discontinuous time and genealogy and I seek to show how historical possibilities conditions cross the cosmological time of this society.