Dizer-se Potiguara : um estudo sobre a revitalização do tupi antigo entre os Potiguara da Paraíba

Abstract

This dissertation initially starts from its author's experience with the language and ethnicity, the Potiguara people of Paraíba. The process of linguistic revitalization, which occurred in the early 2000s, following the resurgence of Old Tupi, is discussed. In this sense, we also investigated the implications of revitalizing an ancestral language for an ethnic group. There are, in its scope, three declinations when examining this issue around language — its relationship with history, with thought and, in the end, belonging. In the first chapter, it discusses the relationship between language and land, returning to the arrival of the first Europeans and the way they represented the indigenous people and the language they spoke – from the non-existence in Pero Vaz de Caminha's account to the considerations of Pero de Caminha Magalhães Gandavo –, as well as the first grammars of Fathers Anchieta and Figueira. In the second chapter, it presents how structuralism, led by Claude Lévi-Strauss, used indigenous thought for its existence by proposing the transposition of languages and thought through language. In the third chapter, we discuss what it means to say Potiguara. The Potiguara teach, regarding their use of the Tupi, that this experience is based on heteronomy. It is from this place that it can be constituted: language occupies the place of extimacy. Calling yourself Potiguara is a Potiguara way of thinking and being.