Tupi Guarani: entre usos e exegeses

Abstract

The recurrence of the word “conflict” in my fieldwork notebooks and variations of the word in expressions such as: “there is much disunion” and “there is no more peace” are the starting point of this essay conducted among Tupi Guarani families who live at the Piaçaguera indigenous reservation, at the southern coast in São Paulo State. Every time I returned to Piaçaguera, indigenous people told me that “a lot of things had changed”, mentioned, many times where each relative had gone. These comments show my interested in meeting certain persons, but also points to the movement of incessant collectives decomposing and composing. It is worthy to mention that conflicts – that which synthetizes the idea of rupture and the reordering of relations, as a consequence – far from being taking as negative, instead I understand the conflicts as a mechanisms of social construction. In this essay, I will describe the uses of ethnonyms. The Tupi Guarani people did not accepted a name given by non-Indians or other indigenous groups. Instead, they teach us that they are Tupi Guarani. Besides, considering the native speeches, the ethnonyms reveal some elements of the indigenous thought. But not only because the mixture, involved in marriages, is the condition of possibility Tupi Guarani and reveals the tension “between”.