Bororo

Livro " Etnografia e iconografia nos registros produzidos por Hércules Florence durante Expedição Langsdorff na província do Mato Grosso (1826-1829)", de Sonia Maria Couto Pereira, publicado em 2016, com Prefácio de Jorge Eremites de Oliveira.

Investigaciones en el oeste brasileño, con poblaciones infantiles, Guaraní, Kadiwéu, Bororo y una experiencia de campo con la comunidad Mayo, al norte de México, con observaciones participativas, entrevistas con las familias y dibujos de los niños, indicaron semejanzas y diferencias entre los diversos grupos étnicos. En el centro-oeste brasileño fue posible notar conflictos en la construcción de la identidad Guaraní, Bororo, una integración y una homogeneidad mayor entre los Kadiwéu. Sobre los Mayo de México, los ritos practicados se encuentran repletos de sincretismos: por una parte está la religión católica y por otra está la adoración de la naturaleza, y la presencia de ambas partes se junta durante el rezo, el canto, la danza, la vestimenta etc., muy diferente de los grupos brasileños.También indican conflictos en la construcción de la identidad infantil. Palabras clave: Guaraní, kadiwéu y bororo; mayo; identidad infantil indígena.

C-Level essay presented to the Dept,. of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology of Uppsala University. The essay deals with the environmental consciousness, spiritualisation of the environment, and the aesthetisation of the pastoralist specialisation of the Wodaabe people (a group within the Fulbe ethnolinguistic complex). Supervisor: Sten Hagberg.

Das System von Mythen, welche die ethnologische Forschung in einer Kulturgemeinschaft oder einer Kette, einem Netzwerk verwandter Kulturen erforscht, ist Teil eines kulturellen Wissens, das von vielen geteilt wird, in Praktiken verkörpert ist und auch die materielle Kultur prägt bzw. von dieser geprägt wird. Dies zeigt sich etwa in den Gebrauchsobjekten, der Architektur und der Gestaltung des Lebensraumes, oder in den Kulturtechniken, wie Jagd, Küche, der Herstellung von Artefakten wie der Töpferei oder der Metallkunst. Die erzählten und vom Ethnologen aufgezeichneten Mythen sind also nur die Spitze einer reichen Tradition mit ihren symbolischen Formen (Mythos, Sprache, Technik und ethnischen „Wissenschaften“).  Im Folgenden werde ich mich auf die aufgezeichneten Mythen konzentrieren und dabei die Arbeiten von Lévi-Strauss als Ausgangspunkt nehmen. Sie betreffen eine Sammlung von etwa 800 indigenen Mythen der Amerikas (mit den Varianten fast 2000) und die zum Vergleich herangezogenen europäischen und fernöstlichen Mythen. Lévi-Strauss hat ihnen viele Jahrzehnte seiner Lebensarbeit (von Anfang der 30er Jahre bis in die 70er Jahre des 20sten Jahrhunderts) gewidmet.

Publié dans le n°214 de la revue L'Homme (avril-juin 2015), cet article se propose d'approfondir et de nuancer la notion de dualisme organisationnel dans les sociétés dites traditionnelles à partir des pistes émises par Claude Lévi-Strauss dans son ouvrage Anthropologie Structurale I. Par un renversement de perspective, se pourrait-il que le dualisme soit la face trop évidente d'une structure sociale bien plus profonde, le triadisme ?

The opportunity of exhibiting in a Bororo village in Central Brazil the film Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness (1931), and translating into Portuguese this typical travelogue and widely considered to be the first documentary with synchronized sound, led the authors to analyze visual images on the Bororo society made in the first decades of the XX century. The article focuses on how visual images - films and photographs - frequently show the intentions of the author and on the other hand may enhance memories and create a particular relationship with the past and history of a people.

The goal of this paper is to prove that in the Romanian folk myth on the parallel world (named Tărâmul Celălalt - The Other Realm) survive elements from the prehistoric imagery. First and foremost, the mythological material concerning the Other Realm  must be separated from that describing the Netherworld. Then the remaining fairy tales should be classified. For the purpose of present study, I limit the number of criteria  used to define the Other Realm only at five, namely:
1- entrance through a precipice (with variants to take into consideration);
2- in the parallel world always exists a time distortion, usually 3 days=1terrestrial year; the time that the hero is allowed to spend there is always limited and, as in Voyage of Bran, the return home could mean his destruction;
3- the women have a much more important saying in that part of story than in the episodes happening in our dimension;
4- the hero - be it a man or a woman - has a specific goal to attain to: to find magical items, get a wife or, simply, to get rich;
5- when the fairy tale is in fact describing a path to an archaic initiation, by the end of it the hero change his aspect so it is hardly recognized by his own kin.
The second goal is to establish - may it be in a relative way - the age of the myth about the Other Realm .  I compare the fairy tale no. 8 in the collection of Petre Ispirescu with a bororo myth. Both have a hero that is abandoned in the wilderness, is partially eaten by prey birds, just to be brought back by the same bird. In both cases the heroes bring home magical artifacts and have their revenge killing a few relatives.
A detail in the Romanian story is that a giant snake threatens the chicks of a mythical bird. This detail, and the fact that bororo people live in a stone age society  can date the main passage of our tale in Neolithic Age, at latest. I follow the track of snakes and birds imagery from Precucuteni Culture to Provincial Dacia; of greatest interest is the treasure found at Lupu in 1978.
The final part of the study focuses on how the initial story evolved to its present form. In conclusion, I argue that even a small fragment preserved from the archaic thought is of outmost importance and ought to be studied.

The opportunity of exhibiting in a Bororo village in Central Brazil the film Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness (1931), and translating into Portuguese this typical travelogue and widely considered to be the first documentary with synchronized sound, led the authors to analyze visual images on the Bororo society made in the first decades of the XX century. The article focuses on how visual images - films and photographs - frequently show the intentions of the author and on the other hand may enhance memories and create a particular relationship with the past and history of a people.

Boróro, the sole surviving language of the Bororoan language family, presents a number of consonantal alternations throughout its inflection paradigms. In this paper I offer a rule-based description of Boróro consonantal alternations that differs substantially from earlier accounts of the same facts, which suffer from inconsistencies and do not account for all the data. Moreover, I show that my description is compatible with data from a sister language (Umutína) in that the rules required by my analysis correspond, in all likelihood, to sound changes that occurred historically in Boróro. I also hypothesize that Proto-Boróro lacked a series of glides and that Boróro might have had word-initial stress at an earlier stage.

RESUMO: Este texto propõe reenquadrar a "autorrepresentação" a partir de uma nova perspectiva: como um novo objeto de representação do campo museológico, isto é, um meta-objeto de formas socialmente reconhecíveis, derivado de uma específica tecnologia social, cuja lógica de operação e efeitos práticos dos seus possíveis modos de uso ainda reclamam por investigações mais detalhadas. Isso será feito por meio da análise da participação dos curadores bororo da aldeia de Meruri, do Mato Grosso, vinculados ao Museu das Culturas Dom Bosco, da Missão Salesiana, no processo de formação do Museu de História do Pantanal (Muhpah), da cidade de Corumbá, Mato Grosso do Sul. A partir de parcerias colaborativas situadas e contextualmente estabelecidas, foi essa rede que produziu o diorama instalado na seção etnológica da instituição que passou a representar localmente não só "a cultura bororo", como também a "autorrepresentação bororo".
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ABSTRACT: This text proposes to reframing "self-representation" from a new perspective: as a new object of representation of the museological field, that is, a meta-object of socially recognizable forms, derived from a specific social technology, whose logic of operation and effects of their possible modes of use still demand more detailed investigations. This will be done by analyzing the participation of Bororo curators from the village of Meruri, in Mato Grosso, linked to the Museum of Cultures Dom Bosco, of the Salesian Mission, in the process of forming the Pantanal History Museum (Muhpah) in the city of Corumbá , Mato Grosso do Sul. Based on situated and contextually established collaborative partnerships, it was this network that produced the diorama installed in the institution's ethnological session, which started to not only represent "Bororo culture" locally, but also "Bororo self-representation".