Abstract

ARMENTA IRURETAGOYENA, Ferdinando A.. The Talk of Shadows: The Domestication of Difference among Mbyá-Guaraní Youth in Southern Brazil. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2020, n.41, pp.151-170. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.07.

The presumption of identity prescribes a naturalistic mode of identification to culture as if every social group defines itself solely by opposition to another. Based on a case of young Mbyá Guaraní (Nação Guarani do Rap) who perform rap music, I will analyze, on the one hand, the place occupied by the Juruá (non-indigenous people) in Mbyá stories and, on the other, the potential affinity between rap and the Guaraní issue. Here, music constitutes a knowledge that synthesizes the socio-territorial conflicts currently faced by various indigenous communities in Brazil and elsewhere in the world. From the ethnological literature on Tupi-Guarani groups, music (songs or dances) is a means by which to deal with others and their potential threats. The Mbyá notion of personhood employs difference as an enclave of its identification: the other (enemy, dead, deities, animals) can be constitutive of itself through a process of domestication. Based on the observations made during my transit between the village and the musical presentations, as well as through the collaborative work I conducted as the audiovisual facilitator of the group between 2017 and 2019, I will highlight the role of music as a way of prey on the other. I conclude that the presence of rap music among the Mbyá is based on a lyrical-expressive encounter, that is legible in the place that each of the cultural schemes grants to the spoken word or to the fluency with which it is pronounced. All this comprises an attempt to problematize contact, not from the plane of identity, but as a continuum between expressive forms.

Keywords : Expressive forms; indigenous rap; Mbyá-Guaraní; personhood; predation.

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