A cosmopolitical education: Indigenous language revitalization among Tuxá people from Bahia, Brazil

ABSTRACT

The Tuxá people from Rodelas, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, traditionally live at the São Francisco riverbanks. Because of their historical dwelling in the place, many more-than-human relations have been established, especially with their ancestors, supernatural beings known as encantados who continue to live in the land. Nowadays, Tuxá teachers, working on a specific school curriculum, are revitalizing Dzubukuá, a language that they currently master only to a certain extent and within ritual contexts. Strengthening the relations with the encantados due to their continuous political struggle to guarantee Indigenous rights, the Tuxá have been emboldening their engagement with Dzubukuá revitalization through both the ritual communication with encantados and the linguistic studies based on a colonial bilingual catechism written in Portuguese and Dzubukuá. Here I demonstrate how Tuxá’s understanding of territoriality, inhabited along with other cosmological entities, can offer a view of Indigenous knowledge, education, and resistance in Northeast Brazil.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitics
• language revitalization
• Indigenous education
• Indigenous politics
• territoriality
• Northeast Brazil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Italics are used to stress native categories even when the words are also of common usage among non-Indigenous Portuguese speakers. On some occasions, I use the English version of them, for example, the ancestral language that translates the Portuguese category língua ancestral. On others, I resort to the native Portuguese terms, such as encantados and ciência, giving an English translation only at their first appearance.

2 Although acknowledging the existence of the term in English publications and in ecologist and ecocultural thought (Abram, 1996; Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020), the genealogy of my use of more-than-human is closer to Indigenous Ethnology of South America and other anthropological traditions (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Cardoso, 2018). In my use of it, the notion refers to cosmological and higher ontological beings other than humans, usually ancestors who are not spirits nor deceased people, but mestres (masters). Due to this reason, the Indigenous more-than-human framework can include the so-called natural world, but here it is closely related to these somewhat preternatural forces that my paper highlights.

3 Eng. our idiom, but with a change of pronominal gender that stresses its character of a native term. In Portuguese, idioma is a masculine gendered word (o idioma), but traditionally, especially when referring to ritual contexts such as the one quoted above, Tuxá switch it to a feminine gendered word (a idioma, nossa idioma etc). For this reason, whenever a Tuxá talks about a idioma (in Portuguese), they will be referring to the ritual language, which encompasses the speech uttered by encantados but also a broader semiotic framework of ritual understanding, aforementioned as their ciência (Durazzo, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001. It was also approved by a review board with the Social Anthropology Programme at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, in accordance with its institutional research requirements, and by the Tuxá Council.

Notes on contributors

Leandro Durazzo

Leandro Durazzo PhD, is an anthropologist working with Indigenous peoples from Northeast Brazil. He is a member of the following research clusters: Etapa (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil), Opará (Bahia State University, Brazil) and Macondo (Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Brazil). Currently, he is also a researcher at the Linguistics and Indigenous Languages Program at the National Museum (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). His research interests are on Indigenous Studies, interculturality, translation, language revitalization, poetics, ritual performance and territoriality.