WRITTEN CULTURE IN FRONTEIRA SUL: INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUAL PRACTICES AND POLITICAL USES OF WRITING AMONG THE KAINGANG

Abstract

Regarding the geopolitical and cultural formations of the territories and populations of the border regions of Southern Brazil, historians have posed burning problems in the history of these processes. These problems have been extensively analyzed in studies of environmental history, colonization and social movements, indigenous ethno-history, indigenous ethno-linguistics and archaeological studies. Conversely, the themes of written culture and indigenous intellectual practices seem not yet consolidated within these studies, despite the fact that it is increasingly possible to analyze them from new problems that can be posed onto the documentation and bibliography already known or to the new documentary collections that are formed in the archives. With this in mind, and considering that the studies of written culture and intellectual history need to overcome the Eurocentric view, which largely neglected, among others, indigenous intellectual practices, this article proposes a panoramic presentation of the possibilities of analysis in historical perspectives of intellectual practices and political uses of writing among indigenous people, especially the Kaingang. Based on the analysis of classic documents and texts by memorialists, travelers and ethnologists, in dialogue with articles, chapters and books of specialized studies, this study thus covers an extended period, from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, and has as its spatial cut the currently called Mesoregion of Fronteira Sul.