The Enunciative scene in the nomination of indigenous people:

The case of Davi Kopenawa

Abstract

Abstract: The history of Brazil is marked by a continuous process of silencing the culture, language, and religion of native peoples. Even after more than five centuries that separate the facts arising from the first contacts between the colonizers and the indigenous peoples, a system that impedes the free cultural manifestation of indigenous peoples persists. One of the forms of this domination involves choosing a name to designate individuals in indigenous communities, without taking into account how the nomination operates according to the culture of these peoples. This article is based on the analysis of the process of naming and renaming according to the biography of Davi Kopenawa, an indigenous activist for the rights of Amazonian peoples, having as corpus the book co-authored with anthropologist Bruce Albert called A fall from heaven: Words of a Yanomami shaman (2015). For the analysis, the methodological theory of Eduardo Guimarães (2018) will be applied to establish the enunciative scene from the semantic crossings that run through institutions and enunciators. In conclusion, it was found that the silencing (cf. ORLANDI, 2008) still instituted by the Brazilian State implies in determining the places of saying that the indigenous people are inserted, constituting them as enunciators in a relationship of alterity with the enunciators and submitted to western/dominant culture.

Keywords: Indigenous people; Nomination; Enunciative Scene; Silence.