Revista Linguística (Oct 2022)

When to say is to make kinship: contributions on the practice of economics of kinship among riverine people of the Paraense (from the state of pará) Amazon

  • Leonne Domingues Alves

DOI
https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2021.v17n1a39403
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 1
pp. 206 – 222

Abstract

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This article aims to understand how linguistic practices present in the local lexicon reveal kinship practices among riverine inhabitants of the Paraense Tocantins River region. Anchored in the fieldwork, based on participant observation and ethnographic descriptions, this work brings reflections on the idiolect of this region, where terms such as cousin, relative and friend are used to establish social relations, which can be read by theories of alliance of kinship. Anthropologists, sociologists and linguists sought to present culture as a set of practices and a set of symbols. However, language and the linguistic sign in it have the capacity to be performative in the sense of establishing factual and pragmatic relations. Since kinship is constituted by social relations of descent and / or affiliation of real or fictitious bases, and language (langue and parole), in this case, spoken expressions of their linguistic codes, it is clear that riverine language reveals kinship relations in the Tocantins River region, especially in the Igarapé Acaputeua, establishing a game that expresses itself and is created, among other things, by the terms of kinship.

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