The Stories of the Others

Abstract

As many other Amazonian indigenous peoples, the Aweti – a Tupi-speaking people who live in the upper reaches of the Xingu River – habitually name a specific kind of narrative, which we usually call myths, by an expression that could be translated as “stories of the ancient people”. Most of the time, however, they simply call them “stories” or, more precisely, tomowkap, which literally means “something that orients”, tales about an event that may have happened at anytime in the recent past or even in the present. This article is an attempt to explore the epistemological and ontological implications of this indiscernibility between myths and other kinds of narrative. The assumption here is that this may tell us something about the way the Aweti think, not only in what concerns the nature of what we call myth, but also about the nature of knowledge one can have about the world and, furthermore, about the nature of the world itself.

Keywords

• Myth
• Aweti
• Upper Xingu
• Knowledge Theory
• Ontology