Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Mutua Mehinaku & Bruna Franchetto
3 Tetsualü: The pluralism of languages and
people in the Upper Xingu
1 Introduction
The Kuikuro word tetsualü can be translated as ‘mixed,’ like a mixture of colours,
of different foods or of different sizes:
(1) tetsualü hige-i hüge kapohondu 1
mixed DPROX-COP arrow size
‘These arrows are different sizes.’
Tetsualü is also a mixture of languages and dialects, a mixture of ethnic groups
over a person’s life history. This text 2 centres on the idea of tetsualü in relation
to people and languages. The Upper Xingu is tetsualü; Ipatse Village is tetsualü;
each Upper Xingu person is tetsualü.
The Upper Xingu, situated in the southern transitional forests in the Brazilian
Amazon, is one of the two surviving Amazonian multilingual and multiethnic
regional systems and the clearest examples of small to medium-sized complex
societies from Amazonia, which preserves a long indigenous history,
spanning over a thousand years ago until the present day (Heckenberger 2001,
2009, 2011). The sociocultural formation of the Upper Xingu was constituted
in a continuous process of transformation and recreation. This region is inhabited
by speakers of all three of the largest South American linguistic groupings
(Arawak, Carib, and Tupi), as well as a language isolate (Trumai), creating
a unique multiethnic and multilinguistic cultural system (Fausto et al. 2008;
Franchetto 2011). In five villages on the eastern tributaries of the Upper Xingu
1 The Kuikuro data are transcribed using the (sub-phonemic) orthography currently used by
the Kuikuro. The correspondences between written symbols and the sound they represent
(when not obvious) are as follows: ü (high central unrounded vowel), j (palatal voiced consonant),
g (uvular flap), ng (velar nasal), nh (palatal nasal), nkg (pre-nasalized voiced velar
stop). The abbreviations for glosses in the interlinear morpheme-to-morpheme translation are
given at the end of the chapter.
2 This article is at the same time a synthesis and a reformulation of Mutua Mehinaku’s MA
dissertation, (Mehinaku 2010), under the supervision of Bruna Franchetto. Mutua is a native
speaker of Kuikuro and a member of the Kuikuro village of Ipatse, where he was born. Franchettós
linguistic and anthropological research among the Kuikuro began in 1977.