Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Tetsualü: The pluralism of languages and people in the Upper Xingu 141
message via songs (in Carib among the Carib, each people in their own language),
while hagaka transmits its message via speech: more specifically, in
the insults (in Carib among the Carib, each people in their own language)
aimed at the ‘cousin,’ the verbal genre typical to this festival. I noted that the
intention to insult is the same since in both rituals the insults can be made
directly or discretely (so the rival does not perceive them). The Kuikuro explain
that in the kuãbü ritual too only the cousin has the right to speak by singing
to the other cousin. One kuãbü song composition says: “if you were my cousin,
I would let you criticize me by singing.” This makes it clear that ideally only
the cross-cousin can challenge by singing. The languages only become mixed
in the interethnic festival concluding the Hagaka ritual, when we hear insults
in all the languages spoken by the guest and host villages. The same universe
of different languages and dialects is recreated every time that the villages
come together in a festival or when the messengers who invited the guests
reply in their own language to the discourses made by the chief of the invited
village (anetü itaginhu, ‘speech of the chief’), which are in his language: Kuikuro
versus Kamayurá, Wauja versus Kalapalo, Kalapalo versus Kuikuro, and so
forth.
In the songs we find loan words from Portuguese and, as we saw, the Bakairi
language, a significant element in terms of understanding the formation of
the Upper Xingu’s ritual complexity. In the primordial time, kuge, ‘people,’ like
the Kuikuro, learnt from the itseke and, in turn, the kuge passed on this knowledge
to other kuge, such that the songs were passed from person to person.
Over the course of this transmission, the songs considered true lost some of
the meaning and became incomprehensible, but the rhythm, the interweaving
of the songs and the effect all remain the same.
4 Kitaginhu agaketühügü: Divided languages
Our analysis confirms what other researchers have already identified: the
strong presence of Arawak occupation in the Upper Xingu region. This did not
happen by chance. The origin akinha (narrative) explains that the creator twin
brothers belonged to two separate peoples: Aulukuma, our ancestor, was of
Arawak origin and named all things in Arawak. Taũgi was an ancestor of the
whites and used to name his creations with Carib words. Anthropology, ethnology
and archaeology tell us that as each people arrived in the Upper Xingu, in
the majority of cases seeking refuge from the whites, they took their culture
and absorbed the culture that they met there. This is also what the songs show