ETHNOGRAPHIC ADVENTURES AMONG CANOE INDIGENOUS: THE PATH OF LINGUIST ADAIR PIMENTEL PALÁCIO WITH ARGONAUTAS GUATÓ IN THE HEART OF PANTANAL SOUTH-MATO-GROSSENSE

Abstract

We started this discussion with the words of the greatest Brazilian linguist Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues (2005, p. 36): “The reduction from 1200 to 180 indigenous languages ​​in the last 500 years was the effect of an extremely violent and continuous colonizing process, which it still persists, having been interrupted neither with the country's political independence at the beginning of the 19th century, nor with the establishment of the republican regime at the end of the same century, nor even with the promulgation of the “Citizen Constitution” of 1988. That said, Adair Pimentel Palácio was the first Brazilian researcher in the field of Indigenous Linguistics to defend a doctoral thesis, the pioneering took place in 1984 at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), precisely under the guidance of Professor Aryon. That said, our objective in this article a priori is to analyse the author's thesis: “Guató, the language of the Canoe Indians of the Paraguay River”, therefore, her investigation focused on the Guató de Corumbá canoe culture, located in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul (Midwest region of the country) - known from the point of view of history, archaeology and anthropology as being Argonauts of the Pantanal (indigenous population with serious risk of extinction). In this way, the author's original idea, still in the 1970s, was to focus on an ethnic language hitherto not studied (at that time there were around 40 languages ​​in that sense). Given the above, the ethnographic linguistics driven by Palácio focused, above all, on the grammar, morphology, phonology, and syntax of the referred Amerindian culture. Therefore, the result proved that the Guató language is extremely complex, dynamic, and heterogeneous, operating in a transitive and intransitive way (it operates in low and high tonic form). Finally, it is worth corroborating that this study did not intend to analyse or exhaust the exclusively linguistic-anthropological concepts described by the author, but rather to register her anxieties, concerns and historical-ethnographic reflections about the Guató river culture in the Pantanal forest.