Paper short abstract:

This paper revisits a classic case of the dialogue between ethnography and literature: the rhapsody Macunaíma, the Hero with No Character, by M. de Andrade [(1928) 1984]. It highlights the writer's dialogue with Pemon verbal arts, which were registered by the ethnographer T. Koch-Grünberg (1917).

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the dialogue between ethnography and literature in Mário de Andrade's landmark work, Macunaíma, the Hero with No Character [(1928) 1984]. As literary critics have widely recognized, Andrade drew extensively on the ethnographic research conducted by the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grünberg among the Pemon people of the circum-Roraima region between 1911 and 1913.

Andrade's personal copy of Koch-Grünberg's five-volume work (1917-1923), housed in the University of São Paulo archives, reveals his close reading and engagement with the Indigenous knowledge recorded, transcribed, and translated by the ethnographer. This includes etiological narratives, magical formulae, songs, speeches, and Pemon knowledge system at large, encompassing astronomy, botany, and zoology. Andrade creatively reworks these diverse elements in Macunaíma, juxtaposing Indigenous narratives with those of Afro-Brazilian origin, in a satyre that challenges Western literary traditions. This paper aims to re-examine such intertextual dialogue from the perspective of Pemon verbal arts.