Paper short abstract

Based on research since May 2024 with a Timbira collective (Northern Jê), we analyze the transduction of verbal arts into pedagogical records. We explore how documenting chiefly oratory generates ontological frictions between ancestral agency and the bureaucratic 'Time of Major Projects'.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses the challenges of linguistic documentation and reclamation within a Timbira collective (Northern Jê speakers) in southeastern Pará, Brazil. Adopting a perspective that understands "language" not as a fixed code, but as a cosmopolitical practice, we analyze how linguistic variations are navigated through three native generational times: the Time of War, the Time of the Brazil Nut, and the Time of Major Projects.

For these Timbira peoples (including Parkatêjê, Kyikatêjê, and Akrãtikatêjê groups), language is historically inextricable from the production of bodies, kinship, and Jê dualist social structures. However, the current "Time of Major Projects" imposes a documentation regime based on writing, normative grammar, and static archiving. This generates an ontological friction: how to document and teach verbal arts—skills fundamental to Jê chieftaincy, ritual, and the corporeal agency of the Time of War—within an archive that operates on the logic of static recording?

Based on collaborative ethnographic research with Indigenous researchers initiated in May 2024, we analyze how this collective attempts a difficult transduction: converting the potency of songs and the oratory of old warriors into documentary records and pedagogical materials, without the language losing its "force". We argue that for this Timbira collective, documentation is not merely preservation, but a reconstruction of a political mode of speaking capable of negotiating with the multiplicity of beings that inhabit their territories.

Paper short abstract

This paper discusses the language reclamation initiative of an Afro-Brazilian reinado. The initiative is motivated by the need for inter-cosmic communication with more-than-human entities, which are incorporated in reinado sessions but speak a different language, Língua da Costa.

Paper long abstract

Much of the literature on language endangerment and revitalization documents language ideological tensions between utilitarian ideologies as drivers of language shift, and ideologies of language as indexing group identity as motivators for maintenance or revitalization (Kroskrity 2009). Both are based on the assumption of an ontological equivalence of languages (Course 2018; Hauck & Heurich 2018). All languages are commensurable.

In this presentation we will critically examine this assumption discussing language reclamation of the Língua da Costa (language of the coast) in an Afro-Brazilian community in Divinópolis, Minas Gerais. Língua da Costa is a contact language based on rural Brazilian Portuguese grammar with a largely African lexicon (Queiroz 1998). Recently, the first author of this paper was contacted by members of a reinado (Afro-Brazilian religious practice) in Divinópolis for assistance in the reclamation of Língua da Costa. The motivation was not only on grounds of its indexical function, but for fairly “utilitarian” reasons: Sessions of the reinado involve the incorporation of more-than-human entities, some of which spoke Língua da Costa. The inability to understand them led to a series of communicative disjunctures, compelling reinado members to seek help with language reclamation.

We will analyze those disjunctures to understand the practices of inter-cosmic translation within this setting. We will also discuss to what extent these practices might imply an ontological nonequivalence between Língua da Costa as being imbued with a cosmological force required for ritual efficacy, and Brazilian Portuguese, and how we might be able to analyze that difference methodologically.

Paper short abstract

Sign language teaching in virtual reality reveals how signs are remade under technological constraints. Using Goodwin’s co-operative action, we focus on how VR pedagogy is organized with transformed modalities and how “the sign” is co-constructed in interaction.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how French Sign Language (LSF) is remade through pedagogical transmission in a virtual reality (VR) adult classroom where the bodily and material conditions of signing become unstable. In the immersive platform VRChat, signing is produced through tracked hands and avatar animations, which constrain what can be articulated (e.g., missing or incomplete finger tracking, absent facial expressions). These constraints generate interactional conditions in which participants must actively reconstitute what counts as an LSF sign.

Drawing on video-ethnographic observations, we analyze how participants collaboratively maintain sign recognizability despite systematic transformations in handshape. A recurrent pedagogical issue is the existence of multiple VR-realizations of ‘the same’ sign, depending on controller type and avatar software. For example, when finger bending is unavailable, signers may first depict bending as a preparatory action, producing an accumulative transformation of an established form.

We foreground the ontological problem: the sign becomes an object-in-transformation whose identity is achieved interactionally/contextually, rather than being presupposed. Building on Goodwin’s Co-Operative Action Framework, we focus on how VR teaching/learning is organized. We complement this with Peircean sign classification to specify modalities of transformation: some shifts preserve iconic resemblance, while others rely on indexical anchoring.

We argue that VR LSF pedagogy involves the cultivation of interpretive methods for recognizing signs across altered forms. The classroom thus becomes a site where language is actively reconstituted through co-operative transformations, raising broader questions: what counts as “the sign” and how does the teachability of language depend on its capacity to travel across divergent materialities?

Paper short abstract

Based on the dynamics of co-operative action, lamination and accumulation (Goodwin, 2018), this work introduces an approach for the documentation, description and analysis of the Baré variety of Brazilian Portuguese (BRASLIND-Baré), which has emerged within an ecology of massive language contact.

Paper long abstract

Inspired by the demands of the native peoples of Brazil for the recognition and documentation of the varieties of Portuguese they speak, we present a description of one such variety (BRASLIND-Baré) based on the dynamics of co-operative action (Goodwin, 2018). The Baré, a people living in Northwestern Brazilian Amazonia, are speakers of Nheengatu, a Tupi-Guarani language adopted once their original Arawakan language became extinct during the colonization of their territory. The variety of Portuguese that they speak has arisen within an ecology of massive language contact. Based on a corpus of 20 hours of semi-spontaneous speech, we present the description and analysis of linguistic phenomena pertaining to the epistemicity domain, such as those related to evidentiality and information structure. From a Goodwinian perspective, we will argue that such phenomena emerge in contemporary interactions from processes of decomposition and reuse with transformation (i.e. co-operative action) not only of linguistic features, but also cultural regimes of historicity, poetics, and tradition, all of which figure as public resources made available by speakers during preceding communicative practices spanning a long time. This approach to the documentation, description and analysis of an Indigenous variety of Portuguese can contribute to understanding how such Portuguese varieties convey discourse structures and cultural meanings that are integral to Indigenous ontologies, as they have emerged from the contact with Indigenous languages and cultures and are used by Indigenous peoples in their daily social and communicative practices.

Paper short abstract

Treating Tukano speech as an archival item reworks a substance that makes persons and acts in the world. Comparing object repatriation and audio return, I trace risks that extend beyond ritual genres and considers destotalization as a strategy for preserving speech while limiting its circulation.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates what happens when Tukano speech—understood locally as a materially efficacious substance that makes persons and can act in the world (Chernela 2018; Hugh-Jones 2023; Barreto 2012, 2022)—is stabilized as an archival item. The discussion centers on how Tukano interlocutors themselves weigh the risks and potential benefits of language documentation, and on whether a language file can be efficacious in archiving knowledge, since knowledge is apprehended in situated transmission from an elder to a prepared person.

The argument is developed through a comparison between the circulation and repatriation of ceremonial objects (Martini 2012) and the circulation and return of sound recordings (Lucas 2020). In both cases, spatial and temporal displacement seems to intensify uncertainty about what, exactly, a displaced entity contains and what it can do, thereby also intensifying its potential risks. Extending this point to linguistic materials, I ask what kinds of implications a repository file can carry, even when it does not record chants, narratives, or other specialized discourse genres.

Building on debates on museum collections and archives the analysis considers how methods used in the governance of collected materials can inform the design of repository protocols–especially forms of “destotalization”, i.e., separating preservation from circulation and producing deliberately partial derivatives (Costa Oliveira 2017; Gongora to appear). Finally , I examine how repositories such as ELAR and AILLA currently govern access and why these mechanisms often struggle to encode situated rules about when recordings may be heard, by whom, and under what forms of mediation.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines Tao traditional songs as an ontologically unique form of language. Drawing on ethnography , it shows how songs are intertwined with social interaction, memory and Indigenous knowledge, becoming normatively binding elements of tribal relations and social structure.

Paper long abstract

In today’s polarized world, many of the native languages of primary tribal societies are experiencing widespread rupture. In contrast, Tao people – the only indigenous maritime tribe in Taiwan – have long maintained an oral, linguistic form of traditional songs. These songs resemble poetic chanting, serve as an interactive mode of communication, record layered memories of individual and collective experiences, and occupy a central position in both ritual and everyday practice.

Based on ethnographic fieldworks, a grounded theory methodology is employed to finding out the underlying ontological practices of the meanings of the collected linguistic texts of 306 Tao songs. Taking Tao songs as subjects of study, this research conceptualizes them as a communicative medium for social formation and examines their social functions through the processes of linguistic transformation, involving individual expression, interpersonal singing, as well as interactive talks and collective performance.

This research engages current debates concerning the ontology of language and communication, collective memories and oral experiences, and the transforming capabilities of aboriginal songs as a unique form as language. Rather than treating the aboriginal song merely as a singular symbolic text, this research emphasizes the socially constructed role of songs in everyday life world. It concludes that Tao aboriginal songs serve as a particular form of language. They are created in social life, embedded in social memory and indigenous knowledge, mediated though interpersonal communication, and become normatively binding elements of tribal relationships and social structure.