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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.