Tense, space and chiefs in the Upper Xingu: an analyses of Kuikuro akinha

Abstract

This article opens with an analysis of two Kuikuro akinha (a term commonly translated as ‘narrative’) to develop considerations about the relationship between spatiality and politics in the Upper Xingu. From a linguistic perspective, we address the production and organization of temporalities and temporal sequencing in a language with no verbal tense inflection. To this end, the article approaches verbal and nominal aspects, epistemic-evidential particles, and demonstrative deictics. This tense distributed through the semantics of different groups of morphemes offers an analogic-heuristic launchpad for considering how notions of time and efforts at native historiography in Kuikuro akinha also circulate through the landscape of the Upper Xingu, condensing to different extents in different spaces and political relationships. This article consequently highlights not only the resources mobilized in the verbal art of Kuikuro storytellers but also opens connections with past and present territories and native historiographical, spatial, and cosmological conceptions and configurations of past and present landscapes.

Keywords
Kuikuro; Karib; Upper Xingu; Narratives; Space; Chiefs