ABSTRACT
Upon an ethnographic research, this paper aims at analyzing meaning-construction strategies deployed by Native Brazilian communities (the Laklãnõ-Xokleng community from the Ibirama Laklãnõ indigenous land particularly) and the Brazilian State (namely the State of Santa Catarina) to perpetuate or to transform power relations established between them within the context of school education. By means of the analysis of an interaction that took place within an in-service teacher training program among Laklãnõ-Xokleng teachers, chiefs and elderly and an official from the institution directly in charge of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng schools within the state’s education system in which they are embedded, strategies are raised and illustrated concerning the following phenomena: 1) the way words and forms are strategically overcharged by competing institutions with their own intentions to despoil the intentional possibilities of language (BAKHTIN, 2002); 2) the referral to specific discursive genres to determine or fulfill tough rules and demands (FOUCAULT, 2004b) to make the enunciation of certain discourses effective and coercive; and 3) the awareness of one’s own capacity of transformation of human beings who, by exerting their power, make cultures (FREIRE, 1967) or, on the contrary, the abdication from that awareness by well-off adjusted human beings that embody states and end up feeling themselves (or feigning to feel) powerless and paralyzed, and denying the performative nature of institutions (BUTLER, 2010). The meaning-construction strategies identified, because of their linguistic, ideological and political nature and because of being willful and systematic, make up linguistic policies themselves, closely tied to identity policies.
Keywords:
indigenous schooling; Laklãnõ-Xokleng