Curt Nimuendajú e as narrativas míticas tembé: Revisitando uma produção etnográfica

Abstract

Revisiting an ethnography by Curt Nimuendajú that integrates a repertoire of mythical narratives of the Tembé Tenetehara indigenous group constitutes the research base of this dissertation. The ethnographer Curt Nimuendajú, a German who migrated to Brazil in 1903 and became, over forty years, an expert connoisseur of indigenous groups, published in 1915 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie the text Sagen der Tembé-Indianer (Pará und Maranhão) in which he gathered ten mythical narratives of the Tembé Tenetehara. In this way, the present dissertation proposed to know about the context and the methodological orientations that allowed the production of such ethnography at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, the research followed a biographical perspective of Curt Nimuendajú, which helped to visualize the course of his initial training in the field of study on indigenous populations, allowing to know the context of the ethnographic encounter with the Tembé Tenetehara in two moments, the first being in the mediations of the SPILTN's indigenist policies in the Gurupi River region, and the second in the dependencies of the religious mission of the Lombard Capuchins in the Pará municipality of Igarapé-Açú. In both contexts, Nimuendajú's ethnographic agenda focused on knowledge of the Tembé language and cosmology, research endeavors that were in line with the guidelines of German ethnology in vogue at the time through salvage ethnography, which he knows from the works of the German Americanists who are referenced in their ethnographies.