A culture of secrecy
The hidden narratives of the Ayoreo
This paper aims at discussing some aspects of the secrecy characterizing sacred texts by the Ayoreo, a Zamucoan
population of the Boreal Chaco in South America, from a linguistic perspective. The magic power exerted by words in Ayoreo
traditional culture is the reason why holy texts are kept secret, and this makes it difficult to provide a complete linguistic
documentation of Ayoreo ‘hidden’ narratives and ritual formulas. After having outlined etiological myths, I will show that
language not only can exert a magic power, but that grammar itself, and specifically linguistic gender, has played a role in the
development of these sacred narratives. Finally, I will compare some elements of Ayoreo culture with lexical data from extinct Old
Zamuco, the most conservative language of the family, in order to show that the populations speaking these languages share the
same cultural background.
Article outline
- 1.Ayoreo and the Zamucoan family
- 2.On noun morphology in Zamucoan
- 3.The centrality of the ‘word’
- 4.Field linguists facing secrecy
- 5.Etiological myths
- 6.Grammatical gender and Ayoreo myths
- 7.Cultural continuity between Old Zamuco and Ayoreo
- 8.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References