Bororo narratives: concepts and manifestations

Abstract

This article presents the concepts developed by Bororo people in their narratives, focusing on the word they use to name them —bakaru— as well as on their manifestations in everyday situations.
Our goal is to show how understanding these concepts and their manifestations in the community reveals aspects of Bororo’s life and culture, that are essential knowledge for our professional interactions with them within the school education program. The data presented come from ethnographic research held in the Central Village of Tadarimana in Rondonópolis (Mato Grosso state, Brazil), between 2011 and 2012. They reveal that these narratives constitute a body of guidelines for Bororo life as a prescriptive dimension resulting from how these people conceive the cosmos; and as a formative dimension, when they use them to guide the training or preparation especially of youngsters and children. As a conclusion, we consider that, in order to hold horizontal dialog between the institutionalized education system and indigenous people, an understanding of the cosmological foundations is needed so that eventualy school may be located in this landscape as an external element, yet strongly couloured with the features of those people who appropriate themselves of the schooling process.