Quoting Mario Juruna: Linguistic imagery and the transformation of indigenous voice in the Brazilian print press

Abstract

In this article, I reveal the textual mechanisms that influential news editors employed to manipulate popular understandings of Mario Juruna, a Xavante leader who played an important role in advancing democracy during Brazil's military dictatorship and became the first Indian elected to national office. I argue that editors used the implicit messages of represented language to initiate shifts in the public's perception of the Xavante leader and thereby to change its opinion of him. Juruna's case illustrates that linguistic resources are powerful tools that hegemonic institutions, such as the press, and other dominant parties may employ to advance their own interests and influence public opinion on matters of political and social import.

Rift, Rupture and the Temporal Politics of Race in Ecuador: Whiteness and the Narration of Neoliberal Futures During and After the Cenepa War

“…[5] While a full analysis of this dynamic is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that a growing anthropological literature explores the ways in which elites throughout the Americas have used their control of print media to advance white privilege in the public sphere and also the ways in which Indigenous peoples have used white-controlled media to make interventions in elite public culture (Arndt 2010;Graham 2011;Jackson 2010;Rappaport and Cummins 2012 Rubenstein (2007, 370) notes that the state played a role in suppressing Shuar warfare with other Indigenous peoples, such as the Achuar, in order to appropriate "Shuar violence" to fight Peruvians. For many Shuar, Rubenstein argues, this was viewed positively since fighting for the state meant that Shuar warriors accrued a debt that the state was expected to pay back.…”

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

“…Analysis of ritual exchange involving inalienable emblems such as kin and body part terms and other culturally potent signs that enter and exit commodity, gift, kinship, corporeal, and spirit(‐ual) phases of possession and exchange sheds light on the range of regimes that enregister value, personhood, and community (see also Kockelman 2007, 2009). 5 Moving from local interdiscursive economies to processes of national and transnational interdiscursive (mis‐) representation, Graham (2011) and Stasch (2011b) treat mediatized forms of print journalism and travel writing with special attention to authority and persuasiveness. The Brazilian press ventriloquates the voice of indigenous Xavante politician Mario Juruna, making tactical changes across textual boundaries to first positive and later negative effect for the agenda of indigeneity (Graham 2011).…”

“Tapwaroro is true”: Indigenous Voice and the Heteroglossia of Methodist Missionary Translation in British New Guinea

“…5; Rumsey ). Missionary authors parody the translanguaging practices of returned workers and their communities in a stereotyped indigenous voice that represents for them an absence of communication (Hill ; Graham ; Stasch ). This parodic indigenous voice then becomes reimagined as a way to express the newness of Christianity itself in contrast to heathenness.…”