Discursos coloniais e resistência indígena nas redes: análise discursiva de posts e comentários sobre os madija (kulina) em ipixuna-am

Abstract

This study falls within the field of Materialist Discourse Analysis (MDA) and aims to analyze posts and comments made on Facebook regarding the Madija (Kulina) indigenous people of the municipality of Ipixuna, Amazonas, during the Covid-19 pandemic, more specifically during the period when the first cases of the disease were recorded in that municipality, in order to identify which discourses are embodied in these texts, that is, the meanings produced within them. To this end, we consider it necessary to describe their conditions of discursive production, in addition to verifying the subject positions assumed within them. With a view to achieving these objectives, we present, in the first chapter, the theoretical foundations of DA, based on Pêcheux (2009), Althusser (1974), and Orlandi (2013), concerning the concepts of language, ideology, subject, discourse, discursive formation, interdiscourse, conditions of production, and subject position, as understood in materialist discourse theory. Furthermore, we outline the analytical procedures, the composition of the corpus, the description of the locus and the subjects, as well as the notions of cut and symptom, as conceived by DA. We also provide a brief historical overview of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and their forced contact with colonizers, particularly the Kulina people—who refer to themselves as Madija—in order to understand the historical and ideological framework underpinning the discourses (re)produced in the aforementioned pandemic context. The results obtained point to the predominance of two discursive blocs: that of the colonizer and that of the colonized. On one hand, we have the materialization of discourses that date back to Brazil’s colonial period, when the construction of a stigmatization of the figure of the Indigenous person began—an imaginary that has been perpetuated in the collective memory and has solidified, maintaining to this day the image of Indigenous peoples as primitive, savage, unevolved creatures, lacking intelligence, who walk around naked, live in the forests, are violent, etc., because, according to the colonial archive, they are uncivilized, untamed beings who hide from the “natural” processes of social evolution. On the other hand, there is a counter-narrative that bursts forth from the margins and shakes the very foundations of the center (power), from which the official, legitimized version of the country’s history emanates. But the voices echoing from the periphery also challenge and deconstruct those of the center; this is the discourse of the indigenous people, of resistance, the internal discourse of oppression, which generates meanings from within, in an attempt to reconfigure that crystallized image or simply to resist the constant and persistent attempts to erase the identity, culture, and history of indigenous peoples.