Voices on Paper: Multimodal Texts and Indigenous Literacy in Brazil.

This paper focuses on the recent production of multimodal writing in an indigenous community in Brazil, resulting from the equally recent introduction of literacy. Seeing this form of writing as part of the process of intercultural semiosis and cultural translation, the paper discusses how concepts of local indigenous oral culture and received wisdom interact with the Western concept of writing as the 'record' or 'representation' of speech, bringing to writing the indigenous notion of cultural 'enactment' or 'performativity'. In an effort to overcome a view of alphabetic writing as semantically only propositional, mimetic and decontextualized, the Kashinawá community, by adding visual components to alphabetic texts, appear to transform writing into contextualized performative 'poiesis' which simultaneously inaugurates a complex process of semiosis inseparable and only comprehensible from their local cultural perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]