The Karawara’s chant: The link between heaven and earth in the light of categorization
Tupi-Guarani, Guajá, shamanic lexicon, categorization
The present study deals with the investigation of the ceremonial variety of the Brazilian
indigenous language spoken by the Awa Guajá people, a Tupi-Guarani people of recent
contact who live in four Indigenous Lands in the northwest of the state of Maranhão,
with the objective of analyzing and describing the shamanic variety of the Guajá
language in contrast to the everyday variety, delimiting their differences in terms of
syntactic, morphological, phonological and/or lexical levels. In addition, this study also
aims to explain the context of use of this linguistic variety, present a trilingual glossary
with translations into everyday Guajá and Portuguese and, finally, analyze, based on the
comparison between the different lexical items of the two varieties ( everyday and
shamanic), the difference in the way references are categorized in these two language
manifestations.