NHEMONGARAI

THE NAME-PERSON AS A GUARANI HERITAGETHE NAME-PERSON AS A GUARANI HERITAGE

Abstract

As a category of thought and an instituting part of cultural dynamics and sociability processes, heritage exists in all societies and presents a wide morphological and semantic variety. Every society presents a set of cultural goods and products that, being structuring, are inextricably linked to collective memory, to the formation of the person-subject and, consequently, to individual and collective identity. Given their structuring character, these elements acquire a status of permanence via transmissibility that, in certain social groups is materializes in rituals. Based on participant-observation carried out in the Guarani village of Araponga, located on the coast of Rio de Janeiro and, theoretically and methodologically, combining elements of the theory of heritage, Astronomy in Cultures and the History of Science, we present the ritual that, among the Guarani, is central because it is the one through which someone becomes a Guarani person or subject: the nhemongarai. And, in view of its instituting relevance, since it is the ritual that allows the formation and maintenance of the Guarani identity, along with its ethnological and astronomical importance, we analyze and understand it as the matrix heritage of the contemporary Guarani society.