The indigenous languages of the Americas preserve a broad repertoire of discursive genres, whose social, aesthetic, and ritual effectiveness depends on particular forms of performance, transmission, and re-creation. Prayers, songs and supplications, ceremonial promises and petitions, formulas of welcome and farewell, and other genres of ritual speech constitute privileged forms of (re)production of memory and of updating tradition, while at the same time serving as spaces for poetic and pragmatic innovation. In this sense, stability and innovation, permanence and change, history and experience are precisely the points of tension that give shape and dynamism to the verbal arts. In other words, discursive creativity is not opposed to tradition but constitutes one of its conditions of possibility. How are these tensions combined and expressed in the genres of ritual speech? How is creativity experienced in language and ritual action? In what senses can both tradition and innovation be sources of authority and ritual efficacy? What poetic, linguistic, sonic, or performative resources open spaces for creative innovation?
In light of the above, this symposium proposes to bring together research dedicated to the study of verbal arts in indigenous languages from a multidisciplinary perspective that articulates ethnography, linguistics, ethnopoetics, and studies of oral tradition. We welcome contributions oriented toward the formal analysis of ceremonial discourse—including its compositional principles, formulaic structures, semantic fields, grammatical markers, and other mechanisms of textual organization; toward the study of its contexts of enunciation and the interactions between verbal expressions and other performative registers; as well as work exploring the strategies through which innovation and creativity produce textual authority and the ways in which these are received and interpreted. The aim is to foster a space of dialogue that allows us to understand indigenous verbal arts as privileged domains for the transmission of memory, the production of knowledge, and as spaces of creative experimentation for the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
