Mythology as oral transmission in the Yanomami's childhood education for their social integration

Abstract

How does the non-indigenous adult perceive the Yanomami child? What we propose in this article is to bring elements to the debate on the theme of indigenous children, from a comparative analysis of Yanomami children through photographs taken by religious at the Catrimani Mission in 1993, where they indicated their traditional environment of family education and their various interactions. This iconographic portrayal is recorded through a sample of photographs of Yanomami children, compared to Davi Kopenawa's autobiographical description, of his childhood memories, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which allowed us to understand the environmental context in which these children are inserted, while observing their interactions with adults and the environment, with an emphasis on symbolic, cultural and emotional aspects. It is about triangular methodology, documentary, photographic and bibliographic. As results indicated, it was observed that the contrast of two narratives based on different supports: the visual, photographic narrative, and the written, literary narrative (autobiographical documentary), demonstrates the persistence, through the contact history of the Yanomami, of oral mythology in the cultural identity of these people at the end of the 20th century.