Futuros que seguem: multiplicidade espaçotemporal Businenge no Suriname pós-colonial

Abstract

Conecto uma questão derivada da etnografia businenge a conceitos acerca da pós-colônia. Na língua saamaka, as principais catacreses que pareiam espaço e tempo colocam o futuro atrás e o passado na frente, porém, ao se referirem ao progresso, as figuras que utilizam são invertidas. Analiso tal duplicidade pensando o emaranhamento de temporalidades da época pós-colonial e a ideia de tradição como terreno de dissonância política e de construção ativa de relações entre passados e futuros.

Rainforest villages, eighteenth-century history

“…Kenneth Bilby, based on several years of ethnography, has written a comprehensive overview of the ways the Aluku, a neighboring Maroon people, deal with various aspects of time, history, and memory, and much of his description would hold for the Saamaka as well (Bilby, 1994: 141–160); Rogério Brittes W. Pires, who conducted 21st century fieldwork in a Christian Saamaka village, has offered a provocative analysis of what he calls “the entanglement of temporalities in the postcolonial age, and the idea of tradition as a contentious political arena where the relationship between pasts and futures are constructed”—basing a lot of his efforts on linguistic evidence (Pires, 2018: 143–174); and I have presented, elsewhere, my understandings of the history and practice of Saamaka calendrical reckoning (Price, 1984: 63–71; Price and Price, 2017: 62–69). Nevertheless, it is Saamakas’ insistence on the importance of their early history (their years of freedom-fighting and nation-building), along with their everyday sense of living in linear history, that almost from our very first day in Saamaka, more than fifty years ago, most impressed me.…”