Globalization in The Margins Toward Elem

10.5216/sig.v29i2.
40775
Globalization in the margins: toward elements for a sociolin-

guistics of mobility from Indigenous experiences
André Marques do NASCIMENTO∗
Abstract
This paper analyzes, from contemporary sociolinguistics and decolonial
theoretical approaches, how the appropriation of infrastructures of globalization
by indigenous peoples has generated new means through which they can
make visible their contemporary demands, as well as new environments for
transidiomatic practices. The analysis focuses on discourse elements of rap music
and social media in which indigenous languages resources are productively
employed. The main argument is that translocal scalar jumps are made possible
through the appropriation of infrastructures of globalization by indigenous
communities and individuals, and it is suggested that this appropriation might
have positive potential effect on the indigenous linguistic vitality.
Keywords: Globalization, Infrastructures of globalization, Indigenous peoples,

Transidiomatic Practices, Technologies of communication.
1. Introduction
Currently, few are the studies that from a critical and non-
dystopicperspective aim at understanding indigenous people’s agency
on the processes and effects of globalization in their communicative
practices. Language displacement, homogenization, extinction and death
have been usually the main descriptors of the so-called globalization
effects on the use of indigenous languages, without much attention
being paid, however, to instances of counter-hegemonic resistance and
redesigning of communicative practices composed by resources of these
languages which, unlike the most catastrophic predictions, might mean
* PhD in Language and Linguistics, Professor at Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, Goiás,
Brazil. E-mail: [email protected].
the updating and continuity of their use in contemporary geopolitical
and geocultural contexts.
Based on these assumptions, this work, which is part of the
broader research project “Situated alternatives to decolonization of
languages practices, ideologies and regimes in intercultural postcolonial
contexts”, analyzes under the sociolinguistic of mobility and
decolonial Latin American studies back ground how the appropriation
of infrastructures of globalization by indigenous communities and
individuals, especially new media and communication technologies,
has positive potential effects on align and make visible contemporary
indigenous demands, even that originating from different geographical
places and local histories, as well as on the linguistic vitality and
linguistic updating, refuting, thus, totalizing hypothesis of cultural and
linguistic homogenization generated by geocultural globalization.
In this way, the analysis focuses on discursive and semiotic
elements that emerge in rap music performed by Latin American
groups self-identified as indigenous, and in posts and comments on
social media, specifically Facebook, by Brazilian indigenous groups
and individuals in which it can be observed new contexts of use of
indigenous languages resources.
Furthermore, this work is affiliated to studies that seek to analyze
the effects of globalization and appropriation of its infrastructures by
communities and individuals that have been marginalized within the
nation states (see WANG et al., 2014), in a geopolitical configuration
that Mignolo (2011) has called internal colonialism. At the same time,
this work seeks to destabilize i) identity essentializations of indigenous
groups and individuals based on their communicative practices; and
ii) contemporary sociolinguistic approaches that encompass almost
exclusively transnational urban contexts and primarily contacts between
European linguistic repertoires.
2. Theoretical Framework: Towards A Sociolinguistic Of

Mobility
Blommaert (2010) systematizes theoretical and methodological

assumptions of what he calls a sociolinguistics of globalization,
proposing conceptual and analytical tools for a renewed approach to
270 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Nascimento, A. M. do. Globalization in the margins: toward elements for a...
sociolinguistic dimensions of globalization in order to understand the
real, concrete, and situated linguistic and semiotic performances.
For language studies, Blommaert emphasizes, the current
phase of globalization is particularly interesting because it allows the
observation of how new geocultural processes affect sociolinguistic
standards with the emergence of new multimodal forms of
communication and superdiverse patterns of urban multilingualism.
The author warns, however, that “it is good to understand that such
processes, and the timeframe in which they occur, can only be
understood as part of larger, slower and more profound changes in
society” (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 14).
In the context of this work, what the current phase of geocultural
globalization has generated, as I intend to demonstrate further, is the
possibility of a “globalization from below”, or, as analyzes Mignolo
(2011, p. 255), alternative “reactions to globalization from those
populations and geo-historical areas of the planet that suffer the
consequences of the global economy”, including the appropriation of
infrastructures which are products of these very recent processes of
globalization. Thus not disassociating late geocultural globalization
processes and effects from the historical and older fact of colonialism.
Within the paradoxes made possible by the current phase of
geocultural globalization, it is important highlight the destabilization not
only of geographical and political boundaries, but also of disciplinary
protocols and theoretical paradigms. In the field of language in
society studies, Mignolo notes, for example, that “the current stage of
globalization is daily questioning […] national ideals and principles
about the purity of language” (MIGNOLO, 2000, p. 229).
It should be recognized that, heir of a modern Western
epistemology, the Saussurean idea of synchrony, which underlies
hegemonic conceptions of language, has built a representation of
sociolinguistic reality in which “language is undressed, so to speak,
and robbed of their spatial and temporal features that define its
occurrence, meaning and function in real social life” (BLOMMAERT,
2010, p. xiv). According to the hegemonic perspective of modern
sociolinguistics, language is the category par excellence that establishes
bounded, nameable and countable units, usually reduced to grammar
and vocabulary structures, whose speakers, even in mobility contexts
Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 271

such as migration, are always fixed in space and time (BLOMMAERT,
2010, p. 04).
For Blommaert, however, with no real existence, the notion
of synchrony and its consequences for the language categorization
cannot remain intact even as a hypothetical theoretical constructs.
Considering the profound changes globally experienced in recent
decades that prevent the world to be divided into clear and transparent
categories, in whatever dimension it is, and to take account of the
complexity intensified by the recent processes of globalization, the
author proposes “a view of language as something intrinsically and
perpetually mobile, through space as well as time, and made for
mobility” (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. xiv, emphasis in the original). The
author, thus,states the bases to a paradigm that conceives language as a
set of “mobile resources, framed in terms of transcontextual networks,
flows and movements” (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 01).
The sociolinguistics of mobility would encompass the study of
language-in-motion and its various spatiotemporal frames in constant
interaction (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 05). These frames, according
to the author, can be described as ‘scales’, under the assumption that
“in an age of globalization, language patterns must be understood
as patterns organized on different, layered (i.e. vertical rather than
horizontal) scale-levels” (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 05).
The notion of sociolinguistic scale is, according to Blommaert
(2010), an important metaphor for the mobility paradigm as it
seeks to capture the movement of people, messages, and semiotic
resources throughout spaces filled of codes, ideologies, standards
and expectations. These movements are made possible by the dual
nature of language practices that allows them to be, in a particular
scalar position, contextually unique and situated, while in another
scalar position they are collective and relatively stable phenomena,
connected to patterns of broader historical sense. The movement, or
scalar jump, would occur from “the individual to the collective, the
temporally situated to the trans-temporal, the unique to the common,
the token to type, the specific to the general” (BLOMMAERT, 2010,
p. 33).
Blommaert also recognizes that the paradigm shift to a
sociolinguistics of mobility has a price, the disruption with totalizing

and stabilizers discourses on language, with which it must necessarily
disagree, precisely because they tie the speakers in bounded well-
defined horizontal spaces (BLOMMAERT, 2010 p. 43). One aspect of
these regimes that matters directly here relates to the description of the
world in processes of globalization from the perspectives of linguistic
imperialism and linguicide. These are the most usual discourses to
institute sociolinguistic realities of indigenous peoples around the
world and also in Brazil.
In language studies of Western tradition, the indigenous societies
have been object of analysis under two different hegemonic perspectives
which share, nevertheless, the assumption that there is an unambiguous
and stable link among language, culture and place: the description
of the systemic-structural features of their languages at different
levels of analysis and under different theoretical approaches; and that
of a traditional sociolinguistics that seeks to present the situation of
indigenous languages in classifying continua whose poles range from
functional linguistic vitality to language extinction and death, according
to different situations and levels of external threats.
A fundamental task of this second approach is to search for
the underlying causes of the sociolinguistic situation of different
indigenous communities around the world that, instead of as diverse
and complex as they are, they would share within that field the imminent
risk of language loss and the common fate of being victims of socio-
cultural and linguistic homogenization. In the literature that makes up
the field, categories such as language death, endangered languages,
linguistic imperialism etc. are very common and, in recent decades, the
term globalization has figured prominently among the threat factors,
although there are few explicit discussions of what globalization is and
how it affects, in fact, the linguistic and cultural diversity in the world
(MUFWENE, 2002a, 2002b).
Obviously, it is not my intention to deny or to obscure the deep,
violent and asymmetrical power relations generated by coloniality that
end up impacting indigenous linguistic practices in postcolonial contexts.
Rather, my main point is to provide elements for the epistemological
decentralization of the field and for less totalizing and dystopic views
that could bring to the core of the theorizing the different dimensions of
the indigenous contemporaneities and agencies.

Blommaert still highlights the ideology underlying the discourse
of language rights, including indigenous’ rights, which is developed
based on the classic Herderian triad territory-culture-language which
territorialize language functions in static spaces where languages can
fully work. Once that link is broken, the languages, often “native” or
“mother” languages, lose their functions. According to the author, this
discourse and the policies they bring to practice “ties the speakers of
these languages to a place and reinforces the presumed fixed connection
between people and their environment - a clear reflex of the Saussurean
synchrony” (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 45).
For Blommaert, all this can be more or less acceptable, at least
when some aspects of reality are conveniently neglected, such as
mobility itself, one of the most disturbing contemporary aspects to
stabilizing visions of communicative practices, since “in contemporary
social structures, people tend to move around, both in real geographical
space and in symbolic, social space” (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 45).This
mobility, of course, also impacts the life and communicative practices
of human groups that are not in major urban centers of the world. On
the contrary, even if at different levels and with different effects, it also
reaches the margins of the modern/colonial world system.
Wang et al. (2014) discuss sociolinguistic phenomena of
globalization in marginal environments, addressing them specifically
from the perspective of new media and communication technologies;
new forms of economic activities and language commodification; and
semiotic resources and authenticity. The authors argue that studies
on globalization and super-diversity are concentrated primarily in
places where their characteristic phenomena are more abundant,
such as highly diverse megalopolis. Less typical places such as peri-
urban, rural, and other remote areas of the world, institutionally
peripheral, and areas to where minorities are relegated, have been
less absorbed by that studies. For them, nevertheless, globalization
impacts the entire world system, including its most remote margins
and unexpected places.
Regarding the urban bias of the sociolinguistic studies, Wang et
al. also recognize a much larger problem, since these studies continue
“seeing the world through the lens of those societies that form the current
centers of the world system, with assumption that what occurs there can

and should be used as a benchmark for studies elsewhere”, what I see as
an unequivocal feature of coloniality of knowledge (MIGNOLO, 2011).
For language studies, this issue is of major theoretical importance,
since “we cannot neglect detailed analyzes of local contexts of usage,
local semiotic economies and local language ideologies if we wish to
understand how people themselves make sense of their lives and life
worlds” (WANG et al., 2013, p. 29).
Consistent with the theoretical convergence here adopted, it
should be set, from a decolonial perspective, what in fact is understood
by “margins”. If geocultural globalization is the latest stage of a process
that began with the constitution of America and of the modern/colonial
capitalism itself, it is also important to recognize that the pattern of
Eurocentered power that emerges in this context has as one of its
cornerstones the hierarchical racial classification of all the peoples of
the planet, which has permeated the most important dimensions of
world power (QUIJANO, 2000, p. 193). That classification transforms
differences in values and establishes margins, which are not just
geographical, but “implies the existence of people, languages, religions,
and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by
the coloniality of power (e.g. structured by the imperial and colonial
differences)” (TLOSTANOVA; MIGNOLO, 2012, p. 62).
Margins are thus understood as spaces (geographical, subjective
and symbolic) where subaltern alterities are instituted from the
perspective of the coloniality of power, i.e., are geopolitical spaces,
but also body-political as well. According to Mignolo (2011, p. 285),
“the margins are places, histories, and people who, not being at
once Christians and secular Europeans, were forced to deal with the
encroachment of their modernity.” Thus, if the indigenous discursive
practices can be produced and/or accessible from anywhere in the
world, we must remember that they remain marginal, not only because
they emanate from the Southern peripheral geopolitical space, but
mainly because their bodies and places of enunciation have long been
defined as inferior by the racial hierarchy that historically usurped
the validity of their voices and knowledges. This does not, however,
prevent them from finding fissures in the spaces of colonial difference
for the resumption of their voices in many forms, including through
globalized resources.

In this way, whether in major centers of the modern/colonial
world system, whether in its geo and body-political margins, the main
conditions for the implementation of the processes of globalization
are, according to Wang et al. (2014, p. 29), the availability of and
accessibility to infrastructures of globalization that “enabling
connections between purely local events and translocal processes,
patterns and developments, and these connections are dialectic: effects
of them occur throughout the different scale levels”. One of the main
forms of globalization in the margins is generated by specific levels
and forms of access to new media and communication technologies,
of particular interest in this work, whose appropriation has generated
fluid, hybrid and complex communicative phenomena, here understood
as transidiomatic practices.
Assuming that “the experience of cultural globalization and
sociolinguistics disorder it entails, cannot be understood solely through
a dystopic vision of linguistic catastrophe”, Jacquemet (2005, p. 257)
suggests that language studies must consider the “recombinant qualities
of the language mixing, hybridization and creolization” through
the reconceptualization of the communicative environment, and
must consider communicative practices based on multilingual talks,
mediated by electronic media and various semiotic resources with local
and global scope.
In criticizing theoretical and analytical positions on globalization
and their processes and consequences often polarized between neo-
liberal celebration of global flows and the catastrophe of cultural
homogenization, Jacquemet notes few engagement of linguistic studies
with theories of globalization and, when it exists, it tends to be stuck
in the dystopic view of linguistic imperialism and language loss or
death; or still it focuses only on local contexts, face to face interactions,
unmediated communicative experiences and physical proximity, even
when dealing with mobility situations such as transnational human
migration. According to the author, this view is strongly influenced by
the modern conception of language that, in general, conceives speech
communities as isolated and homogeneous entities within the limits of
nation-states and analyzes their communication patterns also based on
a clearly identifiable and limited object, “the dominant, standardized
national language” (JACQUEMET, 2005, p 260).The author therefore

proposes that contemporary studies of language and communication
address the effects of globalization on communicative practices and
on new social formations resulting from the mobility of people,
languages and texts, considering also “asymmetrical power relations
and penetrations engendered for such flows” (JACQUEMET, 2005,
p. 261).
This change of perspective in addressing communicative
interactions becomes imperative in a world where more and more
people interact in historically and culturally distant communicative
environments through new synchronous and asynchronous
communication technologies. For Jacquemet, besides expanding
and significantly modifying the possibilities of interaction, the
appropriation of these technologies enables people to gain or increase
their social value because “they achieve power, in other words, by
learning how to interact in a deterritorialized world” (JACQUEMET,
2005, p. 261). Jacquemet proposes, thus, the concept of transidiomatic
practices to address “the communicative practices of transnational
groups that interact using different languages and communicative codes
simultaneously present in a range of communicative channels, both
local and distant” (JACQUEMET, 2005, p. 264).
Transidiomatic practices are, therefore, easily recognizable
where people experience a translocal multilingualism interacting with
electronic communication technologies. Thus, they are not contained
only in areas of colonial and post-colonial contact but are spreadthrough
multiple electronic communication channels around the world. The
“language” to be used in each situation depends on the contextual
nature of the interaction, but in any case, will be “mixed, translated
creolized” (JACQUEMET, 2005, p. 266).
3. Globalization In The Margins: Indigenous Appropriations Of

Translocal Communication Infrastructures
Nowadays, in different regions of colonized territories, it is

possible to see how the appropriation of infrastructures of globalization
has increasingly been part of indigenous communities, changing their
sociolinguistic landscapes and their communicative practices, especially

through the use of newer communication technologies. Two situations I
witnessed in a Brazilian indigenous area illustrate this statement.
In one of them, a group of young indigenous is gathered in front
of the TV in a house of Xambioá people community, Northern Brazil,
to watch anepisode of a US TV show very successful worldwide, which
now reach the village through cable TV (Fig. 1).
Figure 1 - Indigenous youth of Xambioá people watching the US TV series
“The Walking Dead” via cable TV.
Photo: Author, 2014.
Figure 2 - Satellite dishes in Xambioá village.
Photo: Author, 2014.

The presence of TV sets with satellite reception in the aldeias
of Xambioápeople is not new (Fig. 2). What is very new, instead,
is the access to many new transnational channels made possible by
reception via cable TV, which now enables much more diverse and
frequent contact of this population with “repertoires of speech and
cultural artifacts constituted in other languages, from several parts of
the world” (MOITA LOPES, 2013, p. 102).
In another situation, in the same community, this time in the
area of the only indigenous High School, several young boys and
girls have gathered in the schoolyard to connect their cell phones
and some laptops to the recent school internet wireless network (Fig.
3 and 4). The courtyard of the school became then an important
offline and online interaction space for the population, especially
for teenagers, who now can interact with other realities beyond that
indigenous land.
Figures 3 and 4 - Young Xambioá connected via cell phone and laptop to the
school internet wireless network
Photos: Author, 2015.
These situations, I believe, are quite characteristic of

contemporary realities of many indigenous peoples and communities
in which we see the appropriation of infrastructures of globalization
which leave no untouched their communities and, as I seek to
argue, also their communication practices. Such appropriations

have allowed, in many contexts, that indigenous communities
and individuals make more evident their historical demands, their
voices and worldviews and their contemporaneity denied by the
coloniality of power. In this process, indigenous discourses are raised
to a higher translocal sociolinguistics scales which align different
local discourses in the same network of broader sociohistorical
meanings related to colonization and its consequences. Similarly,
the appropriation of these new communication channels has created
spaces of use of indigenous linguistics resources which have emerged
as important means of circulation and dissemination of linguistic and
semiotic repertoires politically subalternized, which also can reach
higher scale-levels, especially through transidiomatic practices.
In what follows, I seek to present two relatively recent
phenomena enabled by the appropriation of these infrastructures
by indigenous individuals and groups. The first one refers to the
appropriation of the cultural apparatus for the production of rap
music, and the second relates to the widespread use of social media,
specifically Facebook.
3.1 Indigenous Rap Music
According to Wang et al. (2014), one of the most prominent effects

of appropriation of new information and communication technologies
by marginal populations is the creation of a broad and diverse market for
popular forms of cultural expression in which “marginal performances
can make it to the mainstream by means of access – however limited –
to contemporary media and communication technologies” (WANG et
al. 2014, p. 31). The spread and appropriation of Hip Hop culture and
its manifestations worldwide, especially rap music, are one of the most
remarkable contemporary instances.

Figure 5 - Print screen of the video clip Koangagua, by Brô MC’s group, from
Guarani Kaiowá people, available on Youtube1, main broadcast channel of
the group’s songs
Photo: Youtube.
Drawing on deterritorialized resources, especially digital editing

means and internet (Fig. 5), and usually at low costs, many indigenous
groups from Brazil and Latin America have been using rap music to
make visible their communities and local stories. As stated by the
Bolivian rapper from La Paz, Sdenka Suxo Cadena, this is because
anyone can produce rap music, even if s/he does not have or does not
know to play an instrument. As she says, “all you need is a pen and
paper. You don’t need money. You can do it anywhere. People largely
identify with it in marginalized neighborhoods” (CADENA cited in
DANGL, 2006).
These markedly local appropriations in different places provide,
moreover, the institution of symbolic discursive communalities that,
in many cases, are based on common histories of groups that more
strongly have been facing the impacts of the colonial experience,
not coincidentally, those who stands today where the intersection of
socioeconomic and racial marginality is perceived in a more latent
way.

In indigenous rap lyrics and discourses, it also can be seen
how specific signs are used in order to enable translocal scalar jumps
(from local to national or even transnational scales) through which
their discourses are aligned with others discourses from different
geographical spaces in cyberspace. These virtual networks, thus, bring
together different indigenous peoples and individuals from different
regions, since, despite their diverse local experiences and trajectories,
they share common contemporary situations generated by colonialism.
In this sense, such pan-ethnic translocal networks strengthen indigenous
discourses that denounce the racism and marginality they experience
locally, while seeking also to widely expose their demands for better
living conditions.
Apprehended, according to Blommaert et al. (2014, p. 4-5), as
the spatiotemporal scope of comprehensibility, sociolinguistic scales
can be understood as the degree in which it can be expected that
specific signs are included and make sense in different framings. In
other words, the more explicit and socially available is the meaning of
a sign, the higher is its scalar level.
Example (1) demonstrates how in the Brô MC’s discourse, a
Brazilian indigenous rap group from Kaiowá people, entextualized in a
press interview which can be found online, there is a scalar jump from
a local scale, considering the indigenous community as a reference
scale from where they produce their lyrics and discourses (i.e. the
margins of the modern/colonial world system); to a broader trans-local
scale in comparing the aldeia (indigenous village), a more local sign in
this scalar universe, to a favela (shanty town), a more widespread sign
in a Brazilian urban sociocultural “ideological topography”, common
to almost all major cities of the country. In a temporal dimension,
their discourse retakes current and bygone socio-historical processes
of exclusion and oppression, and thus discursively align indigenous
villages and urban peripheries, both highly racialized spaces:
(1) “Aldeia é como favela. O que muda é que lá eles usam fuzil e
aqui é facão” (Brô MCs apud AJINDO, 2012)
In this translocal scalar jump, not only there is the positioning

of their discourses and their criticism in a wider spatio temporal frame,

but also the symbolic confluence of struggles for social justice that is,
if not identical, at least similar to marginalized urban areas in Brazilian
context, which is inevitably intersected by contemporary effects of
racial hierarchy, one of the fundamental pillars in the construction of
the modern/colonial world (MIGNOLO, 2011).
Such semiotic process of scalar jump also can lift the discourses of
the Kaiowá group to a transnational scale, as can be seen through common
indexes of racial identification in the discourses of other indigenous rap
groups from Latin America, who have shared the colonial experience and
its contemporary consequences. As can be seen in the examples (2), from
Brô MC’s’ lyrics, and (3), from the Bolivian collective Raza Insana’s,
the sign índio is common in both lyrics and indexicalizes a shared
subalternized racial identity, which goes beyond local spaces, and which,
at the same time, positions the current discourses in broader temporalities
and in a common history of oppression.
(2) Mais de quinhentos anos, uma ferida que não cicatriza/ [...] Sei
que não é fácil levar a vida desse jeito/ Fazer o quê? Me rendo
ou luto contra o preconceito?/ Sou índio sim e pobre, mas não
burro/ Como pensa esse sujeito/ Daquele jeito/ Continuo a mi-
nha sina/ sabendo muito bem quem gerou minha ruína (A vida
que eu levo, Brô MC’s).
(3) Del Tawantinsuyu somos los hijos/ Somos latinos, negros, in-
dios y mestizos/ Hoy vivimos cambios, complicaciones/ Cómo
no, si somos hijos de violaciones (Hijos del Tawantinsuyu,
Raza Insana).
In examples (4) to (6), taken respectively from Brô MC’s’, the

Bolivian Wayna Rap’s and the Chilean Kollectivo We Newen’s lyrics,
the same symbolic resources ofscalar jump can be found. The groups
take up the common ancient past of their people in “America” and,
nowadays, uses their indigenous voices, speeches and words through
rap music to rise themselves from the obscurity where they were placed
by the construction of modernity (MIGNOLO 2011):

(4) Sempre levando a palavra de verdade/ através do rap/ Mostrando
a nossa realidade/ Periferia da cidade, aldeia (Tupã, Brô MC’s).
(5) Los Aymaras somos originarios de América/ vivimos hace mi-

les y miles de años de estas tierras/ Están hablando/ Están cre-
ciendo de la sombra/ Estás saliendo para hablar por siempre/
no y non sin avergonzarse, si ah!/ Miles, miles, son millones
mi pueblo Aymara/ [...] La voz del Aymara, del Quechua/ Se
levantan de la oscuridad/ Alumbrando a Latinoamérica con una
gran luz/ salen, crecen (Chamakat Sartasiry, Wayna Rap).
(6) Mi pueblo, sus voces ya no callaran!/ [...] Mi sangre gerrera se

hace escuchar [...]/ Nuestro pueblo no para/ puñonado resiste/ con
valor y valentía/ porque el Mapuche existe/ nuestro pueblo no para
(Rap Reivindikativo, Wenu Mapu, Kollectivo We Newen).
The appropriation of infrastructures of globalization from the

margins of the modern/Colonial world system also has direct impact
on the use of linguistic resources, especially in so porous and dynamic
practices such as those that make up the Hip Hop culture. Wang et
al. (2014, p. 31) point out, for example, that Hip Hop cultural and
political emphasis on “authenticity from below” is what allows this
style creates links between marginalized individuals and communities
and, in the very process, the local linguistic resources, including those
of minoritized and “endangered” languages, a reproductively used.
Similarly, Blommaert (2010, p. 64) argues that the appropriation
of these infrastructures can also reveal the vitality of minoritized
languages communicative resources so that they can be up to the task
of globalized meaning-making, including new forms of literacy and
models of message.
In the context of rap production by Latin American Indigenous
groups, it is also important to notice the extremely productive use of
indigenous communicative resources, specially through transidiomatic
lyrics.1 The examples (7) and (8) below seek to illustrate transidiomatic
practices of rap music performed by Brô MC’s and by the Peruvian
Kukama group Niños Kukama:

(7) Rap guarani ha kaiwá/ Ndendokatúieremanha/ Ere-
manharõxe-rehemba’evenderehexái/ A-pe rap guarani
ogwahẽpehenduhagwã/ Áraete ore ra’arõ/ Entonceeju ore ndi-
ve/ Entonceejuxendive/ Xerohenóieju ore ndive/Venha com
nóis nessa levada/ Xerohenóieju ore ndive/Aldeia unida mostra
a cara (BRÔ MC’s, Eju ore ndive).
(8) Kumbarikira urupukira/ tsa kumbari utsu ukaima/ kurachi wiri

tima tsa katupi/ tsa kumbari kira urupukira/ Yo soy de Nauta y
me gusta rapear/ pero cantar en Kukama me gusta mas/ Dicen
que Kukama no vale la pena/ Yo digo que tonto, porque no se
esmera!/ [...] Por eso te digo/ Vien y canta comigo/ Canta en
Kukama/ Atravete amigo! (Niños Kukama, Kumbarikira).
Besides defying ideologies of monolingualism through practices

between languages and cultures, which in turn puts in suspicion the
unequivocal connection between language, culture and territory as
constitutive of an indigenous authenticity,transidiomatic rap has positive
effects on the vitality and updating of indigenous linguistic and other
semiotic resources, since it evidences their full potential for globalized
contemporaneity and, at the same time, it amplifies their audience
through hybrid uses of non-indigenous linguistic resources (Portuguese
and Spanish in examples above) so that the messages they convey can
reach non-indigenous societies and so higher sociolinguistic scales.
In this way, Wang et al. (2014) point out that such access to translocal
scalar levels generates new linguistic and semiotic possibilities for
communities located at the margins, since their languages, usually
politically minoritized, acquire new contexts of use and translocal
movement through new media and mobile technologies. Thus, they
explain, “this also has effects on their broader cultural traditions, now
also circulating in novel and dynamic ways” (WANG et al., 2014, p. 32).
It is not only in rap production that infrastructures of globalization
are extremely productive in communicative practices in the margins of the
modern/colonial world system. In the following section, the appropriation
of social media by indigenous individuals is also addressed.

3.2 Indigenous Social Media
On March 2015, the newspaper El Pais in its online Brazilian

version, stamped a message which reached its office through the
application for mobile phones WhatsApp. In the message, Anselmo
Yanomami, a Brazilian indigenous man of Yanomami people denounced
the Special Secretariat of Indigenous Health – SESAI for the terrible
health conditions of their people, as well as for deaths caused by diseases
resulting from the contact. The author of the message also requested the
spreading of the situation of his people in Brazil and abroad3.
If, on one hand, this event denounces the conditions of indigenous
life in recondite ignored by most part of Brazilian population, including
the State itself, on the other, it shows the degree of appropriation of
infrastructures of globalization by Brazilian indigenous peoples and
points to how indigenous agency in using mobile and translocal means
of communication has strengthened and became more visible lately.
As highlighted by Lima (2014), it is clear that indigenous people have
more and more occupied spaces as producers of information about
themselves, refuting the privileged white interpreter of their lives,
interests and perspectives. In this way, they “create communication
channels within each and among different and geographically separated
peoples, and so creating mutual understanding and possibilities of
articulation” (LIMA, 2014, p. 09).
According to Mignolo (2011, p 283), this movement is part of a
broader process of decentralization and decolonization and configures
itself as one of the greatest paradoxes of globalization, that is, it makes
possiblethat “subaltern communities within the nation-state to create
transnational alliances beyond the state to fight for their own social
and human rights” (MIGNOLO, 2000, p. 298). In Brazil, as in many
Latin American countries, there are many translocal virtual networks
mediated by information and communication technologies implemented
by indigenous groups to make visible their contemporaneity, their
historical struggles and projects of life and future which, in many
cases, are similar projects to fight coloniality of being and knowing;
more precisely, against racism and all its social, political, economic,
epistemological, cognitive and cultural consequences.

To this end, internet and many forms of digital communication have
become powerful tools for actors and localized struggles that constitute
new types of translocal and global policies and subjectivities, even when
the actors are geographically immobile or have little mobility, and have
limited resources of infrastructures of globalization. In other words, the
Internet allowed these groups simultaneous and decentralized access to
participate in translocal struggles that are repeated in different regions
(SASSEN, 2010). According to Anapuaka Muniz (2014), a Pataxó
leader and intellectual, social medias further political demonstrations
and then indigenous individuals now understand the value of these
tools, especially since the powerful campaign #SouGuaraniKaiowa
(MUNIZ cited by AIRES, 2014).4
Although many are the means and tools of communication
mediated by the Internet, the focus in this work is in the more recent
phenomenon of indigenous appropriation of social media, specifically
Facebook. This appropriation has been occurring at different levels in
the internet, from the level of pages and applications programming in
different languages, to the level of collective and individual uses of
social media.
According to Oliveira (2014), because it is composed by
people or organizations that share values and goals, one of the main
characteristics of a social media is the capacity to absorb people and
different thoughts from some common trait. Furthermore, according to
the author, social media allows less hierarchical relationships among
participants, decentralizing the sharing of information, knowledge
and interests, hence strengthening larger social participation and
mobilization.
In Brazil, given the condition of marginality of indigenous
populations, including the representation of their real conditions of life
by the hegemonic media, the appropriation of social media has become
an important tool of articulation, mobilization and denunciation of
innumerable situations experienced by the indigenous communities
and as a way to achieve the adhesion of the non-indigenous population
to their agendas. An exemplary case is the page “Resistance of Terena
People” (Fig. 6), created on Facebook to denounce to Brazilian
population offenses committed against that people in the state of Mato

Grosso do Sul, Brazil’s Middle-West region, where state policies are
explicitly favorable to agribusiness and against indigenous rights.
Figure 6 - “Resistance of the Terena People”, page on Facebook.
Photo: print screen on August 2015.
On the occasion of the worst conflict caused by a reintegration

of Fazenda Buriti, in the municipality of Sidrolândia, Mato Grosso do
Sul, in 2013, when there was a murder of an indigenous man, Terena
individuals used cell phones to post information in real time about
the atrocities committed by the police against them, which until then
were not broadcast by hegemonic press. The indigenous area, legally
claimed by former deputy Ricardo Bacha, was declared an Indigenous
Land in 2010, but in 2012, the Federal Regional Court accepted an
appeal granting Bacha property of the area, which led to police action
against indigenous people.
Another exemplary case of appropriation of social media in
favor of indigenous collectives interests is Radio Yandé, which has a
website and a Facebook page, aimed at “the diffusion of indigenous
cultures through traditional perspectives, but adding the speed and
scopeof technology and the internet”.5 On Facebook, the appropriation
of this globalized infrastructure is reflected in the use of semiotic
resources that put different spatio-temporal scales into play, as can be
seen in the post reproduced below (Fig. 7).

Figure 7 - Post from the page “Radio Yandê” on Facebook.
Photo: print screen on August 2015.
Considering the post in the social media as a multimodal sign, in

which meaning-making occurs in complex multisemiotic modes, some
features stand out, such as the background image, which reproduces an
indigenous headdress, and the mottos “With the strength and willingness
of great warriors” and, superimposed on the image, “The traditional
indigenous way, now in digital format”. This combination of semiotic
elements takes up historical indexical orders that produce different
scales by juxtaposing the locally-situated signs “great warriors” and
“traditional indigenous way”, with “now in digital format” which,
in turn, elevates the discourse in the post to a higher scale in which
indigenous contemporaneity is indexed.
In this processes of appropriation of social media, it also becomes
clear that the communicative practices are impacted. As highlighted by
Mignolo, “[globalization] made possible the resurgence of indigenous
languages suppressed by colonial and imperial expansion and by the
surge of fractured imperial languages within and outside national
territories” (MIGNOLO, 2000, p. 255). In this way, it is possible to
observe that linguistic-discursive resources of indigenous languages
have been increasingly used in different contexts and practices on the

internet and social media, demonstrating their creative and adaptive
vitality to new interactional environments.
At the level of individual use of social media, there are different
uses of indigenous linguistic resources in different communicative
practices. The following examples, taken from Brazilian indigenous’
Facebook profiles, between February 2015 and January 2016seek
illustrating some of that uses. This is, however, a preliminary incursion
into what Ivkovic and Lotherington (2009) have called virtual linguistic
landscape, understood as a way to delineate complex language
resources, practices, and statuses coexisting in virtual spaces intersected
by power relations (IVKOVIC; LOTHERINGTON, 2009, p. 19). Thus,
for reasons of space and scope of this work, the following examples
(9 and 10) will not be explored in their semiotic complexity, which
could only be made through an extensive and expanded Ethnographic
Linguistic Landscape Analysis, as suggested by Blommaert (2016).
Thus, the next two examples are presented here only to illustrate two
productive different strategies of employment of indigenous linguistic
resources in social media, highlighting their potential for mobility in
virtual environments and on broader sociolinguistic scales:
(9) Multimodal posts and comments with linguistic-discursive
resources of indigenous languages (Fig. 8 and 9):
Figure 8 - Post In Karajá Language Figure 9 - Post In Xerente Language
Photo: Printscreen on March 2015. Photo: Printscreen on May 2015.

(10) Translation from indigenous language to Portuguese
language or vice versa (Fig.10 to 13):
Figure 10 - Translation From Figure 11 - Translation From

Portuguese Language To Xerente Language To Karajá,
Maraguá Language Tapirapé, Kamaiurá E Portuguese
Languages
Photo: Printscreen on May 2015.
Photo: Printscreen on March 2015.
Figure 12 - Translation from Figure 13 - Translation from

Xavante language to Portuguese Xerente language to Portuguese
language language
Photo: Printscreen on April 2015. Photo: Printscreen on April 2015.
In this virtual landscape, hybrids and more complex uses of

communicative resources emerges, which here have been called
transidiomatic practices. The following example illustrates how these
practices have been performed in virtual environments by indigenous
users. The two communicative situations were captured, and here

presented with the user’s previous consent, from posts on Facebook
and, as I argue, demonstrate how transidiomatic practices can fulfill
some communicative functions:
(11) Multimodal posts on Facebook employing resources of
Portuguese and indigenous repertoires (Figures 14 and 15)6:
Figure 14 - Transidiomatic posting on Facebook, employing Portuguese and

Karajá resources
Photo: Printscreen on January 2016.
As can be seen in Figure 14, multimodality, that is an important

dimension in virtual communication environments, integrates images
and digital literacy practices in meaning-making. In the figure above,
we can see an indigenous student in a university environment where he
attends an undergraduate course in Intercultural Education. The situation
captured in the picture in itself reflects the geographical, cultural and social
mobility through which he moves between his home community and the
university, in a Brazilian capital. Considering, as Blommaert (2010, p. 23),
that “repertoires are grounded in people’s biographies and in the wider
histories of the places where they were composed”, the student’s mobility
is indexed in the use of language resources of Portuguese language and

10.5216/sig.v28i2.35454
Karajá language, in a hybrid juxtaposition that along with the semiotic

resources of photography, and mediated by a virtual channel, constitutes
a transidiomatic practice (JACQUEMET, 2005).
When asked about the use of different linguistic resources in
his post (personal communication to the author on January 2016), the
Indigenous teacher pointed out that the use of Karajá resources is a way
to enhance his community language and to draw attention to the multiple
literacy opportunities that this digital environment allows, despite
considering that social media is not yet fully prepared to indigenous
repertoires, and points as an example the impossibility of use of certain
orthographic characters of his language. Concerning the hybrid use of
languages resources, the indigenous student does not see any damage to
the indigenous language, instead he believes that the complementarity
of resources is important for intercultural communication, and it may
even destabilizes the use of tori rybè, i.e. Portuguese language, as
hegemonic repertoire on social media.
The communicative situation illustrated in Figure 15 is also
generated in the interaction on Facebook by indigenous university
students. It is a post by a Krikati student who informs his network
he will change his undergraduate course, so the use of Portuguese
language resources to reach a wider audience, but what draws attention
is the comment of his former colleague, using resources of Portuguese
language and Krahô language, this one the language of her people.
Figure 15 - Transidiomatic Posting on Facebook
Photo: Printscreen oon January 2016.

To understand this communicative situation mediated by the
social media, it is important realize that Krikati and Krahô peoples use
communicative repertoires made of partially convergent resources, i.e.
there is partial mutual linguistic understanding between these different
people, so that they can understand each other when using their own
“language”. When asked about the reason of linguistic hybridity in her
commentary (personal communication to the author on January 2016),
the Krahô student said to have used the indigenous resources that she
knew would be understood by his interlocutor, as far as possible, a
practice which can be interpreted as an index of solidarity and ethnic
affirmation among indigenous students at university; and to ensure
the whole meaning of her comment, resources of Portuguese language
complemented her practice, filling gaps for which there would be no
convergence between indigenous repertoires.
In this process of social media by indigenous individuals,
it is still interesting to see how linguistic-discursive practices and
resources of indigenous languages can also be positioned in translocal
scalar levels, following the flow of messages and content posted all
the time in social media, from different parts of the world, concerning
different socio-cultural realities and using diverse linguistic and
multimodal resources. As the following examples show, comments
in indigenous languages on shared contents can be seen referring
to a regional musical event (Figure 16) and also to an abroad event,
which shows a dancer performance at a baseball game in the United
States (Figure 17). In both cases, indigenous resources make the posts
even more complex semiotically by adding heterogeneous linguistic
resources that will circulate in an even wider network. At the same
time, in tagging the posts with indigenous resources, they became also
more local, since it will make sense for indigenous who share the
same linguistic resources, especially, in their home communities.

Figure 16 - Translocal scalar positioning of Xerente language resources
Photo: Printscreen on March 2015.
Figure 17 - Translocal scalar positioning of Xavante language resources
Photo: Printscreen on April 2015.
In these translocal scalar jumps, indigenous language resources,

which from a traditional view would have to be fixed in local events
of interaction in order to full functional performance, acquire through
social media not only a chance of recognition by wider audiences, but
mainly new possibilities of movement and spreading, and consequently

of expansion of their uses. This phenomenon, according to Jacquemet
(2016, p. 338), is made possible because the several possibilities of
sampling and recontextualizing content in virtual environments, and in
that process adding new semiotic elements, even if they are indigenous
“bits of language” (BLOMMAERT, 2010).
4. Final Remarks
In this work, I sought to present sociolinguistic elements that show

how appropriation of infrastructures of globalization by indigenous
groups and individuals has generated possibilities to make visible
indigenous peoples themselves and their historical and contemporary
demands and agendas and, with regard to language practices, how this
appropriation has given rise to new transidiomatic communicative
environments in which indigenous language resources are used
productively, challenging ideologies which undoubtedly predict as evil
the effects of geocultural globalization to indigenous languages.
This appropriation does not occur out of power relations,
nonetheless. The speedy flow of languages resources and texts also
increases and intensifies the otherness clashes that constantly reaffirm
a pattern of racially hierarchical power, in which indigenous peoples
and their subjectivities, identities, contemporaneities and also their
communicative resources are publicly denied or challenged.
With regard to communication practices performed with
indigenous language resources, the clashes at higher translocal
sociolinguistic scales occur primarily by a wider naturalization of
language ideologies that, on one hand, do not allows conceptualizing
mobile individuals and communicative practices within the limits of
an utopic Nation-state and, on the other hand, subsumes deviant and
historically marginalized individuals and linguistic practices. This
ideology can be illustrated, for example, by indigenous profile names
blocked on Facebook in the United States in 2015, simply because their
indigenous names did not fit the company’s standards7; or even by the
translation “request” made by a non-indigenous individual in Brazil
as a comment to a post employing indigenous language resources and
targeting an indigenous audience, also in 2015 (Figure 18).

Figure 18 - Monolingual and hierarchic ideology on Facebook
Photo: printscreen on April 2015.
The monolingual ideology associated with the idea of hegemony

of the Portuguese language in Brazil is probably what causes the
strangeness and the request for translation into Portuguese by the non-
indigenous interlocutor. Not translating his text, the indigenous user
assumes a counter-hegemonic attitude, consistent with Anzaldúa’s
powerful criticism, according to which minoritized peoples “no longer
feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the
first overture – to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology
blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met
halfway” (ANZALDÚA, 1999, p. 20).
This monolingual ideology, reinforced by modern foundations
of sociolinguistics of distribution (BLOMMAERT, 2010, p. 8), has
nevertheless shown its limits in the field of language studies, making
room for new theories and linguistic ideologies that are concerned with
concreteresources, or bits of languages, or even of literacy practices,
which together form complex linguistic repertoires employed in real
practices. In this direction, the sociolinguistics of mobility has allowed
the understanding that such repertoires, since that they are intrinsically
linked to speakers’ life trajectories, become more and more complex
and often apparently truncated in contexts of diversity generated, in the
cases discussed here, by the colonial difference.
Even considering the cultural complexity and the identity politics
in which indigenous peoples move nowadays, deny their cultural and
linguistic mobility and their appropriation of globalized resources that
impact this mobility, for whatever reason, is once again deny their

contemporaneity, the same strategy used for over five hundred years to
position them in a pastperformatively built by modernity/coloniality and
where, it appears, the traditional Western based language studies want
to keep them in their thoughts, even by that ones most well-intentioned.
Globalização nas margens: elementos para uma sociolinguística da

mobilidade desde experiências indígenas
Resumo
Este artigo analisa, desde abordagens da sociolinguística contemporânea e de
estudos decoloniais, como a apropriação de infraestruturas de globalização por
povos indígenas tem gerado novos meios de interação através dos quais podem
tornar visíveis suas demandas atuais, assim como tem criado novos ambientes
de interações transidiomáticas. A análise enfoca elementos discursivos do rap
e de postagens e comentários em redes sociais nas quais são produtivamente
usados recursos das línguas indígenas. O principal argumento é que saltos
escalares translocais são possibilitados por esta apropriação de infraestruturas
de globalização que pode ter efeitos potenciais positivos na vitalidade
linguística dos povos indígenas.
Palavras-chave: Globalização, infraestruturas de globalização, povos

indígenas, Práticas transidiomáticas.
Globalización en los márgenes: elementos para una sociolingüística

de la movilidad desde experiencias indígenas
Resumen
Este artículo analiza, desde enfoques sociolingüísticos contemporáneos y
descoloniales, como la apropiación de la infraestructura de la globalización
para los pueblos indígenas ha generado nuevos medios de interacción que
pueden hacer visibles sus demandas actuales así como ha generado nuevas
formas de interacciones transidiomáticas. El análisis se centra en elementos
discursivos de rap y de mensajes publicados en las redes sociales en las que
se utilizan productivamente recursos de las lenguas indígenas. El argumento
principal es que los saltos escalares translocales son posibles gracias a esta
apropiación de infraestructuras de globalización con potenciales efectos
positivos sobre la vitalidad lingüística de los pueblos indígenas.

Palabras clave: Globalización, infraestructuras de la globalización, pueblos
indígenas, Prácticas transidiomáticas.
5. Notas
1 Available in: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBafJlZxT6s>; retrieved

on August 2015.
2 Also addressed in Nascimento (2013; 2014).
3 See <http://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2015/03/20
politica/1426888546_164934.html>, retrieved on April 2015.
4 The campaign was launched at the end of 2012 in solidarity to Guarani
Kaiowá people who in a public letter announced the extermination of their
people by agribusiness representatives. The letter had great repercussion in
the press and in social media and immediately motivated millions of users
to share the hashtag #SouGuaraniKaiowa and to add Guarani Kaiowa to
their profile names.
5 See <http://radioyande.com>, retrieved on March, 2017.
6 These communicative situations were more broadly discussed in Lucena
and Nascimento (2016).
7 See: <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/
native-americans-blocked-from-using-facebook-when-using-fake-
indigenous-given-names-10038142.html>, retrieved on September 2015.
References
AIRES, Kellen. Mídias digitais e ativismo: a etnomídia e o poder político dos

indígenas nas redes sociais e internet. Panorama, n. 2, 2014. Disponível em:
<http://natwork2013.wixsite.com/panorama2014/ativismo>. Acesso em: 24
jul. 2017.
ANZALDÚA, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: the new mestiza. 2. ed. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
BLOMMAERT, Jan. The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.

______. The conservative turn in Linguistic Landscape Studies. Research
on alternative democratic life in Europe, 2016. Disponível em: <https://
alternative-democracy-research.org/2016/01/05/the-conservative-turn-in-
linguistic-landscape-studies/>. Acesso em: 24 jul. 2017
______ et al. Further notes on sociolinguistic scales. Tilburg Papers in Culture
Studies, 2014. Disponível em: <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/29c9/36bf43
93ba8ad712153f5a4669e6c22c55dc.pdf>. Acesso em: 24 jul. 2017
DANGL, Benjamin. Rapping in Aymara: in Bolivia, hip-hop music and culture
are becoming key parts of a larger liberation struggle. Upside Down World.
Sep. 2006. Disponível em: <http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/bolivia/
rapping-in-aymara-bolivian-hip-hop-as-an-instrument-of-struggle/>. Acesso
em: 24 jul. 2017.
IVKOVIC, Dejan; LOTHERINGTON, Heather. Multilingualism in
cyberspace: conceptualizing the virtual linguistic landscape. International
Journal of Multilingualism, v. 6, n. 1, p. 17-36, 2009.
JACQUEMET, Marco. Transidiomatic practices: language and power in the
age of globalization. Language and communication, 25, p. 257-277, 2005.
______. Language in the age of globalization. In: BONVILLAIN, N. (Ed.).
The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. London: Routledge,
2016. p. 329-347.
LIMA, Antonio Carlos de Souza. Prefácio. In: OLIVEIRA, Bruno Pacheco.
Mídia índio(s): comunidades indígenas e novas tecnologias de comunicação.
Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa /LACED, 2014. p. 9-10.
LUCENA, Maria Inêz Probst; NASCIMENTO, André Marques. Práticas
(trans)comunicativas contemporâneas: uma discussão sobre dois conceitos
fundamentais. Revista da Anpoll, v. 40, p. 46-57, 2016.
MIGNOLO, Walter. D. Local histories/ Global designs: coloniality, subaltern
knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
______. D. The darker side of Western Modernity: global futures, decolonial
options. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2011.
MOITA LOPES, Luiz Paulo. Como e por que teorizar o português: recurso
comunicativo em sociedades porosas e em tempos híbridos de globalização
cultural. In: ______ (Ed.). O português no século XXI: cenário geopolítico e
sociolinguístico. São Paulo: Parábola, 2013. p. 101-119.
MUFWENE, Salikoko S. Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’
languages. Journal of Linguistics, v. 38, n. 2, p. 375-395, 2002a.

______. Colonisation, globalisation, and the future of languages in the Twenty-
first century. International Journal on Multicultural Societies, v. 4, n. 2, p. 1-48,
2002b.
NASCIMENTO, André Marques. Ideologias e práticas linguísticas contra-
hegemônicas na produção de rap indígena. Signótica, v. 25, n. 2, p. 259-281,
2013.
______. O potencial contra-hegemônico do rap indígena na América Latina
sob a perspectiva decolonial. Polifonia, v. 21, n. 29, p. 91-127, jan./ jul. 2014.
Disponível em: <http://periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/ojs/index.php/polifonia/
article/view/1285/1440>. Acesso em: 24 jul. 2017.
QUIJANO, Aníbal. Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina.
In: LANDER, Edgard (Ed.). La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y
ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO,
2000. p. 193-238.
SASSEN, Saskia. Sociologia da globalização. Translation Ronaldo Cataldo
Costa. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2010.
TLOSTANOVA, Madina; MIGNOLO, Walter D. Learning to unlearn:
decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Columbus: The Ohio
University Press, 2012.
WANG, Xuan et al. Globalization in the margins: toward a re-evalution of
language and mobility. Applied Linguistics Review, v. 5, n. 1, p. 23-44, 2014.
Submetido em 15 de abril de 2016

Aceito em 7 de março de 2017
Publicado em 31 de agosto de 2017


Globalization in The Margins Toward Elem

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Globalization in The Margins Toward Elem

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Globalization in The Margins Toward Elem

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

10.5216/sig.v29i2.

Globalization in the margins: toward elements for a sociolin-

André Marques do NASCIMENTO∗

Keywords: Globalization, Infrastructures of globalization, Indigenous peoples,

2. Theoretical Framework: Towards A Sociolinguistic Of

Blommaert (2010) systematizes theoretical and methodological

270 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 271

272 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 273

274 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 275

276 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

3. Globalization In The Margins: Indigenous Appropriations Of

Nowadays, in different regions of colonized territories, it is

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 277

Figure 1 - Indigenous youth of Xambioá people watching the US TV series

“The Walking Dead” via cable TV.

Photo: Author, 2014.

Figure 2 - Satellite dishes in Xambioá village.

Photo: Author, 2014.

278 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Photos: Author, 2015.

These situations, I believe, are quite characteristic of

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 279

3.1 Indigenous Rap Music

According to Wang et al. (2014), one of the most prominent effects

280 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Drawing on deterritorialized resources, especially digital editing

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 281

In this translocal scalar jump, not only there is the positioning

282 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

In examples (4) to (6), taken respectively from Brô MC’s’, the

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 283

(5) Los Aymaras somos originarios de América/ vivimos hace mi-

(6) Mi pueblo, sus voces ya no callaran!/ [...] Mi sangre gerrera se

The appropriation of infrastructures of globalization from the

284 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

(8) Kumbarikira urupukira/ tsa kumbari utsu ukaima/ kurachi wiri

Besides defying ideologies of monolingualism through practices

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 285

On March 2015, the newspaper El Pais in its online Brazilian

286 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 287

Figure 6 - “Resistance of the Terena People”, page on Facebook.

Photo: print screen on August 2015.

On the occasion of the worst conflict caused by a reintegration

288 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Photo: print screen on August 2015.

Considering the post in the social media as a multimodal sign, in

Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017 289

Figure 8 - Post In Karajá Language Figure 9 - Post In Xerente Language

Photo: Printscreen on March 2015. Photo: Printscreen on May 2015.

290 Signótica, Goiânia, v. 29, n. 2, p. 269-301, jul./dez. 2017

Figure 10 - Translation From Figure 11 - Translation From

Photo: Printscreen on May 2015.

Photo: Printscreen on March 2015.

Figure 12 - Translation from Figure 13 - Translation from

Photo: Printscreen on April 2015. Photo: Printscreen on April 2015.