Boitatá

Bridging the gap between traditional oral folklore and modern metropolitan expression, this paper examines urban hip-hop battles in Salvador and Recife as sophisticated manifestations of contemporary vernacular oral poetics. Through close textual and sonic analysis of freestyle rap lyrics, we demonstrate how MCs deploy traditional cordel literature tropes, rhythmic improvisation, and vernacular rhetorical devices to critique systemic marginalization and police violence. The study maps out genealogies connecting twentieth-century northeastern repentistas (improvised singers) with twenty-first-century urban rappers, revealing unbroken threads of oral artistry adapted to digital-age struggles. We explore how performance venues—ranging from public squares to digital streaming platforms—serve as modern agoras where historical grievances are transformed into collective political empowerment. By analyzing stanza structures, rhyme schemes, and audience interaction dynamics, this research validates hip-hop not merely as imported youth subculture, but as a legitimate, highly evolved branch of Brazilian oral literature that actively reshapes civic consciousness, linguistic identity, and public discourse across marginalized urban landscapes.

This research examines the complex ecosystem of mythic water spirits within Guarani oral narratives, analyzing how rivers, springs, and subterranean aquifers are personified as sentient moral agents in traditional storytelling. By transcribing and analyzing oral testimonies collected from elders in southern Brazil, the author reveals an intricate ecological philosophy encoded directly into grammar, narrative structure, and ritual songs. The study contrasts Western Cartesian resource management with Guarani relational ontology, demonstrating how oral poetics serves as an ethical framework regulating human-nature interactions. Furthermore, the paper explores the pedagogical role of storytelling in transmitting hydrological conservation knowledge across generations, proving that oral tradition is an indispensable tool for contemporary environmental ethics and planetary sustainability in the Anthropocene.

Liturgical chants in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé ceremonies represent a profound synthesis of Yoruba linguistics, ancestral memory, and acoustic spirituality. This paper examines how oral performance in sacred terreiros transcends simple verbal communication to become an active metaphysical force capable of invoking deities and stabilizing community cohesion. Through detailed sonic transcription and interviews with senior priests (babalorixás and ialorixás), we explore the structural nuances of call-and-response patterns, tonal inflection, and polyrhythmic drumming. The findings challenge logocentric academic biases by illustrating that sacred knowledge in Afro-diasporic traditions is primarily inscribed through bodily memory, vocal timbre, and communal resonance rather than static orthography.

This study traces the remarkable survival of medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo in remote agrarian communities across northern Portugal and Galicia. Despite centuries of institutional literacy and urbanization, elderly rural women continue to perform traditional work songs that preserve archaic metric structures, parallelisms, and thematic motifs identical to those recorded in thirteenth-century royal cancioneiros. By combining philological textual criticism with modern acoustic field recordings, this paper documents living fragments of medieval lyricism. The research sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms of oral transmission, demonstrating how collective memory operates independently of written archives to sustain centuries-old cultural artifacts across generations.

Traditionally dominated by male poets, Brazilian cordel literature has experienced a profound feminist renaissance over the past two decades. This paper analyzes how contemporary female cordelistas utilize traditional rhymed verse forms (such as the sextilha and septilha) to subvert patriarchal tropes, rewrite canonical folklore from intersectional perspectives, and address contemporary issues of domestic violence, economic autonomy, and political representation. Through close readings of key chapbooks published between 2018 and 2024, the author demonstrates how women poets harness the popular authority of cordel to carve out empowering discursive spaces within northeastern Brazilian print and oral culture.

How do traditional folklore characters—such as the Saci, Curupira, and Boitatá itself—survive and mutate within algorithm-driven digital platforms? This article investigates the phenomenon of "digital orality," examining how short-form video applications like TikTok and Instagram Reels function as contemporary virtual campfires. By analyzing viral audio memes, folkloric reinterpretations, and participatory challenges, we argue that internet culture does not destroy traditional folklore, but rather accelerates its vernacular circulation. The paper presents a novel methodological framework for archiving ephemeral digital oral texts, bridging traditional folklore studies with cutting-edge media theory.

Ritual laments represent one of the most archaic and emotionally charged genres of oral poetry across diverse global cultures. This comparative study examines the structural and thematic parallels between traditional funeral dirges in rural Greece (Mani peninsula) and indigenous mourning chants (taki) in the Peruvian Andes. Through rigorous cross-cultural analysis, the authors demonstrate how improvised vocal lamentation acts as an institutionalized communal container for processing collective trauma, loss, and social transition. The paper highlights the universal kinetic and melodic properties of grief poetry, offering profound insights into the anthropological foundations of human vocal art.

This comparative transnational study explores the striking conceptual similarities between Aboriginal Australian "songlines" and indigenous Brazilian navigation and creation chants. Both traditions encode geographical knowledge, ecological navigation markers, and ancestral history into melodic structures that allow travelers to navigate vast, arid or densely forested terrains through song alone. By juxtaposing these distant traditions, the authors argue for a universal "geopoetic" cognitive faculty in human culture, where landscape and language are inextricably fused in oral memory. The paper offers profound implications for cultural heritage preservation and indigenous land rights advocacy.

Collecting and archiving oral testimonies of political violence and institutional trauma requires a specialized ethical and rhetorical framework. This paper reflects on methodological protocols for conducting oral history interviews with survivors of political authoritarianism in Latin America. We examine how narrative fragmentation, silence, gesture, and emotional pacing operate as essential components of traumatic testimony that cannot be captured by standard transcription alone. The author proposes an "ethics of listening" that transforms the interviewer from an objective data collector into an active moral witness, ensuring that vulnerable oral histories are preserved with dignity, nuance, and rigorous academic integrity.

Proverbs function as condensed philosophical systems, carrying complex ethical, legal, and metaphysical insights across oceans and generations. This transatlantic study examines the survival and metamorphosis of Yoruba and Fon proverbs within Afro-Brazilian popular culture, particularly in Candomblé liturgy, capoeira philosophy, and daily vernacular speech. Using cognitive metaphor theory, we analyze how metaphorical mappings from agrarian and natural life are deployed to navigate modern social complexities. The research underscores the intellectual sophistication embedded in oral aphorisms, challenging archaic hierarchies that privilege written philosophy over oral wisdom traditions.

In oral storytelling, the human body is not merely an instrument delivering spoken words; it is an active semiotic text in its own right. This paper investigates the kinesic dimensions of traditional storytelling across Andean and Platine folklore performances. By examining hand gestures, facial micro-expressions, posture shifts, and spatial choreography, the author demonstrates how physical movement provides syntactic punctuation and emotional depth that spoken language alone cannot achieve. The study introduces a robust notation system for analyzing embodied performance, advancing the theoretical boundaries of narratology into the realm of somato-sensory studies.

Poetry slam competitions have exploded across Brazilian metropolitan centers, offering vibrant democratic platforms for marginalized voices. This article focuses specifically on queer and transgender slam poets in downtown São Paulo, analyzing how performance poetry acts as an assertive tool for claiming public space, resisting heteronormative violence, and forging solidarity networks. Through audiovisual analysis of slam performances, we explore how rhythm, vocal dynamics, and raw emotional vulnerability construct safe, empowering communities. The research highlights poetry slam as a vital contemporary evolution of oral poetics deeply engaged with civil rights and social justice.

As oral traditions increasingly migrate into digital spaces, academic repositories face unprecedented technical and ethical hurdles in collecting, standardizing, and preserving ephemeral audio-visual artifacts. This review article evaluates current institutional frameworks for digital folklore archiving, addressing issues of metadata interoperability, indigenous data sovereignty (FAIR and CARE principles), and long-term digital preservation formats. By examining case studies from major Brazilian and European university archives, the authors propose a comprehensive roadmap for future digital oral heritage repositories, ensuring that live performance nuances are safely preserved without violating community governance rights.