Letter of discovery of Brazil: bodies, sexuality and power

This essay, starting from the description of the indigenous in the letter of discovery of Brazil of Pero Vaz de Caminha (1500), tries to define the clear tensions in the relationship between the first seafarers went to Brazil and the local population.It will be defined the relationship with the otherness, starting from the bodies, in their double function: they are at the same time filter (the eye of the colonizer) and filtered (the bodies of the colonized). It will be analyzed the way the sensorial perception can contribute to the construction of the representation of the world.  The description of the bodies and the perception of them, that the Portuguese writer will give though his own senses, will be the basis to observe the relation of the power and the tensions between colonizers and colonized, tensions that will persist in the future Brazilian society. Finally starting from the production of desire that this bodies excite and from the relationship between genders, will be speculated the function of sexuality in the society and the way the the power tries control it for its strengthness and establishment. The perception of the body will be also the reason to analyze the representation that the Portuguese writer will give of the otherness as being or as existing being.  

Variation and education in Linguistic Atlas of Brazil

This article focuses on one of the aspects treated in the project Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (ALiB Project) – the teaching of Brazilian Portuguese language. Therefore, this paper investigates how individuals’ language presents specific linguistic marks that construct, maintain and project the diversity in the questionnaire of the ALiB Project, based on the use of the linguistic variation. Thereby, it deals with the importance of linguistic atlas for the education process, highlighting the publication of some Brazilian regional atlas and the linguistic atlas of Brazil. Thus, it discusses the relevant contribution of these works to the knowledge of the linguistic reality in Brazil, as the atlas can optimize and motivate classroom activities and they can also be explored by other subjects of school curriculum. The methodology used was based on the performance of the following stages: 1) reading of the theoretical texts related to the proposed theme; 2) choice and formation of the corpus, made up of inquests of the ALiB Project in different capitals; 3) analysis of the corpus in order to verify linguistic marks that transmit the construction, projection and maintenance of the linguistic variation. The analyses of the selected inquiries try to study variation and its relationship to education by the informers from different age-groups in the different capitals of the country. The analysis of the corpus enabled the realization of register and documentation of lexical diversity of Portuguese language spoken in Brazil, according to the principles of the modern Pluridimensional Geolinguistics, in which the register follows specific parameters.