Traditional storytellers of the Jequitinhonha Valley (MG)

guardians of memory and ancestry: interfaces of oral literature, linguistic variation, and digital technologies

Abstract

This article argues that a corpus of two hundred and fifty-five oral narratives, which can be listened to and read in the digital educational resource “Narrativas em Rede”, created by this author, may be classified as oral literature, based on the ideas of Cascudo (1984), and the storytellers, conceived as traditional narrators, in line with Benjamin’s (1985) ideas in the essay “The Storyteller”. It is argued that the storytellers identified in the Jequitinhonha Valley between 1987 and 1997, when performing the oral narratives analyzed, make use of a mixed or primary orality, as conceived by Zumthor (1993), while, at the same time, drawing upon the knowledge and experience of traditional narrators, a central figure in Benjamin’s (1985) essay. It is believed that the creation of the digital resource (website) “Narrativas em Rede” gives voice to orality and, at the same time, projects this corpus of oral literature from the Jequitinhonha region into spatial dimensions beyond the territory in which it was produced. Currently hosted on the World Wide Web, this literature becomes universal, accessible from any part of Brazil and of the world through digital technologies such as smartphones, tablets, among others, consolidating itself as a bridge between past and future, uniting tradition and innovation, modes of storytelling and forms of social interaction of new generations.