Makunaima(s): Poetic of Metamorphosis

Abstract

This article analyzes the trajectory of Makunaima, a myth originally collected by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, among the Taurepang people, on the border between Brazil, Venezuela and British Guiana. We used an interface between anthropology, literary theory, and semiotics of images to reflect on the ways this Amerindian “cultural hero” was adapted to the modernist literature of Mário de Andrade, and to the cinematic aesthetics of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. This set of mythological variants is analyzed by means of its main remaining characteristics, and its differential distances. This study aims, lastly, to apprehend the recurring elements that configure a Makunaimic poetics in those narratives.