What Do the Subjects of Our Narratives Say?

Abstract

From the perspective of critical hermeneutics, identities are understood as being constructed insofar as it becomes possible to confer meaning on events, ordering them into stories that are recognized and narrated as one’s own. In these stories, a tension is established between a past linked to tradition and inheritance and a future toward which one projects oneself from a present situation and context. We therefore assume that there are no cultures, groups, or subjects lacking intersubjectively constructed narratives.

We propose to address conceptions of the subject, the world, and life that become present in traditional oral narratives of the Andean cultures of Northwestern Argentina.

Among critical hermeneutic thinkers, such as Ricoeur and Habermas, and especially from Latin American perspectives, there emerges the need to listen to the voices of subjects expressed in popular narratives. These narratives open paths for understanding symbolic expressions of tensions related to conflictive socioeconomic and political situations characterized by the denial of dignity, both to human and nonhuman beings.

In this paper, we are particularly interested in exploring the richness of meanings of a resource always present in this type of text: metaphorical utterances. We postulate that, through them, regional popular discourse expresses a dynamic conception of the reality inhabited by its actors.