The authorship of indigenous communities: who is the author?

The starting point for this paper is the concept of authorship presented by Foucault and Barthes. For them, the author is a social construction. Therefore it is necessary to understand who the author of a work is to produce a real representation and to value cultural identities. The context of this paper is the IFLA Statement on Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. It recommends - specifically in #2, #3 and #6 of its guidelines – to promote research and learning about indigenous peoples, to publicize the value of indigenous knowledge to both non-indigenous and indigenous peoples and to encourage the recognition of intellectual property of indigenous traditional knowledge and products derived from it. It is about an exploratory investigation, based on bibliographic, documental and comparative research whose object of study is the concept of indigenous authorship in bibliographic representation. As the author is represented in the bibliographic records according to guidelines established by cataloguing codes, reflections about authorship and its form of representation are instrumental for links to be created between bibliographic records, documents, users and memory preservation. In this perspective, learning about Brazilian indigenous peoples is the beginning of more complex studies to promote indigenous knowledge and to recognize their value for all societies, and eventually to construct a Brazilian identity.

本研究的立论起点源自福柯与巴尔特提出的作者身份概念。在二人看来，作者身份是一种社会建构。因此，唯有明晰作品的作者身份，方能实现真实的表征，并珍视文化身份。本研究的依托语境为《国际图书馆协会联合会（IFLA）土著传统知识声明》，该声明特别在其指南的第2、3、6条中提出：应推动针对土著族群的研究与学习，向非土著族群与土著群体自身宣传土著知识的价值，并鼓励认可土著传统知识及其衍生产品的知识产权。本研究属于探索性研究，基于书目研究、文献研究与比较研究方法，其研究对象为书目表征语境下的土著作者身份概念。由于在编目规则确立的规范框架下，作者身份需在书目记录中得以呈现，因此对作者身份及其表征形式的反思，有助于建立书目记录、文献、用户与记忆留存之间的关联。基于此视角，了解巴西土著族群，是开展更复杂研究的起点——这些研究旨在推广土著知识、认可其对全人类社会的价值，并最终助力构建巴西的文化身份认同。