This dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afro-descendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America. / text

(in English): The aim of the present work is to offer an up-to-date synopsis based on historical data and textual evidence that would give a coherent description of the long-discussed question of the mutual relations between the Hittite (or Anatolian) and the Greek world in the period of the Late Bronze Age. In order to do so, various data from different scientific fields were put together. After a brief introduction to onomastics and the history of the Greco-Anatolian studies follows the main part of the work which deals with probably mutually borrowed anthropo- and toponyms in these languages from both a diachronic and synchronic point of view.

This thesis is an ethnographic account of the indigenous history and colonization of the upper Tapajós river in Brazil. Research was conducted using archival materials in which I searched for the different conceptualizations of river movements and routes, of either Indians or colonizers. During the period of penetration in the region called “Mundurucânica”, several native groups living in the savannah and at the riverbanks, started to be used as a labour-force, but above all, they worked as interpreters thereby enabling colonization on these Amazonian rivers around the Tapajós. If, on one hand, native groups were violated by colonization, on the other, they have shaped and influenced the penetration, demonstrating their active involvement in this historical process. With the arrival of Franciscan priests and the ultimate establishment of the Cururu Mission, exchanges between indigenous people and colonizers became impregnated with mythical fragments. These relations of displacements and encounters between indigenous groups—that in turn influenced colonization efforts—with local cultural values and practices is still a relatively little explored topic in anthropology. This thesis synthesises the history of the colonization of a region of the Brazilian Amazonian rainforest from the point of view of its indigenous inhabitants. It considers the pacification of the Indians in the 18th and 19th centuries, presenting ethnographic material of the indigenous groups that have moved into the Tapajós region and examines their social logic of interethnic contact. I analyze fragments of material culture, myths and naming such as they appear in the literature so as to track down the spatial dynamics of indigenous Amazonia and its landscape transformations.