The authorship of indigenous communities: who is the author?

Abstract

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.