Kairós and Chronos: about Kaingang times and cosmology

Abstract

In the present work we present the results of an investigation that had Time as its study theme and, as a guiding thread, listening and recording the stories of the Kofa ag Kaingang of the Xapecó Indigenous Land, seeking to understand the concept of time manifested through stories. The research had as a methodology the autoetnography, an investigation in which an indigenous woman becomes the author of a study about her own people, through documentary research and field research with Kofa ag from the community. The data were analyzed in the light of the Discursive Textual Analysis. The study showed us a tension between “living” time in the past way of life and in the contemporary of the Kaingang, from the notion constituted historically and culturally, in their configurations and meanings. Our premise is that indigenous good living occurs in the balance of time Chronos and Kairós; that the Kofa ag experience a conflicting relationship with nature, marked by the Chronos time and experienced in a Kairós time; that in the current routines imbued with clock time we find the evident traces of Kairós time, in the reading of the world that each of them provides.