The own and the other in narratives about witchcraft of the northeast of Mexico

Keywords: Discourse, witchcraft, own discourse, Mexico, semiotics

Abstract

The stories about witchcraft in northeastern of Mexico always present how some situations that seem daily and normal end up covering up their true reality that is negative and harmful, that is, people, things or situations that seem good, in reality they are evil situations. The cover-up mentioned above occurs in an irruption of the alien in the own, where the alien is that which does not belong to the daily reality of the speaker and that is therefore considered as threatening and dangerous. The own usually appears as the daily, the usual and ordinary in the lives of these people. This paper shows the linguistic expressions with which the own, the alien and that inversion of the reality of the speakers of the southeast of the Mexican state of Coahuila are referred to in a series of 21 oral narratives on witchcraft. These references use differences between fright, fear, terror and horror to discursively express this process. When the borders between the own and the alien are blurred, the linguistic expressions return to these narratives in horror stories and raise the notion, from witchcraft, of an upside down world.

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Author Biographies

Gabriel Ignacio Verduzco Arguelles, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

BA of Dogmatic Theology from the Universidad Pontificia de México (2001); MA in Research Methodology from the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila (2006) and PhD on Cultural Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Léon (2016). Awarded first national position for the best doctoral thesis and third international position ALED 2017. Member of the National System of Researchers as a candidate. Full-time research teacher at the Faculty of Science, Education, and Humanities of the UAdeC. Leader of the academic research group “Discourses, Semiotics and Languages. Studies of Culture in the Region” at the same university.

María Eugenia Flores Treviño, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León

BA in Media Education (Language and Literature) ENS, BA in Spanish Language and Literatures UANL, MA in Sciences: Language and Literature UANL, PhD in Humanities and Arts (Honorable Mention 2006) UANL. Award for the Best Master’s Thesis in Humanities, UANL, 2002. Member of the National System of Researchers Level 1. Coordinator of the Mexico Chapter, of the EDICE Program, directed by Diana Bravo at the University of Stockholm. Member of the AMER.ES.CO group of the University of Valencia, coordinated by Antonio Briz. PRESEEA-Monterrey researcher, coordinated by Lidia Rodríguez. Leader of the Academic Research Group UANL-245. “Discourses, Semiotics and Languages. Studies of Culture in the Region”. Books published: 6; Book chapters: 36; Supervised PhD dissertations: 30.

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Published
15-12-2018
How to Cite
Verduzco Arguelles, G., & Flores Treviño, M. (2018). The own and the other in narratives about witchcraft of the northeast of Mexico. Texts in Process, 4(2), 159-173. https://doi.org/10.17710/tep.2018.4.2.2arguellesytrevino
Section
Working papers

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