Abstract

The proper name, in addition to designating an identity transmitted intergenerationally, can harbor social memories consubstantial with the representations of a family genealogy, intertwined with transgenerational historical processes. In this case study, the resonances of meanings linked to the signifier “Terena” are analyzed in the light of the onomastic social process of transforming ethnonyms into surnames, based on ethnopsychoanalytic theoretical and methodological foundations. It was found that there was no transparency or linear correspondence, at least in this case, between the signifier Terena as an ethnonym and the same as a family surname, leaving open the extent to which its multivocality is linked to the repression of family memory and/or to resistance to a genealogical identification that at different historical moments will have assumed different and eventually antagonistic valuations.

Keywords:
proper name; ethnopsychology; identification