This paper aims at contributing to the development of a new paradigm in the social sciences. To do so, it attempts to clarify notions inherited - and maybe wrongly misinterpreted in the process - from the social and historical context of modern western culture. The notions to be clarified are related to one of modern western culture's projects, namely, the "obliteration" of the subject and the establishing of differences between subjects and their many ways of doing, saying and thinking. The paper reports on the process of developing our own research work and articulates it with a reflection about the several ways of doing-saying. It builds on a possible approximation between academically acceptable processes of doing-saying and the account, by the film director Walter Salles, of his making of the movie Central do Brasil. Finally, it emphasizes the view that links people to their doings and sayings, understood as "traces" that remain - and thus allow us to reconstruct the processes through marks - and that we legitimate, as constitutive parts of the doings and sayings associated with the many rationalities intimately linked to people's experiences and practices in/through culture.
Traces; Languages; Culture; Illiterate adults; Knowledge