In this article, I explore articulations formed through the terms povo (a people) and causo (a yarn or story), with an emphasis on the latter, by looking at the exchange of prosa (conversations) among the Buracos' people - the Buraqueiros - in the North of Minas Gerais, Southeastern Brazil. The Buraqueiros say that yarns teach us about the people. And in order to treat both these terms as native concepts, the article asks: What type of knowledge does the yarn conceptualise? What type of logic does it generate among these people? What is a yarn, in the end? The aim is not to seek circumscriptions for this narrative form, for it appears both as short remarks and lengthy lectures. Instead, I investigate its creative practices, the trivial conversations and relational configuration from which the yarn emerges. I shall describe how, when he tells of a people, the narrator creates, qualifies and intensifies or diverges relations between himself, protagonists and listeners, acting in a constant movement that transforms the arrangements through which a people are constituted. I conclude by using these reflections to analyse "Dona Bibi's yarn about the television".
Oral narrative; Kinship; Ethnographic writing; the Northern Mineiro Sertão