The roughly 350 speakers of the Wauja (Xingu Arawak) language form a distinct ethnolinguistic group living in a single circular village within the upper Xinguan multilingual social system and inside the Brazilian Xingu Indigenous Park. This dissertation is an ethnographic and linguistic anthropological study of how this small scale society, hemmed in since the mid 1950s by the perimeter of the Park, a massive state project in lowland Amazonia to spatially and temporally fix "primitive" Indians in their natural state, comes to build relationships that reach out to challenge their very isolation and to redefine those very boundaries.

The dissertation progresses narratively and analytically from texts grounded in the local village setting, moving through inter-local exchange ritual meetings, encounters with Brazilian agents at the frontiers of the Park involving bible translation and territorial claims making, finally accompanying a contingent of Wauja men in a paid dance performance in France. I theorize a model of Wauja discursive interaction as indexically reflecting, calibrating, and constituting social relations as exchange relations. I further show how the conditions of such relations are moving into new spaces of exchange, and how the Wauja's efforts to domesticate new spaces entail negotiation over the terms of such relations. Thus I approach linguistic and sociocultural texts with an attention to the conditions of their spatialization and to the logics of exchange, in which discourse, too, finds its place.

The dissertation contributes to the linguistic anthropological theorization of text as an analytic domain in which language structure and use articulate with contexts of production. I argue that the contextual features of space, in combination with frames for interaction and exchange, inform textual production, and that textuality is in turn a central component of cultural models of space and exchange. Thus a linguistic anthropological approach to text informs broader anthropological understanding of space and exchange as well as linguistic theorization of the place of language in culture.