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oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E58-D

Metadata
Title:Music: David 2
Documentation of Wayana
Contributor (researcher):Eithne
Contributor (singer):David
Coverage:Suriname
Date:2006
Description:Wayana The Wayana are a small Amerindian group currently living in the dense tropical rainforests of Suriname, French Guiana and northern Brazil. Although there are many variations in the number of speakers remaining today it seems acceptable to presume that approximately 1200 live in the afore-mentioned areas. The name Wayana, by which they are known today, is in reality a collective name for several ethnic groups who are believed to have merged in the 18th century. This most likely occurred, in order to increase their chances of survival following extensive warfare and the spread of European diseases for which they had no cure. Despite the many discrepancies within the written sources as to which groups are to be included within this amalgamation, it is assumed that the three largest groups included the Upului, Opagwana(i) and the Kuku(i)yana, the Fire-fly People, who are known as the “original” Wayana (Boven, 2006: 59). Today the Wayana live along a total of five rivers, which are important sources for food, water and sanitation, and which additionally form important links with hunting grounds, gardens and other villages. Approximately 200 Wayana continue to reside in northern Brazil from where they originate, although they now seem, for the most part, to have merged linguistically with the Apalai. In Brazil they live in the state of Pará, along the banks of the Jarí and Paru Rivers; the latter of which forms the state border between Amapá and Pará. Despite their Brazilian origins, the largest number of Wayana speakers can be found along Litani and Lawa Rivers, the latter of which partially forms the Suriname-French Guiana border. In the interior of Suriname approximately 400 Wayana continue to live along the Tapanahoni River where they have resided since the mid 19th century. Here they are concentrated in the villages of Palumeu and Pïlëuimë (Apetina), the latter of which is where the majority of these recordings were made. Text taken from: Hough, Karen. 2008. The Expression and Perception of Space in Wayana. Sidestone Press, Leiden. References: Boven, Karin. 2006. Overleven in een grensgebied:Veranderingsprocessen bij de Wayana in Suriname en Frans-Guyana. IBS Rozenberg Publishers, Amsterdam. Recordings: The recordings were made by Dr. Eithne B. Carlin in 2006 & 2007. Initially Trio (Cariban) was used as a lingua franca, and all Wayana data were translated into Trio. Kulepeman and Same were the narrators. Kulepeman lives in the village of Apetina and remains the sole inhabitant who has not traded his loincloth for western clothes. At the time of the recoding he was early in his sixties. His grandson, Johan, sometimes helped with the translations. Same is a traditional healer and lives with his family in Tutukampu, a small camp downstream from Apetina. Several of these recordings were made in this camp. The music recordings are of Same’s son, David. Despite his ‘hip-hop’ image, the songs he is singing are church songs.
Recordings: The recordings were made by Dr. Eithne B. Carlin in 2006 & 2007. Initially Trio (Cariban) was used as a lingua franca, and all Wayana data were translated into Trio. Kulepeman and Same were the narrators. Kulepeman lives in the village of Apetina and remains the sole inhabitant who has not traded his loincloth for western clothes. At the time of the recoding he was early in his sixties. His grandson, Johan, sometimes helped with the translations. Same is a traditional healer and lives with his family in Tutukampu, a small camp downstream from Apetina. Several of these recordings were made in this camp. The music recordings are of Same’s son, David. Despite his ‘hip-hop’ image, the songs he is singing are church songs. Wayana: The Wayana are a small Amerindian group currently living in the dense tropical rainforests of Suriname, French Guiana and northern Brazil. Although there are many variations in the number of speakers remaining today it seems acceptable to presume that approximately 1200 live in the afore-mentioned areas. The name Wayana, by which they are known today, is in reality a collective name for several ethnic groups who are believed to have merged in the 18th century. This most likely occurred, in order to increase their chances of survival following extensive warfare and the spread of European diseases for which they had no cure. Despite the many discrepancies within the written sources as to which groups are to be included within this amalgamation, it is assumed that the three largest groups included the Upului, Opagwana(i) and the Kuku(i)yana, the Fire-fly People, who are known as the “original” Wayana (Boven, 2006: 59). Today the Wayana live along a total of five rivers, which are important sources for food, water and sanitation, and which additionally form important links with hunting grounds, gardens and other villages. Approximately 200 Wayana continue to reside in northern Brazil from where they originate, although they now seem, for the most part, to have merged linguistically with the Apalai. In Brazil they live in the state of Pará, along the banks of the Jarí and Paru Rivers; the latter of which forms the state border between Amapá and Pará. Despite their Brazilian origins, the largest number of Wayana speakers can be found along Litani and Lawa Rivers, the latter of which partially forms the Suriname-French Guiana border. In the interior of Suriname approximately 400 Wayana continue to live along the Tapanahoni River where they have resided since the mid 19th century. Here they are concentrated in the villages of Palumeu and Pïlëuimë (Apetina), the latter of which is where the majority of these recordings were made. Text taken from: Hough, Karen. 2008. The Expression and Perception of Space in Wayana. Sidestone Press, Leiden. References: Boven, Karin. 2006. Overleven in een grensgebied:Veranderingsprocessen bij de Wayana in Suriname en Frans-Guyana. IBS Rozenberg Publishers, Amsterdam.
Recordings: The recordings were made by Dr. Eithne B. Carlin in 2006 & 2007. Initially Trio (Cariban) was used as a lingua franca, and all Wayana data were translated into Trio. Kulepeman and Same were the narrators. Kulepeman lives in the village of Apetina and remains the sole inhabitant who has not traded his loincloth for western clothes. At the time of the recoding he was early in his sixties. His grandson, Johan, sometimes helped with the translations. Same is a traditional healer and lives with his family in Tutukampu, a small camp downstream from Apetina. Several of these recordings were made in this camp. The music recordings are of Same’s son, David. Despite his ‘hip-hop’ image, the songs he is singing are church songs.
The NWO Endangered Languages Programme “Giving them back their Languages: The endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas” research falls within the aim of documenting all the highly endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas that is currently being carried out at Leiden University, and which has until now focussed on Trio (Cariban), Mawayana (Arawakan), and Kari’na (Cariban), as they are spoken in Suriname. Ongoing work also includes Wapishana (Arawakan) and Taruma (isolate) in Guyana. The two languages chosen for the present project are Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai (both Cariban) which are spoken in the southern rainforest of Suriname, French Guiana, Guyana and Brazil. The researchers will focus mainly but not exclusively on these groups resident in Suriname since it is there that these languages are found to be relatively conservative compared to the varieties spoken in the other countries. Tunayana-Waiwai is spoken by approximately 150 people in Suriname. The Wayana speakers in Suriname number approximately 400. Previous and ongoing research has shown that these Cariban and Arawakan languages of the Guianas exhibit features that have been hitherto undescribed or analyzed, that can enhance our understanding of the complexities of the language-culture interface, and how such cognitive structures within these languages can develop and grammaticalize. The languages of the Guianas constitute an as yet untapped source of knowledge for those studying emergent grammar and grammaticalization processes, as well as ethnolinguistics. The primary aim of the programme is to write two comprehensive grammars of Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai. In particular, full grammatical descriptions of these languages are required for the programmatic focus of the project which aims to look in detail at certain aspects of the languages that have cultural import, namely the semantic and pragmatic domains pertinent to the worldview of the speakers. The culturally-dependent conceptualization patterns that obtain in these languages include classificatory patterns in the locative and directional postpositions, evidentiality patterns, and truth-tracking devices. While a lot of attention has been paid in the anthropological literature to the worldviews of Amazonian peoples, whereby one commonality is the transformational world in which they live - that is, these peoples live in constant interaction with the omnipresent (invisible) spirit world - little attention has been paid to the differing structures through which this commonality is expressed, be these ethnographic or linguistic in nature. In previous and ongoing work on related languages of these two language families, a number of grammatical morphemes (clitics, suffixes and modal particles) have come to light that in their basic meaning are used to chart interactions between "this world", that is, the world of humans, and the "other-world", that is, the world of spirits, both of which are intertwined. Concomitant with such grammatical markers, one finds a number of categories that can best be subsumed under the term "truth and knowledge markers" that include a frustrative marker, assertion markers, and markers which are used to assign responsibility to an actant. It is such complex categories of grammatical marking that are difficult to grasp unless one takes into account the worldview according to which the speakers live. In the Cariban languages, for example, one finds a marker –me (-pe), often translated as 'being' or 'as' in the literature and termed facsimile marker in Carlin (2004) that is used on nominals to mark that the denotee of that nominal is manifestly but not inherently that which is denoted by that nominal, that is, it is seemingly but not intrinsically so, as shown in the Trio example below. Here the speaker is talking about an adopted daughter: without the –me marked on j-eemi, the speaker is referring to his biological daughter. j-eemi-me nai mëe 1poss-daughter-facs she.is 3pr.anim.prox she is my daughter (but not biologically so) What such examples as that given above show is that it is obligatory for the speakers of these languages to mark different kinds of truths, that is, actual truths and apparent truths, or truths that are transient but not absolute. The researchers aim to chart systematically the linguistic processes and means for the construction of possible worlds and the ensuing knowledge of those worlds, with as a point of departure “the reality of a multiplicity of knowledges or versions of the world” (Overing 1990:603).
Wayana Language The Wayana language is a member of the Cariban language family, which encompasses between 39 and 60 languages across South America (from the Colombian Andes through to the Guianas and Brazil). Although several of these languages are extinct, due to their relative isolation from the Western world and the subsequent processes of acculturation, many are still actively spoken today. The inverse is true of the coastal groups of the Guianas, and South America in general, whose languages today are much less preserved due to their early contact and intense trading with the Europeans, since the 16th century. Currently, the effects of globalisation on indigenous languages and cultures are becoming increasingly visible among the groups of the interior. This unavoidable process begun with the introduction of new goods and ideas brought in from foreign groups through trade. This has resulted in lexical borrowing and linguistic adaptation. Despite these recent trends, the Wayana language continues to be actively spoken today and it remains the dominant language in Apetina, where many Wayana are still predominantly monolingual. The Cariban family is well known in the linguistic world due to its unique Object-Verb-Subject sentence construction, thought previously not to exist in languages (Carlin, 2002: 47). Furthermore the Cariban language family contains morphologically complex, agglutinative languages which: Share a common lexical stock as well as an inventory of grammatical morphemes that exhibit different stages of development resulting in vast grammatical differences. (Ibid) The Wayana language is therefore rich in morphology and morphological processes. Grammatical functions are expressed through the use of affixes, primarily in the form of suffixes, rather than separate words as in many European languages. These affixes, not only express functions as person, tense and topological relations to name but a few, but also act as nominalizers and verbalizers, whereby verbs may be derived from nouns and vice versa. Due to these processes, each word is capable of embodying a considerable amount of information and in turn expands the lexicon of the Cariban languages considerably (Ibid: 56). The focus of this paper lies predominantly in the rich postpositional system used to express topological relations. Text taken from: Hough, Karen. 2008. The Expression and Perception of Space in Wayana. Sidestone Press, Leiden. References: Carlin, Eithne B. 2002. Patterns of Language, Patterns of Thought: the Cariban Languages in: Atlas of the Languages of Suriname. Carlin, Eithne B. and Jacques Arends, (Eds.). KITLV Press, Leiden.
Identifier:oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E58-D
Under the auspices of an NWO project: 355-70-015
Publisher:Dr. Eithne Carlin
Leiden University
Subject:Singing
Individual song
Christainity
Wayana language
Subject (ISO639):way

OLAC Info

Archive:  The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:  http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
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OAI Info

OaiIdentifier:  oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E58-D
DateStamp:  2017-02-14
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Search Info

Citation: Eithne (researcher); David (singer). 2006. Dr. Eithne Carlin.
Terms: area_Americas country_SR iso639_way

Inferred Metadata

Country: Suriname
Area: Americas


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Up-to-date as of: Wed Apr 12 4:34:54 EDT 2017