If you're reading this, it's probably because you've just heard from me about staying in touch by email for 2013-2014. In just four days, I'll be leaving for a year of linguistic fieldwork in Peruvian Amazonia, funded by Yale's Parker Huang Undergraduate Travel Fellowship.
During the time that I'll be in Peru and have internet access -- roughly June 4 to June 15 and August 15 to December 5 in 2013, then Februrary 1 to July 31 in 2014 -- this blog will serve as an abbreviated version of my fieldwork diary, edited for relevance and to keep (some) research participants anonymous. I hope that it has some intellectual interest for the linguists, anthropologists, etc. among you. For everyone else, I hope that this blog helps you keep tabs on what I'm doing, and that it reminds you to write to me :)
Since many of you have asked what I'm doing in the jungle, this post will describe the three sites I'm visiting in Peru, and why I'm going to each of them. In my next post (before leaving), I'll also give some background on the nature of my research and why I bother studying endangered languages at all.
Entering Nueva Vida
(Photo credit: Kelsey Neely, 2012)
After leaving the US on Tuesday and doing some field preparations in Peru, I'll be going first to the village of Nueva Vida, departamento de Loreto. Legally, Nueva Vida is a comunidad nativa -- a Peruvian term which is usually translated as "indigenous community." That's a little vague, though: Nueva Vida's status as comunidad nativa means that the indigenous people who live there have collective legal ownership of the village and the land, water, and natural resources surrounding it.
Almost everyone in Nueva Vida belongs to the Máíhuna (pronounced approximately MY-hoo-na) ethnic group, although a few people are Kichwa or mestizo (have mixed indigenous and European ancestry). Approximately 20 people in Nueva Vida and the neighborhood speak Máíhɨ̃ki (approximately MY-hun-kee), the Máíhuna people's traditional language. Almost all of them are completely fluent in Spanish, although a few older people don't speak Spanish well and prefer to use Máíhɨ̃ki for their day-to-day interactions.
In the summer of 2012, I did linguistic fieldwork on Máíhɨ̃ki in Nueva Vida from June 11 to August 11, with a team from UC - Berkeley. I'm heading back to the village with the same group, from about June 15 to August 15 of this year, to continue that research. The other returning members of the team are Lev Michael, Christine Beier, and Stephanie Farmer. Lev is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, Steph is his graduate student, and Chris is affiliated with a language documentation NGO called Cabeceras Aid Project / Proyecto de Apoyo Cabeceras (which is my official sponsor for this project). Lev and Chris are married and have been doing fieldwork in Peruvian Amazonia together since the early 90s.
Left to right: Stephanie, me, Lev, Chris, Grace Neveu (Berkeley '13), and Kelsey Neely (Berkeley graduate student) in Iquitos, June 2012
(Photo from Kelsey Neely)
I'll be working in Nueva Vida with the Berkeley team through the summer, focusing mostly on documentation of oral literature. The core of my work will be recording, translation, and grammatical analysis of traditional oral narratives (think creation stories, metamorphosis stories, hero narratives, and other kinds of myth and folklore) from older speakers of the language. There's a lot of work to be done in this area -- we found out last summer that Máíhuna oral literature is much more extensive than the team had originally believed, and we've only recorded a small part of it.
I'm also excited to get more data about the nature of personal narratives, informal conversations, baby-talk, jokes, and so on in Máíhɨ̃ki. Language documentation projects tend to focus on traditional narratives, but you can't draw valid conclusions about grammar from a corpus that comes from only one discourse genre. For that reason, I'm planning to spend a good fraction of my time in Nueva Vida recording and analyzing samples of speech from everyday interactions, as well as from the traditional oral literature.
After two months in Nueva Vida, I'll be heading back to the city of Iquitos to recuperate, do data analysis, write a paper or two, and take care of graduate school applications. Iquitos is only 7 hours by boat from Nueva Vida on a good day, but it's a world away. I'll be staying at La Casona, an excellent hotel which plays host to about half the Americans passing through Iquitos, and enjoying the air conditioning.
My digs in Nueva Vida (photo mine)
...and in Iquitos (photo from Hotel La Casona)
I expect to spend about three weeks in Iquitos, then head to my third and main site, the town of Estrecho (also known as San Antonio del Estrecho or just El Estrecho). Estrecho is approximately three days by boat and foot from Nueva Vida, or a 45-minute plane ride from Iquitos. It's home to about 5,000 people, including about 10 fluent native speakers of Máíhɨ̃ki. These folks have mostly migrated to Estrecho from the remote Máíhuna community of Tótóya in order to take care of their grandchildren, access the hospital and health services in Estrecho, and so on.
I haven't met the Máíhuna people from Estrecho yet, but they've expressed interest several times in working with a linguist. The most recent time was in July of last year, at the yearly congress of FECONAMAI, the Máíhuna indigenous federation. This year I'll be going to the same congress (in the middle of the Nueva Vida field season) to meet them in person and make an agreement about working on language with them.
Rusber Tangoa Rios (foreground) and others at the 2012 congress of FECONAMAI
(Photo by Stephanie Farmer)
Provided that the Estrecheños are still interested, I plan on working with them in Estrecho from around September 10 to November 10 or 15. I'll be continuing my research on oral literature, and also doing some initial documentary fieldwork on the dialect of Máíhɨ̃ki which they speak. We learned last summer that the dialect of Máíhɨ̃ki spoken in Estrecho and Tótóya is very different from the variety that people speak in Nueva Vida -- so different, in fact, that it's hard to believe they are mutually intelligible (the test which linguists normally use to determine if two speech varieties represent the same language). As a result, much of my job in Estrecho will be to get a better idea of how the Northern Máíhɨ̃ki spoken there is different from the Western variety that we know from Nueva Vida.
Estrecho should be a learning experience -- it's my first solo field trip, after all -- but I can't take too much learning all at once! For that reason, after the first trip to Estrecho and a few weeks in Iquitos for data analysis, I'll be going back to the United States for most of December and all of January. During that time I'll be writing up my findings, attending the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) conference in Minneapolis, and visiting some of you :) When that's done, in early February I'll head back to Peru for another two trips to Estrecho. That's rinse and repeat on the fall trip, until the end of July 2014 comes and I'm back to the US for grad school.
Máíhɨ̃ki speaker and all-star language consultant Alberto Mosoline Mogica writes at a linguistics and literacy workshop for Máíhɨ̃ki speakers, summer 2012
(Photo mine)
Coming very soon: my thoughts about why I bother (and why anyone should bother) with studying endangered languages, and about the relationship between linguists and the speech community.
