Sucusari - the path to Romero's house (photo mine)
Six months minus one day later, I'm about to head back to the US! Despite (or maybe because of) the change of plans, I had a fantastic and very productive 10.5 weeks working on the Eastern dialect of Máíhɨ̃ki in the Sucusari River, a tributary of the lower Napo, from early September to the end of November. The Máíhuna community on the Sucusari, which is also called Sucusari, is a lovely and very hospitable place to work, and I met some great consultants. Pictures of them and of my digs below!
The maloca / Centro Cultural Máíjùnà in Sucusari (photo mine)
For the first month that I was in the Sucusari, I did all of my consultant work in this building - a "maloca," aka vast gazebo, in a semi-cleared area immediately outside the central village. Because it wasn't close to houses or livestock, it was much quieter than the other vacant buildings, and excellent for making recordings.
The disadvantage was that, while this structure has a roof, you can see from the photo that it doesn't have any walls. That meant I couldn't live there (I lived with a host family instead - sadly no photos as my camera stopped working) and also that when it rained outside, it also rained some quote-unquote inside. For problems such as these waterproof equipment cases were made.
After four weeks working in the maloca and living with the family - thank you to my wonderful hosts Douglas, Lesley, and Victorino! - I made a 10-day trip to Iquitos to do some data analysis tasks that needed the Internet. Then I resupplied and came back to the village for a bit less than seven more weeks.
Work HQ at the Centro de Interpretación Máíjùnà (photo mine)
For my latter trip, a new vacant building became available - the "Centro de Intepretación Máíjùnà." The C. de I. is a planned museum of Maijuna culture which our colleagues at Nature & Culture International (NCI) are constructing to bring some more cash income to the community.
During the time I was in Sucusari in October and November, the structure was finished but NCI hadn't put any equipment or exhibits inside - so they very generously let me live there! The building is meant to be lit by solar-powered electric lights, so there were no windows or lights inside. The only natural light came into the front room (pictured above), so I worked with consultants and on my computer there during daylight hours. Then I cooked and so on in a darker room further back in the building.
I went through a lot of candles and headlamp batteries but on the whole it was a completely fabulous place to work, with good acoustics and no distractions. As a result I got far more done on the trip than I had planned - 27,000 words of transcribed narrative (more than halfway to my original goal of 50,000!). All thanks for that are due to NCI and my wonderful consultants, pictured below...
Romero Ríos Ochoa (photo mine)
One of my main consultants (language teachers) for both visits to Sucusari was Romero Rios Ochoa (pictured above). Romero, who is the classificatory uncle of several of the Máíhɨ̃ki Project's main consultants on the Yanayacu River, was also the primary consultant for a group of missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) who worked on Máíhɨ̃ki in the 1950's and 1960's. At that time, the SIL also took him to a training institute in the city of Pucallpa, and he became (probably) the first Máíhuna high school graduate and (definitely) the first Máíhuna schoolteacher. He taught for many decades in the bilingual elementary school on the Yanayacu, then retired came back to the Sucusari in the 1990s.
Romero is a very smart man, a good storyteller and verbal artist, has a natural interest in language, and speaks quite clearly - you can't ask for a lot more in a consultant! The SIL materials on Máíhɨ̃ki aren't much help, but I nevertheless owe them a lot for training him.
Seberino Ríos Ochoa (photo mine)
My other main consultant was Romero's younger brother Seberino Rios Ochoa (pictured above). While I worked with Romero mainly on irrealis texts (e.g. speculation about the future, discussion of counterfactual and conditional scenarios, some ethical reasoning, etc.) and traditional narratives, Seberino was an amazing trove of knowledge about the natural and human geography of the Sucusari basin. We recorded and fully transcribed a ton of data about place names in the region -- with folk etymologies, some history of each site, info about natural resource use, and all such good things -- as well as some very punchy personal narratives. Even beyond his linguistic knowledge he was a rock star. Like Romero, he spoke very clearly and was patient with my ridiculous requests to repeat that word/that sentence again, and again, and again.
Looking downriver toward the village from the Centro de Intepretación (photo mine)
The Sucusari is a great place, but even in the best of fieldwork situations, 6 months is a long time to spend in villages - so now I'm taking a break and heading to the US for a little over a month. When I'm back to Peru in January, if all goes according to plan, I'll be working in Estrecho on the Putumayo/Northern dialect of Máíhɨ̃ki. Until then, between Dec 5 and January 14, I'm doing data analysis, eating everything in sight, and hopefully catching up with some of you!
