Almost home!

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!

Vamos abajo!

Writing once more from Iquitos - but not for long!

As I wrote last time, I headed to El Estrecho from the city last Wednesday, August 28. After three days of very exciting work, though, logistical problems led me to leave. I went back to Iquitos with several hours of Northern Máíhɨ̃ki recordings and worked on them for a day and a bit. Then on Monday, I caught the first possible boat from Iquitos to the Máíhuna village of Sucusari, which is on the Rio Sucusari near the mouth of the Rio Napo, so that I could explore the possibility of working there instead.

Sucusari is a small and rural community, but because of SIL, missionary, and scientific activity in the area, it's been host to a lot of outsiders. I had a great time visiting it on Tuesday - almost all of which I spent with the older adults at a thatch-making minga (cooperative work party) - and Wednesday. The Sucusarinos were surprised to see me but glad to give me permission to work in the community, so later today I'm heading back there for a month of fieldwork. If all goes well, I'll briefly visit Iquitos at the end of that month, then head back to Sucusari to continue fieldwork until the end of November.

But this isn't a goodbye to the internet just yet! The Maihuna people on the Sucusari have some unusual neighbors a little downriver: the staff and guests at ExplorNapo Lodge, an ecotourism business. (Explorama Tours, the parent company of ExplorNapo, has been incredibly gracious to me in helping to arrange travel and transportation of my luggage between Iquitos and the Sucusari - thanks to them for helping to make my work in lower Napo possible!) ExplorNapo is only about 30 minutes by boat from the village, and they have an internet connection which they've generously agreed to let me use once a week or so while I'm in the field. So if I write again before October 7, it'll be from the Rio Sucusari itself - and if not, ta for now!

Prep time

Good morning from Iquitos - or to use a Máíhɨ̃ki expression, "jáíjùnà ã́kɨ̀nà bàìrò" - "the place where lots of mestizos live"! I arrived here on Friday from Nueva Vida with the Máíhɨ̃ki Project team, and will be in the city a total of ten days.

The second half of my Nueva Vida trip went very well: I finished transcribing a total of 2.5 hours of recordings (about 13,000 words) in Western Máíhɨ̃ki, and recorded several hours of new material with one of the oldest speakers of that dialect. Fortune also smiled on me in terms of Northern dialect data collection. I was able to do significant lexical work with a Northern Máíhɨ̃ki speaker who visited Nueva Vida for the MP's linguistics workshop, and I talked at some length to five more speakers who were passing through Nueva Vida on the way back to Tótóyà from the federation congress.

I also picked up a new hobby on the Yanayacu: the hula hoop! Since Nueva Vida is essentially a swamp, it's not possible to run or walk for exercise, so the only options are swimming and things that you can do inside. Chris Beier brought along a weighted adult hula hoop for just this reason, and by the end of the field season I was a pro with it. She was also kind enough to give me the hula hoop as a farewell gift - so it should see some further use in Estrecho! I wish I could provide photographic evidence of this development, but alas my stills camera was on the fritz for most of the field season.

Since the rest of the MP team went back to Berkeley on Tuesday, my hula hoop and I are alone in Iquitos for the week. I spent the first few days after we arrived wrapping up team work, and now I'm getting ready for the first solo phase of my trip - buying supplies, packing my luggage, preparing materials, and catching up with some of you :) - through Monday the 26th. Then early Tuesday, I fly to El Estrecho, where all the gnats are strong, all the scenery is beautiful, and all the subordinate clauses are above average.

(The Plaza de Armas, or town square, of El Estrecho. Photo by Chris Beier)

Jáímàìkìrò - El congreso

Un saludo desde Iquitos! I'm here - briefly and unexpectedly - because
of some (net positive) changes to the program of the congress of the
Máíhuna indigenous federation, which took place yesterday and today.

Our participation in the congress was short and sweet: Lev and Chris
stood up, gave an update on the project's overall work, and introduced
me and my project in Estrecho. I gave a very short speech in Máíh+ki,
repeated myself in Spanish, and then sat down. Afterward I was able to
meet some speakers from the community of Tótóya, which is near
Estrecho, and talk to them about the possibility of working with me in
September and later. My Máíh+ki has improved to the point where I can
converse if everyone involved speaks relatively slowly and clearly, so
I was able to give those speakers some concrete evidence that I really
want to learn their language -- as I said several times, "jana ák+j+ki
j+kamáyi íko ñáméyí, máíj+ki j+kayi íko óíyí" ("now I don't want to
speak Spanish, I want to speak Máíh+ki").

Now, we're in the city for two days to take care of some logistical
matters, and then it's back to Nueva Vida for the speakers' workshop
and the second half of the field season. During that time I'll be
wrapping up the work that I've been doing on Western dialect texts
over the last month, tutoring writing and so on in the workshop, and -
most exciting! - working with a Northern dialect speaker who will be
at our field site starting tomorrow through at least August 6. I'll be
back to internet access again on August 16, and ciao (or, chíbayi)
until then!

From Amalia, June 27th

Just a note by proxy to let all of you know that our research team has arrived safely in Nueva Vida and started work here! We've been in town and I've been collecting data for just under two weeks (I'm writing on June 27), but this is the first opportunity I've had to send a message with someone to Iquitos and thereby to the Internet.

 

My health has been good, the weather has been disgusting, and the work has been very productive. I'm about 20% done with the field season here and, I would estimate, 35% done with the part that will involve collection of substantial new data. For the last two weeks, I've been exclusively collecting and transcribing oral texts – mostly traditional oral narratives and descriptions of how people celebrated festivals, did subsistence tasks, and so on in the "old days."

 

I'm continuing with that data collection through July 23, with a four-day break in mid-July to go to the annual congress of the Máíhuna indigenous federation. Then I'll be working through August 7 at the project's linguistics workshop for Máíhɨ̃ki speakers, and after that I'll have one more week of data collection before we pack up and go back to Iquitos on August 16.

 

Look for a recap of the congress in mid-July, and goodbye until then!

El Estrecho sáíkò

Saludos desde Iquitos - capital of Peruvian Amazonia! I arrived here
just over a week ago, but there's already lots of news.

After leaving New Haven last Tuesday, I got into Lima midday on
Wednesday and Iquitos later that afternoon. Unfortunately, my checked
bags didn't come with me from São Paulo to Lima. I was not amused to
learn this, less because I was tired of having worn the same clothes
for two days -- although I was! -- than because I was going to be in
Iquitos for all of 36 hours before leaving for an
information-gathering trip to Estrecho. However, after several
inquisitive phone calls to the Irregularidad de Equipaje desk of my
airline in Lima, all of my suitcases arrived in Iquitos on Thursday
with time to spare for packing for Estrecho.

Besides the business of luggage, my Thursday was dedicated mainly to
meeting some of the other (non-indigenous) people who work with the
Máíhuna communities. These folks include ethnobiologist Michael
Gilmore and several staff from Nature and Culture International, a
conservation NGO. Although Cabeceras has substantial history with
Máíhuna people -- they've been in regular contact since about 2006 --
Michael and NCI have a lot more, about 15 years in Michael's case.

The next day, we arrived at the tiny military airport in Iquitos a few
minutes after 6am. Our 16-seat plane left for Estrecho an hour and a
half later, and we were on the airstrip outside of town at precisely
8:13am.

Our first encounter with the Máíhuna community in Estrecho came less
within 30 minutes of our landing, when a Máíhuna family who had met
Chris at previous years' congresos spotted us walking into town on the
street outside their house. We had to defer visiting them until we had
registered with the police and found a place to stay, but by 10:00 we
were back to the same house and beginning our social rounds.

That was how we spent almost all of that day and the next two: going
from one Máíhuna family's house to another; Chris introducing me to
the household and describing my project; hearing the family's
reactions and thoughts about the language; and making small talk about
farming, health, children's education, and so on. We also held one
community meeting to officially submit my proposal, and were invited
to another, which turned into more of a storytelling session (just as
important as the official meeting, at least for me!).

In the course of the weekend, we learned quite a bit of information
about the Máíhuna community in Estrecho. Here are some of the central
points:

- There are at least 60 ethnically Máíhuna people in Estrecho -- a
significant chunk of the ethnic population (around 400), and probably
the same or even larger than the population of Totoya, the nearest
Máíhuna comunidad nativa to the town.

- Most of the older generation of Máíhuna adults in Estrecho were born
in Totoya, and many of them have lived there for a significant amount
of time. There is still frequent traffic between Estrecho and Totoya,
and a few people have houses in both locations. The primary attraction
of Estrecho is that it has three high schools and a technical school;
most people seemed to have moved there for education.

- All of the Máíhuna adults over 50 that we met appeared to have at
least a passive knowledge of Máíhɨ̃ki. I heard seven people from
Estrecho actually speak the language and was told that another
speaker, who works as a teacher, was out of town. All of the speech
that I heard was clearly the Putumayo/Northern dialect, even though
one of the speakers is originally from the Yanayacu.

- We were repeatedly pointed toward one older man as the most expert
storyteller -- at least in town and possibly anywhere in Máíhuna
territory (since I did not discuss attribution with him I will not use
his name here). This man lives about one hour's walk outside of
Estrecho, but visits his daughter's house in town frequently -- he was
there every day that we were. He told us a vivid personal narrative in
Máíhɨ̃ki on the second occasion that we met him, and several more
traditional stories on the third. This speaker is very wealthy in
verbal skill and traditional knowledge, but less wealthy in teeth, so
I found it hard to understand him at first, but I think that he'll be
an enviable consultant (especially after the summer field season, when
my Máíhɨ̃ki will hopefully be better).

Chris and I also verified that Estrecho has all of the facilities that
we had thought -- hospital, market with acceptably fresh produce,
stores with dry goods, cell phone service, and internet access at the
local boarding school -- although, because of the town's remoteness,
prices are somewhat high for rural Peru. We even found a truly
outstanding hostal for me, located on the second floor above a
dry-goods store, with extra electricity (on from 8 to 3 as well as the
public hours of 6:30 to 10) and access to a kitchen.

All in all, I would appraise it as a long weekend very well spent.
Every Máíhuna family and definitely every speaker in the town has met
me, met Chris, and confirmed that I am a legitimate researcher and (I
hope) a friend to the community. And, I've gotten the financial and
logistical information that I need to be ready to return there, which
-- as I told the speakers and the hostal owner -- I plan to do on
September 1.

But between now and then, I have the team-based summer trip to the
Yanayacu to take care of. We don't have internet access at Nueva Vida,
although I may be able to send a post or two by email in the middle of
July -- so it's ciao for now to the world outside of Máíhuna country.
I'll be back to Iquitos in mid-August with much more to share!

T-4

Hello everyone!

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.