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.