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This project seeks to understand the Amazonian relation to nature by recording Amazonian Kichwa, Achuar and Wao Tededo language narratives about the land and its species. The links below lead to short videos of testimonies, stories, and songs about nature. Our method is to interview knowledgeable individuals in the forest setting where their memories are activated by the plants and animals they see. The videos are edited from these longer interviews to exemplify key aspects of Kichwa thinking about nature. Although the subtitle are set to English they can be changed to Spanish or Kichwa by clicking the settings icon. Because our approach is anthropological linguistics much of our recent focuses on the Kichwa language itself as the vehicle through which the relations to nature is shaped and expressed.
"The study of Amazonian languages is of fundamental relevance to anthropologists. Not only is linguistic understanding a critical part of the participant-observer paradigm, but it informs our understanding of culture in profound ways, and vice versa, as captured in the Boasian model and in Hockett’s dictum (1973:675) that “linguistics without anthropology is sterile, anthropology without linguistics is blind"
The Languages of Amazonia by Patience Epps, and Andrés Pablo Salanova, Tipiti, Volume 11, 2013
Kichwa Language Narrators
Links:
José María Arguedas, Cantos y Cuentos Quechuas (1933)
José María Arguedas, Agua (1933)
José María Arguedas, Ríos Profundos (1958)
José María Arguedas, El zorro de abajo y el zorro de arriba (1971)
Wao Tededo Narrators
Achuar Narrators
“Historical Ecology of Waorani Ridgetops, Ecuadorian Amazon” National Geographic. Co-PI with William Baleé, Tulane University. Funded: 2019-2020
“Language for Sustainability: Sustaining Biodiversity and Bio-cultures through Indigenous Languages and Participatory Science.” July, 2018-July, 2019. Global Consortium for Sustainability Outcomes. Co-PI with David Manuel Navarrete
Watering the Earth with Tears: The Social Relation to Nature
Contents
Introduction
Relatives who went away: On the origins of species diversity
The resulting related world
Thunder
Childhood: Establishing the boundaries of a shared body
Fragile boundaries: children in forest narratives
The pull across boundaries: Adolescence and the seductive forest
Forests and gardens as extensions of the female body
Ancestors in land: Death as crossing the boundaries,
Human Beauty and the Beauty of the Land
Connecting lines: painting the land on the body
Ceramic art: The visualizing of patterned nature
Perfumed Wind: the local smell of a healthy body
Breath, Wind, and Wind sickness
Language and Forest Relations
Singing with the voice of birds
Speaking to plants and animals
Language as social relation
Evoking the language of the land Ideophones
Perspective
Humor and the evoking of animal/human similarity
Food plants and wild relatives
Drinking bitter barks
Trees Awake at Night
Search by Species
Ecological destruction and the Resistance of Forests