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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones
Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
By focusing on ordinary conversational language, relying on a notion of “group” derived from unilineal descent theory, and neglecting mythology and ritual, studies of Vaupés Tukanoan multilingualism have inadvertently tended to reproduce a Western ideology of language as marking national identity and concerned with conveying meaning. This paper suggests that attention to musical, ritual, and shamanic contexts reveals multilingualism in a different light, with ritual speech acts as constitutive of social groups, names as vehicles of reproduction, and breath as a substance-like bodily element and source of vitality. The more esoteric, rhetorical, musical, or visual ornamentation is given to breath, …
The Origin Of Night And The Dance Of Time: Ritual And Material Culture In Northwest Amazonia, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones
The Origin Of Night And The Dance Of Time: Ritual And Material Culture In Northwest Amazonia, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Based on a survey of published material complemented by original fieldwork, this paper shows that Northwest Amazonian Arawakan, Tukanoan and Makuan stories of the Origin of Night form parts of a single, more inclusive myth about the sequential creation of earth, trees, house-frames, roofing leaves, night, song and dance. Here a box of feather ornaments plays a central role as the container of both roofing leaves and night with leaves as feathers, the ornaments of the house-as-person. When placed on the house-frame as thatch, these ornament-leaves shut out the light causing "night." The feather box, a container of bright yellow …