Documenting ritual songs: Best practices for preserving the ambiguity of Alto Perené (Arawak) shamanic pantsantsi ‘singing’

Mihas, Elena

Documenting ritual songs: Best practices for preserving the ambiguity of Alto Perené (Arawak) shamanic pantsantsi ‘singing’

dc.contributor.author	Mihas, Elena
dc.date.accessioned	2019-05-15T21:15:04Z
dc.date.available	2019-05-15T21:15:04Z
dc.date.issued	2019-05
dc.description.abstract	Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the paper explores the ways of interpreting and translating a shamanic pantsantsi song by a fieldworker and Alto Perené (a.k.a Ashéninka Perené) language workers. The language’s vitality is on a steep downward trajectory. Currently, it is spoken by a few hundred people. Aiming to create a thorough record of shamanic singing for the purpose of Alto Perené preservation, the fieldworker grapples with various stumbling blocks. Among them are the absence of shamans as an institution, the simulative setting of audio and video recordings, the inaccessibility of the text meanings to language consultants, and the non-definitiveness of the translated text. The shamanic language is manipulated in various ways to make it distinct from the profane speech of community members. The manipulative strategies include the singer’s allusions to the predation and conviviality schemes, prosodic repetitions, lexical and morphosyntactic manipulations, and voice masking. The meaning of the pantsantsi text eludes the non-indigenous fieldworker unless she collaborates with highly proficient language speakers, devotes many years to the committed study of the research language, possesses a good knowledge of the culture-specific background, and draws on multiple sources of translation.
dc.description.sponsorship	National Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.format.extent	34 pages
dc.identifier.citation	Mihas, Elena. 2019. Documenting ritual songs: Best practices for preserving the ambiguity of Alto Perené (Arawak) shamanic pantsantsi ‘singing’. Language Documentation & Conservation 13: 197-230.
dc.identifier.issn	1934-5275
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24866
dc.language.iso	en-US
dc.publisher	University of Hawaii Press
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
dc.rights	Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
dc.subject	shamanic singing
dc.subject	fieldwork
dc.subject	ambiguity
dc.subject	collaboration
dc.title	Documenting ritual songs: Best practices for preserving the ambiguity of Alto Perené (Arawak) shamanic pantsantsi ‘singing’
dc.type	Article
dc.type.dcmi	Text
prism.endingpage	230
prism.publicationname	Language Documentation & Conservation
prism.startingpage	197
prism.volume	13