Wounaan Oral Traditions and Music, Lapovsky Kennedy Collection, 1964-1966
Tradición Oral y Música Wounaan, Colección de Lapovsky Kennedy, 1964-1966
Object Details
| Collection Language | Wounmeu |
| Language PID | ailla:119523 |
| Title [Indigenous] | Maach jooinhí warrgarwe jöoinau jaaujerr dʌ̈i maachdëu nem sirnaa haaujempa Wounaanau nem hĩgk’atarr hũan Lapovsky Kennedyiu grabaawia p’ë hautarr, 1964-1966 |
| Language of Indigenous Title | noa |
| Title | Wounaan Oral Traditions and Music, Lapovsky Kennedy Collection, 1964-1966 |
| Country(ies) | Colombia |
| Collector(s) | Kennedy, Elizabeth |
| Depositor(s) | Kennedy, Elizabeth El Congreso Nacional de Wounaan |
| Project/Collector Website | |
| Description [Indigenous] | |
| Language of Indigenous Description | |
| Description | Description of the collection made by the depositor: "All the stories and music in this collection were recorded between 1964 and 1966 by myself, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy (Liz), assisted by my husband of that time, Perry Kennedy. I was doing field work for my doctoral dissertation, a holistic ethnography of the Wounaan people entitled, "The Waunan of the Siguirisúa River: A Study of Individual Autonomy and Social Responsibility with Special Reference to Economic Aspects." For recordings done almost 50 years ago they are in excellent condition. However, sometimes my record keeping about the “who,” “when” and “where” of storytelling was less than perfect, leaving a few holes in the metadata. (The missing information is probably embedded in my field notes which I didn’t have time to access.) Although the majority of field work time was spent on the Siguirisúa River, the total population of which numbered 249 people, living in 22 houses dispersed along the length of the river, in January 1965, we also spent a couple of months on the Docampadó river. I am including a section entitled , “Conditions of field work,” from my dissertation Introduction that gives a description of field work written closer to the time. Wounaan told stories at the end of the day as people were preparing for sleep. Often they would start out gathered around the story teller, and would leave if sleep called before the story was finished. My recollection is that storytelling was a regular occurrence. When we discovered that, we encouraged it for our recordings. Wounaan were happy to oblige us as they themselves really enjoyed the storytelling. No recordings of stories were staged in advance. They were told by people present in a house, when their telling suited Wounaan schedules. They could have a small audience in a small house or a large audience in a large house with visitors. We collected 209 stories. Since we lived in every house on the Siguirisúa river for at least a short period of time, we had a variety of different story tellers from the Siguirisúa but also some from the Docampadó, 36 in all, for which we only have names for 27. (The reason we are missing 9 names is due to problems in my record keeping, not to narrators’ desire to remain anonymous.) We identified narrators from the index on the tape box , from my census, from a list of photographs and sometimes Perry announced the story teller before he/she began. For narrators whose names are missing, we identify them as narrator 1, 2, 3, so that those listening to the stories today can ascertain whether this is a different unknown narrator. For some people we only have their first name, because in general we were following good social science practice of the time of not fully identifying narrators. When preparing the collection I added last names from my memory, when I could. (We encourage anyone who knows the last name to contact AILLA. For a few people we only had a name and no identifying characteristics.) The majority of story tellers were men, only 3 women. They were of all ages, although unquestionably some of the elder men, such as Luis Angel Chamarra, were known for their story telling ability, while others were just learning. All of the story tellers seemed to me to be native speakers of Wounaan meu with some knowledge of Spanish. However, it is possible that Embera was spoken at home for some and I didn’t pick this up. For instance, I know that at least one native Embera speaking woman was married to a native Wounaan speaker and lived on the river with him. I did not follow up on the linguistic impact of this arrangement. Also at the time I did not know anything about distinct dialects among Wounaan. So information given under “subject community” is provided based on the knowledge of contemporary Wounaan language experts. This topic on the division between those from the creeks (Dösigpien) and the main and lower San Juan River (Döcharpien) is a bit controversial: everyone acknowledges it exists, but define it a bit differently depending on where they are from. Part of the difficulty is that to classify someone from the main San Juan River (Döcharpien) is essentially denying that the creeks are part of that river, which itself holds much cultural currency as the "true river" of Wounaan homelands. Regardless, the division does carry linguistic and cultural characteristics that PTOW (Proyecto Tradición Oral Wounaan) staff felt were important to recognize in the meta data. (See Julia Velasquez’ Runk’s dissertation , “And the Creator Began to Carve Us of Cocobolo’: Culture, History, Forest Ecology, and Conservation among Wounaan in Eastern Panama,” for further information.) In the mid-1960s, Wounaan looked forward to stories and were actively engaged in the process. It was expected that the audience would interact with the story teller by making comments that show their interest and involvement and help move the story along. Comments came from young people as well as adults, women as well as men. (We have almost no data on the names of the commentators in this collection.) The story teller never got distracted by the comments, but rather acknowledged them when appropriate and kept moving on. I did not learn until I was working with Proyecto Tradición Oral Wounaan, (Project of Wounaan Oral Tradition) PTOW, that is, the team of Wounaan linguists on the NSF DEL grant, “Documenting Wounaan meu,” for which I am co PI, that many comments on the Siguirisúa and Docampadó stories were bawdy, or what present day Wounaan language experts, living in Panama, referred to in Spanish as having “palabras rojas.” In truth I had no idea that this was the case during the actual recording of the stories, even though I had an elementary grasp of Wounaan meu. Even more interesting to me, is that two pairs of Wounaan, who had been particularly helpful as language teachers on the river, and who accompanied us to Cali to work with me to transcribe stories from the recordings, never mentioned the bawdiness of the comments. They focused on transcribing the story line as developed by the story teller, and not the comments. This is a wonderful example of what can be missed if a researcher is not completely fluent in the language. The bawdy stories presented several problems for transcribing, translating and archiving this collection. The contemporary Wounaan language experts, working with PTOW on the NSF DEL Grant, were offended by the bawdy comments, and also didn’t want their children listening to them. Their first reaction was to not transcribe the comments. This is likely related to the fact that they have all been evangelized. Yet they also were aware of the contradiction that they wanted to preserve the language and customs of their ancestors, and yet wanted to ignore what they didn’t like. After much discussion the solution was to produce two transcriptions and translations of each story, one with comments and one without. Children under 12 would not receive passwords for the stories with comments, and others would have the choice of listening to the stories with comments or not. The preparation of the collection for deposit was done as part of the NSF grant, although I paid for the digitizing of the tapes and some of the indexing help. The indexing required the help of a fluent Wounaan speaker to accurately record the beginning and end of each story, to write the title of the stories in Spanish and Wounaan meu, and to write a brief summary of each story in Woounaan meu and Spanish. This knowledge was combined with my knowledge about the story teller, the location of the recording, etc. Diego Watico did the titles and summaries for the original indexing of tapes 1-6, and then Chindío Peña Ismare as part of PTOW reviewed that indexing and did the titles and summaries for stories and music on tape 7, 20, 21, 22, A & B and 31-34, while Toñio Peña Conquista worked on tapes 35-39. Chindío’s indexing was particularly valuable, because he had grown up on a small river, Pepecorro whose headwaters were quite close to the Docampadó. (The Pepecorro is a tributary of the Pimía, that flowed into a larger River, the Bicordó, that flowed into the major San Juan River.) He remembered some of the people and could recognize their voices. If our memories are in disagreement I include both in the metadata. Ping Pong Media of Tucson did the digitizing of the original reel to reel tapes.(See section F of the Depositor’s packet for more detail on equipment.) Bryan James Gordon, graduate student in the joint Linguistics/Anthropology program at the U of A and part of the NSF Grant, provided the technical assistance to make these digitized recordings available to Wounaan through Tool Box. Julia Velasquez Runk as lead PI for the project and dedicated scholar about Wounaan history and culture was an invaluable resource. And finally Jacque Lamb was my assistant in creating the Excel Spread sheet of metadata for the 209 stories and 53 pieces of music. She was invaluable in her knowledge of Excel and her attention to detail." See the PDF file below entitled "Kennedy_conditions_of_fieldwork.pdf" for more information about this project. |
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