Closing up shop
Clare & I returned from San Joaquín de Omaguas early Monday morning -- we were up at 3AM, on the Amazon by 4:20, cut through a small side river that was open because of a higher than normal river that leads into the Marañón, and were in Nauta by 7:20 -- in record time. From Nauta one takes a taxi to Iquitos in a ride of a about an hour and fifteen minutes. We had hired the dueño of our lodgings, Jorge Saquiray, to take us in a rented boat with his motor. He and his family (wife Danis, children Juliessa and Treycy) have been very hospitable to us over the last two years, and we were sad to leave them.
Our four weeks in San Joaquín were very productive. We worked Mon.-Sat., 1-4PM, with our brother-sister consultants Lino (75) & Alicia Huanío (78). We made good headway in following up on incipient grammatical analyses from last summer, as well as in eliciting new lexical items for our dictionary. (Since our time in SJQ last summer, Rosa Vallejos, a Peruvian scholar who studies Omagua's only related language, Kokama, has published her dissertation and passed on to us a copy of her draft dictionary. Given that she works with far more fluent speakers of Kokama than we do of Omagua, her dictionary is considerably larger. Because the two languages are so closely related, it is possible to phonologize Kokama words (i.e., make Kokama words sound like possible Omagua words) to see if cognates exist in Omagua.) Lino's fluency appears to have increased since last summer, as the language comes back into his mind more and more. Both he and his sister are fun, enthusiastic people to work with, with endless amounts of intriguing and insightful stories to tell. Despite the new progress we have made on Omagua this summer, we are not scheduled to carry out any additional fieldwork on Omagua beyond the end of this month. We have reached a point of diminishing returns in working with semi-speakers, and although there is likely more textual (story) data and lexemes we could collect from them in future work, the quantity is not necessarily worth the time and money.
We were housed in the same lodgings as last year, Hospedaje Xiomarca, a centrally located series of rooms attached to the biggest store in town. The Saquiray family who owns it are also one of the few families with a private generator in town, and the only family that we know of with satellite TV (for themselves). Electricity is essential for keeping our computers charged. Our general reception in the village upon return was much more warm and non-foreign than our first arrival there last summer -- we are both less strange to everyone in general, and people appreciate seeing outsiders who work in their village return. There is a long history of whites and mestizos sweeping through these rural riverine villages with very narrow goals that demand the time of locals, but who never come back or deliver a product to show the results of their work. In general, then, it was nice to be less of a spectacle then before.
Despite this greater ease around town, we actually got out less and interacted with people less than last year. Our work this summer was particularly fast-paced and kept us busy working at our lodgings most of each day, every day of the week. In addition, we did not work with one of our previous consultants from last summer, Arnaldo Huanaquiri, whose home is outside of the village and requires a daily walk through parts of the village to reach it. We interact most with the Saquiray family and several schoolteachers who live in adjoining rooms to ours -- though it is is difficult to be amicable with them when they irreverently blast their radios too early in the morning and too late at night. Mosquitoes (and larger bugs) are the same perennial problem, so our night is cut short by 6:30 at the latest. On two separate occasions, however, we visited our consultants Lino & Alicia at their homes. Lino recently finished construction on a new house for him, his wife and his daughter -- they have an old-fashioned wrought iron pedal-run sewing machine inside, which looks quite out of place in the Amazon. His house is por la loma (on the hill), which is an area of town with great views of the river near the entrance of the carretera (trail) into the village that comes form the highway (la pista). Alicia lives just past her brother down a narrow trail in the bajada (low-lying area). She runs a half-acre farm entirely on her own, growing everything from manioc to pineapple to bananas to sugar cane. She is always very generous with us, bringing us fresh fruits several times a week from her chacra (farm). Both she and her brother are in extremely good health and extremely fit. Unfortunately, the land in front of Alicia's house, which is all muddy clay, is starting to fall away, as all the swaths of land between there and the river sink down towards the river. She had plans to begin moving her house farther uphill the day after we left -- a less ambitious process than one might expect. Most house beams are tied tightly together, and the palm thatch roofs are easily removable.
Other random events around the village include San Juan festivities (and the eating of delicious banana leaf-wrapped food called juanes); watching a canoe be constructed across the street from our house; scooping up a frog in my bath water; eating one of the chickens that so obnoxiously annoyed us for days; listening to my grating sanitario (healthworker) neighbor singing at all ours of the day; hearing about when our consultants breasts came in (a good Omagua verb to know, kamayara, 'to get breasts'); and having a gross elderly passerby tell us how to say 'let's fuck' in Omagua (for those interested, yapá yini mɪnuka). We were sad to leave the individuals who have become our friends, and our consultants seemed genuinely sad to see us go. For Lino & Alicia, they are just now beginning to reach a point where they are really personally enthusiastic about the work we are doing, and now we are leaving. But it's hard to explain to them the diminishing returns of our working with them. We have promised to send back copies of our dictionary in August to them, the school and the municipio (city center).
I will update more about our work in Iquitos hopefully later today, and the changes in plans I have had for my future work here in Loreto and in the South in the Department of Cuzco.
Our four weeks in San Joaquín were very productive. We worked Mon.-Sat., 1-4PM, with our brother-sister consultants Lino (75) & Alicia Huanío (78). We made good headway in following up on incipient grammatical analyses from last summer, as well as in eliciting new lexical items for our dictionary. (Since our time in SJQ last summer, Rosa Vallejos, a Peruvian scholar who studies Omagua's only related language, Kokama, has published her dissertation and passed on to us a copy of her draft dictionary. Given that she works with far more fluent speakers of Kokama than we do of Omagua, her dictionary is considerably larger. Because the two languages are so closely related, it is possible to phonologize Kokama words (i.e., make Kokama words sound like possible Omagua words) to see if cognates exist in Omagua.) Lino's fluency appears to have increased since last summer, as the language comes back into his mind more and more. Both he and his sister are fun, enthusiastic people to work with, with endless amounts of intriguing and insightful stories to tell. Despite the new progress we have made on Omagua this summer, we are not scheduled to carry out any additional fieldwork on Omagua beyond the end of this month. We have reached a point of diminishing returns in working with semi-speakers, and although there is likely more textual (story) data and lexemes we could collect from them in future work, the quantity is not necessarily worth the time and money.
We were housed in the same lodgings as last year, Hospedaje Xiomarca, a centrally located series of rooms attached to the biggest store in town. The Saquiray family who owns it are also one of the few families with a private generator in town, and the only family that we know of with satellite TV (for themselves). Electricity is essential for keeping our computers charged. Our general reception in the village upon return was much more warm and non-foreign than our first arrival there last summer -- we are both less strange to everyone in general, and people appreciate seeing outsiders who work in their village return. There is a long history of whites and mestizos sweeping through these rural riverine villages with very narrow goals that demand the time of locals, but who never come back or deliver a product to show the results of their work. In general, then, it was nice to be less of a spectacle then before.
Despite this greater ease around town, we actually got out less and interacted with people less than last year. Our work this summer was particularly fast-paced and kept us busy working at our lodgings most of each day, every day of the week. In addition, we did not work with one of our previous consultants from last summer, Arnaldo Huanaquiri, whose home is outside of the village and requires a daily walk through parts of the village to reach it. We interact most with the Saquiray family and several schoolteachers who live in adjoining rooms to ours -- though it is is difficult to be amicable with them when they irreverently blast their radios too early in the morning and too late at night. Mosquitoes (and larger bugs) are the same perennial problem, so our night is cut short by 6:30 at the latest. On two separate occasions, however, we visited our consultants Lino & Alicia at their homes. Lino recently finished construction on a new house for him, his wife and his daughter -- they have an old-fashioned wrought iron pedal-run sewing machine inside, which looks quite out of place in the Amazon. His house is por la loma (on the hill), which is an area of town with great views of the river near the entrance of the carretera (trail) into the village that comes form the highway (la pista). Alicia lives just past her brother down a narrow trail in the bajada (low-lying area). She runs a half-acre farm entirely on her own, growing everything from manioc to pineapple to bananas to sugar cane. She is always very generous with us, bringing us fresh fruits several times a week from her chacra (farm). Both she and her brother are in extremely good health and extremely fit. Unfortunately, the land in front of Alicia's house, which is all muddy clay, is starting to fall away, as all the swaths of land between there and the river sink down towards the river. She had plans to begin moving her house farther uphill the day after we left -- a less ambitious process than one might expect. Most house beams are tied tightly together, and the palm thatch roofs are easily removable.
Other random events around the village include San Juan festivities (and the eating of delicious banana leaf-wrapped food called juanes); watching a canoe be constructed across the street from our house; scooping up a frog in my bath water; eating one of the chickens that so obnoxiously annoyed us for days; listening to my grating sanitario (healthworker) neighbor singing at all ours of the day; hearing about when our consultants breasts came in (a good Omagua verb to know, kamayara, 'to get breasts'); and having a gross elderly passerby tell us how to say 'let's fuck' in Omagua (for those interested, yapá yini mɪnuka). We were sad to leave the individuals who have become our friends, and our consultants seemed genuinely sad to see us go. For Lino & Alicia, they are just now beginning to reach a point where they are really personally enthusiastic about the work we are doing, and now we are leaving. But it's hard to explain to them the diminishing returns of our working with them. We have promised to send back copies of our dictionary in August to them, the school and the municipio (city center).
I will update more about our work in Iquitos hopefully later today, and the changes in plans I have had for my future work here in Loreto and in the South in the Department of Cuzco.
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