Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252027582 ISBN 13: 9780252027581

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Before they were largely decimated and dispersed by the effects of European colonization, Arawak-speaking peoples were the most widespread language family in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they were the first people Columbus encountered in the Americas. Comparative Arawakan Histories, in paperback for the first time, examines social structures, political hierarchies, rituals, religious movements, gender relations, and linguistic variations through historical perspectives to document sociocultural diversity across the diffused Arawakan diaspora.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan D. Hill is chair of the Department of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He is the author of Keepers of the Sacred Chants: The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society.Fernando Santos-Granero is a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru.

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Comparative Arawakan Histories

Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in AmazoniaBy JONATHAN D. HILL FERNANDO SANTOS-GRANERO

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-02758-1

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction JONATHAN D. HILL AND FERNANDO SANTOS-GRANERO....................................................................................................................................................11. The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America FERNANDO SANTOS-GRANERO........................................................................................................252. Arawak Linguistic and Cultural Identity through Time: Contact, Colonialism, and Creolization NEIL L. WHITEHEAD...........................................................................................513. Historical Linguistics and Its Contribution to Improving the Knowledge of Arawak SIDNEY DA SILVA FACUNDES................................................................................................744. Rethinking the Arawakan Diaspora: Hierarchy, Regionality, and the Amazonian Formative MICHAEL J. HECKENBERGER............................................................................................995. Social Forms and Regressive History: From the Campa Cluster to the Mojos and from the Mojos to the Landscaping Terrace-Builders of the Bolivian Savanna FRANCE-MARIE RENARD-CASEVITZ.....................1236. Piro, Apurinã, and Campa: Social Dissimilation and Assimilation as Historical Processes in Southwestern Amazonia PETER GOW...........................................................................1477. Both Omphalos and Margin: On How the Pa'ikwené (Palikur) See Themselves to Be at the Center and on the Edge at the Same Time ALAN PASSES.............................................................1718. A New Model of the Northern Arawakan Expansion ALBERTA ZUCCHI............................................................................................................................................1999. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Woman: Fertility Cultism and Historical Dynamics in the Upper Rio Negro Region JONATHAN D. HILL......................................................................22310. Secret Religious Cults and Political Leadership: Multiethnic Confederacies from Northwestern Amazonia SILVIA M. VIDAL....................................................................................24811. Prophetic Traditions among the Baniwa and Other Arawakan Peoples of the Northwest Amazon ROBIN M. WRIGHT.................................................................................................269References Cited.............................................................................................................................................................................................295Contributors.................................................................................................................................................................................................327Index........................................................................................................................................................................................................331

Chapter One

The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America

FERNANDO SANTOS-GRANERO

The relationship between language and culture has been the subject of much speculation in Western philosophy and social sciences. In the recent past, the tendency has been to contest the one language–one culture hypothesis implicit in the writings of eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann G. Herder, an idea that, under several guises, dominated early anthropology and linguistics. In his 1769 essay "On the Origin of Language," Herder asserted that polities are unified neither by the acceptance of a common sovereign power, as proposed by Hobbes, nor by a social contract based on the general will, as advocated by Rousseau (Barnard 1969). Instead, he indicated, first, that the basis for the sense of collective political identity was the sharing of a common culture and, second, that the emergence and reproduction of a group's culture are based on the use of a common language. Herder referred to units possessing a common culture and language by the term Volk, or nationality. Members of such communities are united by the collective consciousness of a common cultural heritage. This consciousness, which distinguishes members of a collective from those of similar communities, is what Herder calls "national character."

Herder's propositions found their way into historical linguistics and through it to modernist ethnology. The detection of connections between Sanskrit, Persian, and European languages by Sir William Jones in 1786 and the discovery by Jacob Grimm of the existence of regularities of sound change between different but related languages established the framework for the emergence of comparative linguistics. The Neogrammarians, a group of scholars working in Leipzig, formulated the principles and methods of the new discipline in the late nineteenth century. Its basic premise is that languages that have a large number of cognate words descend from a common ancestral language and thus belong to the same family. Implicit in this proposition is the assumption that speakers of the protolanguage constituted a culturally unified community and that its descendants share at least some aspects of that culture.

This was Brinton's (1891) approach in The American Race, which provides the first modern linguistic classification of Native South American languages. In addition to associating language and culture—in Herder's tradition—the author posited a linkage between language and race. Brinton (1891, 57) suggested, "Similarity of idioms proves to some extent similarity of descent and similarity of psychic endowments." In an intellectual environment in which evolutionism was becoming a dominant mode of thought, it was only a short step from here to assert that certain combinations of language, culture, and race were superior or inferior to others. Anthropology was quick to reject this argument by refuting the assumption that there existed an immanent connection between language and culture or race and culture.

In The American Indian, Wissler (1917) asserted that there are "no correlations between culture and linguistic type." According to him, the fact that speakers of the same language stock are represented in several cultural areas demonstrates that "language can travel independently of culture" (Wissler 1917, 332). Edward Sapir (1921/1931, 143) went a step further, declaring that "races, languages and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that their areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering fashion, and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course." Franz Boas (1928) was equally definitive. From then on it became almost anathema in anthropology to propose a connection between language and culture, except as formulated in the milder versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which postulate that language influences but does not determine the way we think and perceive the world (see Sherzer 1992,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252027582
• ISBN 13: 9780252027581
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Herausgeber: Hill Jonathan David, Santos-Granero Fernando
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar