Broken words, furious wasps. How should we translate the sonic materiality of Araweté ritual singing

Bibliographic Data

ID10555124
AuthorsGuilherme Orlandini Heurich (University College London, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume106
Issue1
Pages105-126
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal de la Société des Américanistes (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-9174 • E-ISSN: 1957-7842
PublisherSociety of Americanists (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/jsa.18302
OpenAlexW3042193379
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited24

In Araweté ritual singing, the performance of oporahẽ songs is an exercise in downplaying referential meaning without the actual removal of the sounds of the language. These songs are performed in a way that effectively break words into syllables, which are recombined to form unusual and “meaningless” words. Phrased differently, a good amount of these songs’ “meaning” is not in the things to which they are referring. By looking at the effect of this displacement of syllables in the performance and in the written rendering of the Araweté’s oporahẽ songs, this paper addresses the role of translation in anthropological practice when referential meaning is not easy to access. Following recent approaches in linguistic anthropology, the paper argues that an attention to the materiality of sound and voice in Araweté ritual singing provides a framework for understanding the performance and translation of songs in indigenous Amazonia

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Indigenous · Linguistics · Materiality (auditing · Meaning (existential · Singing · Sociology · Communication · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology · Translation Studies and Practices