 Okay, before I start, if you are an A student, please sign up here. Where are they all? I have no idea. They believed in the summer or the day that the people were born. I thought exams had some difficulty when they were revising. Very, very difficult. You're an A student. I thought exams had some difficulty. They thought exams had stopped on the 14th, but they're probably revising. Okay. Okay. If the A students are revising, they need to just get started. It's my great pleasure to welcome Guillermo Hoyerich today, who is at UCL, where he is a mutant pilot, working on singing and forgetting, also, I believe, among the Arabic cliques, a group named Eastern Armenia. And today, he will tell us about singing. He will probably offer a bit about forgetting. And we've talked two times about Red Girl, music and language in Eastern Armenia. Thanks so much. Thanks for the opportunity being here. Thanks for coming. I will, as we anthropologists do, read, but I have a few slides as well. So, I'll just, since we're a bit delayed, I'll just jump in and start. Can you hear me with this? I don't need a microphone. I can't hear you well. No? Should we be very close? Okay, let me know. I've got what years it is. One lazy afternoon in the Yerarete village, where I conducted most of my field work, I was lying in my hammock trying to organise my field notes. When Canine Padine, my next-door neighbour, came into the house and asked me if she could listen to some songs on my radio. While we sat there and listened to the words of a deceased woman, sung through the voice of a shaming, a young man arrived carrying his baby and joined us. A few minutes later, Canine Padine's grandmother came in to drink some of the coffee I had prepared. And when she was about to leave, her granddaughter told her about a part of that song in which the dead woman complained about her husband, who was still alive. The grandmother sat down to wait for her to come around. Soon after, another couple came by to drink some of my coffee and were also convinced by Canine Padine to wait and listen to the now almost famous bit of music. The seven of us sat there and waited for over an hour for the part in which a deceased wife complained that her husband was gossiping with other women. It was only one line which went, can you see that he is whispering in her ears? The audience laughed heartily and after a few more sips of coffee left. Canine Padine then turned off the radio, smiled at me and also left. Canine Padine literally translates as Red Girl. The Arauetes are 500 maize cultivators and hunters who live in eastern Amazonia in seven villages in the Brazilian state of Para. They have been in contact with Brazilian government representatives since the late 1970s and most of them currently speak Portuguese even though they only communicate with each other in Arauetes. I did 14 months of field work with the Arauetes mainly in the Paratatsim village from 2013 to 2014 returning briefly in 2015 and last year. Due to the recent construction of the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world close to their territory, the Arauetes livelihood is currently being threatened and this paper is part of an effort in language documentation to which I hope to get some funding soon. Arauetes music is primarily vocal with rare instrumentals and the songs are divided into two main genres music of the enemies and music of the gods. While music of the enemies is linked to warfare danced in a courtyard and structured by specific formulaic expressions music of the gods is linked to shamanism presented but not danced in a courtyard and structured through refrains. Moreover, music of the gods presents the words of deceased Arauetes through the shaman's voice. A shaman travels to the land of the mai the gods with whom the dead live with and eventually turn into and brings back one or more deceased relatives to sing among the living. In these songs, the dead describe their arrival in the mai domain and how they were treated by the gods including how they were devoured by them and then remade taking new spouses and forming new families. Music of the gods is by far the most important music genre in Arauetes verbal art if we consider the number of songs that are presented, recorded and reproduced. The two songs in which I focus today belong to the music of the gods poetic genre although they are quite unique. One of them is a spirit capturing song in which the shaman searches the outskirts of the village at night to capture the anin spirits who are often responsible for deaths amongst the Arauetes. This song or rather speech song will be my main focus today. The other one is a healing song which are extremely rare amongst the Arauetes although healing songs are quite common in South American shamanistic traditions that is not the case for the Arauetes to whom shamanism is not first and foremost related to healing but to singing a shaman is above all a singer. What is important here is that these two songs the song that captures spirits and the one that heals lost souls are connected through the same event. Red Girl, my neighbour who loves listening to recordings of shamanic songs and with whom I started this talk was pierced by a spirit's arrow becoming gravely ill her blood started to coagulate around her stomach and dark blue patches of it became visible in her skin. In the following days her illness became progressively worse and eventually she could not raise herself from her hammock because her soul or double had left her body. The songs that I'm discussing today are directly associated with this sad event. In song one her father set out to seek revenge against the anin spirits that had shot arrows at his daughter and in song two her grandfather was responsible for bringing her other body, her soul, back to its connection with the living carcass thus restoring her health. First I would like to say for the record that I am not a linguist. I'm an anthropologist, a social anthropologist as we say but one that has an interest in language, linguistics and linguistic anthropology. I will however quickly provide you with a snapshot of languages in Amazonia. Far from being a place in which languages and peoples are just disappearing the Amazonian indigenous population grow faster than the non-indigenous Brazilian population. And in the past 20 years there has been a massive growth and development in the amount of linguistic and anthropological work in Amazonia. The more these languages are studied the more it becomes clear that very few features can be thought of as typically Amazonian and the region actually boasts incredible diversity in terms of linguistic structure. However there are a few features that seem to be more frequently found in Amazonian languages than in other parts of the world some of which are directly relevant to this talk. As many authors have emphasised Indo-European languages frequently lack something that is very common in Amazonian languages which is the grammatical need to specify where the information of a statement comes from and sometimes to also qualify whether the source of information is reliable or not. I am referring to the concept of evidentiality which has gained much attention recently. The second topic that has been the focus of some linguists working in Amazonia is frustratives. Particles that qualify an activity that couldn't be completed as desired something desired but not achieved. Here is an example of how frustratives work in Arauete. After an evening meal someone might recall what happened during the day or maybe what they heard from someone else. Sometimes what a person says is immediately retold by someone else usually a close relative. In such interaction the retailer of the report and the original utterer compose a dialogue that lasts for a few minutes. Every time a sentence is retold the original utterer says that is what I said and adds a particle indicating that it is what she wanted to say but didn't manage to. I just brought a few slides here maybe a bit too much but I am talking about the Arauete the Arauete is from the Tupi Gorenii language family you can see the Tupi language is spread out in yellow there. I am sorry? Oh right, perfect, yes. Very clever, there. There are 8 subgroups in the Tupi Gorenii family subgroup 5 includes the Arauete, Kaya B and the Shingu the Asurini Shingu which you can see in black here so this is the Kaya B and over here the Arauete and Asurini of Shingu so this is the eastern portion of the Amazon they are here in orange the green bit is what we call the legal Amazonia in Brazil and the orange bit is the Arauete territory it is quite substantial and very important territory for them and it is about 2.5 million acres so this again is the Arauete territory some of the villages or half of the villages are in a small river over here and 3 of them are on the banks of the Shingu river which is one of the major rivers in the Amazon flowing all the way over here to the Amazon river and this is the city of Altamira which hosts about 100,000 people now and where they are still or have finished building the Belomorchi Dam, the third largest dam in the world this is the city to where the Arauete go to every now and again and the construction of the dam has really affected their lives this is the banks of the Shingu and the Paratatsin village where I did my fieldwork and the Arauete we had just finished building a canoe but of course as you can see they have been using they have been piloting this river for the past 20 years which they didn't before this is Kujana those are the earrings that they make I'll come back to them later on it's a young Arauete family the clothes that they weave and this is how they wear those earrings here prepared for a ceremony but it's quite usual to just paint the faces with the red unicorn during the day as well and this is Giacometru singing Solano, I'm sorry Elisabeth Solano, the only language that has sufficiently worked with the Arauete language so far describes it as a nominative accusative language that uses morphological strategies of both of fixation and prefixation to agglutinate that relies heavily in co-referentiality and whose predicates are nominal in nature unfortunately, neither her nor other linguists who have briefly visited the Arauete have neither analyzed nor mentioned reported speech norwithstanding its ubiquitous use in daily conversations and in specialized language such as songs this topic with reported speech will be my main focus here today the overall agreement among linguists seems to be in Amazonia that direct speech is the most common form of reporting but some form of non verbatim speech has been described for some languages in his analysis of telling and retelling amongst the Kuna Scherzer says reported speech can have baroque proportions when for example one Kuna is quoting his teacher who's quoting his other teacher he's quoting someone from a different indigenous group who's quoting a chief of the spirit world who's quoting God all of this through embedded citations voiced in one single utterance in another group the Kalapalu reported speech is more formal in narratives than in daily conversations according to Ellen Basso in these narratives, mythological quoted speech creates a monological understanding of a particular point of view quotes does create a dialogue between points of view that identify a specific way of understanding the actions of a character or person in other words it introduces multiple voices to highlight one specific perspective most authors outside of Amazonia use the difference between direct and indirect speech as a tool to think about reported speech although back then to which I will return later on makes a historic argument for the distinction between indirect and direct forms of reported speech scholars frequently take the distinction itself as a given direct speech then becomes not only the arguable historical precursor of indirect speech but also its logical point of departure as Hasler argues and I quote the criterion for the bipartition of reported speech is the speaker's perspective in indirect speech the perspective of the speaker is maintained in indirect speech perspective and they exist switch to the positions of the reporter that is why direct speech maintains the most important features of the original utterance while indirect speech changes pronouns, tenses datic elements, intonation and even referential words end of quote one common assumption is that a citation is a phonological string that has no effect whatsoever on the behaviour of the sentence in which it is inserted for example as you probably know very more than well than I do formal semantics's premise is that embedded clauses are opaque a quote and sentence is not syntatically or semantically a part of the sentence that contains it as Donald Davidson once argued and the reference of indexicals comes from the context of utterance and does not rely or affect the context in which they are being reported or evaluated however, linguist studying romance languages discussed phenomena that were neither direct nor indirect speech as early as 1886 these phenomena were not verbatim citations but they were not straightforward shiftings of the reference of the subject time or place they resembled mixed situations which are hard to classify in terms of the distinction between direct and indirect speech what I'm presenting here today reflects on some of these questions the ultimate question being what does it mean to use another speech through our own voice anin are spirits that approach Arauete villages at night roam furtively around their houses and hide behind banana trees from where they shoot arrows and try to pierce the Arauete the shaman sees in his sleep that the spirits are approaching and on doing so he leaves his house to catch them with his rattle and with the help of the gods moments before being killed the captured spirit uttered its final words through the shaman's voice containing embedded quotes with comments about the Arauete and others when this happens you might hear a shaman voice a spirit quoting his grandfather saying that the gods are not actually gods there is in these songs a clear and sharp distinction between two moments or blocks that are repeated as a set several times during the execution of these songs in the first block the shaman voices the spirits and on the second block he voices the gods the spirits are voiced right after being captured and just before being killed while the gods sing after each spirit's demise briefly these spoken songs combine a spoken block and a sung block one of the expressions that my Arauete interlocked is used to describe the spirits that speak in the first block is the ones who tickle us who use their hands to make us laugh the seeming lightness of this expression obscures the fact that these forest-dwelling beings are also called the ones who kill us the Arauete's description of the anin does encapsulate an ambiguity between the shared sense of intimacy of a laugh and the disjunctive sense of alterity that death entails this sound of intimacy and the sound of death, however are not only descriptions but also sounds the spirits make when they are captured by the Arauete these spirits laugh before and after every sentence they speak and they give a death cry when killed by the shaman's assistant the gods block in turn is characterized by refrains the use of refrains is characteristic of any song in which the gods are present in which the gods are present compared to the giggles and death cries of the spirits block the refrains frame the rhythm of the song laugh and refrains do similar things here but before one even looks at what these speeches and songs are saying these frames set a tone of whose words we will hear what I want to highlight here is that these two blocks are sung right after each other so it's the shame-saman's singing the same shame of the capture of the spirits that voices the anin in this very fast speech framed as I argue between these two laughs between before and after the sentence while in the my's block in the gods song what frames the whole thing is the refrains so it's this bit over here which more often than not does not translate into anything for the aroeter and that usually goes after what's being said so when a shaman goes out to capture the anin he roams through the entire village passing between different houses to find them the search occurs in silence and at a fast pace while he walks the shaman move both his arms in a circular motion in front of him in one of his hands he carries a rattle which he uses to capture them it is only when he stops at a spot on the village boundary that he will voice them the shaman surrounds the spirits and the gods hold them down until the shaman can throw them to the ground the spirits are caught by surprise they feel lost they are asked for their bows and arrows where do they go where could grandpa be where is grandpa really where do they go says grandpa there they are says grandpa there is the bow where is my bow grandpa is over there again and the jaguar is truly there one spirit looks for his grandfather who in turn asks and answers the whereabouts of someone while his grandfather is already after someone that he describes as a jaguar at this point is still unclear what exactly the spirits are looking for and why they need their bows it seems that they want to protect themselves from a nearby jaguar which perhaps is a reference to the shaman and the gods who have come to capture them further speeches of different spirits throughout the evening will clarify what's happening here the spirits have been surprised to be to them a group of wild pigs or peccaries and they are scrambling for their weapons to hunt them other spirits mention the muddy pits where peccaries spend their time comment on the beauty of these pigs and how the fatness would make them a good roast the hunt for peccaries is how the spirits see their relationship with the aroete they prey on them make them victims of their weapons and roast them for food before many deaths amongst the aroete are attributed to these spirits and several of my interlocutors talked about the huge roasting grill that the spirits use to prepare aroete meat by presenting these ethnographic details about the spirits I do not wish to bore you but I want to highlight the idiom of hunting, capture and killing that surrounds the whole event and I want to think if the capture of another's body is related to the capture of another's words if hunting pigs and capturing voices are somehow related in other words, there's the fact that spirits also speak changes the way in which we analyze reported speech can we rethink what it means to report another speech based on this idiom of predation that is inherent in the capture of spirits or conversely can we completely separate linguistic structure from language ideology as the night progresses more and more spirits are captured but eventually what they say start to change instead of talking about the victims of their hunting parties they start fearing and challenging the gods unlike the predator prey asymmetry through which they conceptualize the relationship with the aroete they see themselves in this direct relationship with the gods we need to stick together says the spirit or we will stink later they don't like seeing us the spirit says and then he quotes his grandfather who shouts not people referring to the gods here the attitude has changed the spirits need to stand up straight and stick together or they will stink later they will become rotten corpses they are cautious because the gods don't like seeing them and would not hesitate to kill them the spirits grandfather however strikes a dissonant chord saying that these armadillos are not people according to my aroete interlocutors he is referring to the gods and telling his grandchildren that the armadillo they see is not actually like them it's not actually a person and therefore it is permissible to kill it as a difference finally the spirits mention that perhaps their grandfather shouldn't say that meaning that the gods won't like hearing that they are not people the position rather than the condition of being a person or being human has been a central concern in recent ethnographies in theory about lowland south america several authors have posited that judging by meridian understandings of what humans are capable of the idea of humanity is not exclusive to humans rather it is a condition shared by animals, divinity plants, spirits and also indigenous people themselves is humanity is a position that several beings can access beings that western metaphysics would label non-human in these context humanity appears to be not what one is but a point of view that other beings have access to where being human is a cultural capacity shared by humans and non-humans as the phyriticastro suggest suggests a meridian souls be they human or animal are thus indexical categories whose analysis calls notes not so much for anonymous psychology as for a theory of the sign or a perspectival pragmatics the spirits grandfather this grandfather's dissonant code then is not just a difference in opinion they see the gods as celestial beings just like the eroites shamans as several eroites intellectuals explain to me the spirits grandfathers are not just from a different generation not just grandfathers there are also ritual specialists similar to an eroite shaman as Irafdo once told me they can travel to the land of the gods and bring them to sing and eat among the living spirit spirits however they also seem to challenge the gods by asking if they are actually people the spirits call people pigs and try to hunt them with their bows and arrows but the eroites see them as spirits who can be captured by the shamans rattle and killed with the machete from each point of view there is a different understanding of who are actually people who is human and who is prey from the spirits perspective humans are game animals that can be hunted down from the eroites perspective the spirits must be caught and killed as if they were at war that is if they were all humans as a result what the eroites perceive as warfare the spirits see as hunting we can see I hope the reported speech and the meridian notion of personhood are presented together in the capture of the spirits a shaman voices them gives them a platform to speak so to speak and in this platform they challenge the spirits challenge the eroites gods the very beings that the eroite will turn into but the spirits are not only speaking what they themselves think they are using reported speech to bring their grandfathers or their shamans words into the scene so let's have a closer look at how they do this the eroite language conveys reported speech either through quotative evidentials or through lexical verbs of saying the quotatives are grammaticalized particles that do not resemble verb of saying are inflected only in self-quotation and only appear next to verbatim quotations the forms that I have recorded so far are iku idare idare idau and they all have the same structure verbatim word or expression is followed by a quotative which can be any of the forms mentioned although iku is the common form is the most common form the quotative is followed by a free personal pronoun or someone's name and there's an option at the end of including a reference to an object in this example the expression I will go is followed by the quotative and in this case the pronoun wing which can refer to any third person singular plural eroite vocal music frequently uses reported speech a characteristic that the songs shared with daily conversational practices and with the telling of news from other villages and mythical narratives in the capture of the spirits this is quite clear in the spirit's speech where a direct speech marker where the direct speech marker iku is used to quote another speech as in the following example from one of the speech presented earlier this marker also makes it possible to place a citation inside another citation through its simple repetition so not people iku my grandfather could be just added with said my grandfather said him said him add infinitum the use of iku is characteristic of the spirit's speech but this is not true for the second block of these songs the block in which the gods sing as I said earlier the gods sing after the killing of every spirit but the strategy of the gods to cite another speech is quite different so let's see what happens in the gods block the my are the eroites god or divinities who once live with them but have since then abandoned the eroite to live in a celestial abode eroites shamans develop a relationship with the gods through the heavy use of tobacco which transforms their body and makes them visible to the gods it is this relationship that enables them to bring the gods to help in the capture of the spirits which they do by surrounding them from every side and allowing the shaman to encapsulate them in his rattle following the spirit's execution the shaman crouches and the gods sing a short song I will come later with the great great kuchingas to the my's house there the great kuchingas fly there the great kuchingas fly are they talking to me all these kuchingas together all these kuchingas together oops sorry the my describe the landscape of the land in this place small kuchingas birds live in the canopy of dense trees that lie on both sides of a perfumed river these birds are frequently called kuchinga feathers in a figure of speech that designates the bird by its feathers and at the same time hints at the fact that the gods just like the eroite hunt these birds to make earrings these items are hugely valued by the eroite because they allow them to become gods another expression of the eroites continuous effort to link with the divinities here however the kuchinga birds are associated with the spirits and the gods comment briefly on the spirits activities and intentions by asking are they talking to me after a different capture on the same evening the gods sing a long verse in which the kuchinga motifs takes up most of the lines but the gods suddenly mention the spirits again and the reference is unmistakable the gods sing look she's saying build a large grill this grill is a large wooden structure placed above a fire to roast and smoke game the eroite use it to smoke what they hunt and according to them the spirits use it to roast the meat of their victims since the gods do not have any culinary skills they eat raw or cook food in the sun this line could refer to nothing else but the spirits grill the structure they use to roast the eroite meat compared to the spirits speech the gods song follows one single motive to depict a particular landscape while the spirits describe different actions movements and introduce different voices such as the grandfather the gods don't mention their own actions but the movements of a small bird which is associated with the spirit here we can see how the contrast between the sonic characteristics of the two blocks the fast spoken laughs and the melodic refrains is also a contrast between the sense the scene of a hunting party in the spirits block and the landscape of small birds on the forest canopy these two blocks however are so different in terms of the linguistic mechanism that they employ the spirits speech frequently soared to the use of direct speech citations while in the gods block another speech only appears as a comment or glossy if the spirits use equal the gods use the particle in order to mention what the spirits are saying if the spirits mention everyone the gods, the spirits other spirits the eroite through embedded citations the gods never quote the spirits speech directly the verb puer is used here to report something that the spirits have said the main action of the scene is the making of the large wooden grill to smoke and roast meat and the sentence is on the third person it seems clear that we're not dealing here with direct speech sentence but with some form of paraphrasing in which puer is the reporting verb in other words the spoken block of these songs uses embedded citations to add voices to the shamans uttering of the spirits speech but the shamans voicing of the gods song only briefly resort to another voices and what it does it uses a form of paraphrasing from a linguistic point of view if I may equal is a marker that closes a citation and puer is I believe a reportative evidential particle that is in contrast to equal may indicate the indirect speech my question here is is this distinction between equal and puer in any sense related to the eroites cultural understanding of what speaking and uttering is ultimately can with divorce this analysis of reported speech practices from the way in which they seem to think about the notion of what human spirits and divinities are this relationship between utterance and alterity so to speak is a major theme as we all know in the works of Michael according to the first language is inherently dialogical embedded with alterity and characterised by a fundamental heteroglossia that prevents us from analysing it as something solely univical and closed Voloshinov who worked closely with Bakhtin and I'm sorry if I'm getting this wrong but distinguishes between a linear style of reported speech in which the integrity of someone's discourse is kept and the identity of the utterer is played down and a pictorial style in which that integrity is destroyed and the utterer may colour someone else's discourse for her own opinions focusing mainly on Russian, German and French he emphasises how indirect speech is rare in the medieval forms of these languages and how it emerges in the 19th century along with a form of critical individualistic style that involves several debilitation of both the authoritarian and the rationalistic dogmatism of utterance eventually leading to the dislocation of the authorial context on the same subject he wrote and I quote when someone else's ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us entirely different possibilities open up such discourse is of device decisive significance in the evolution of an individual consciousness consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in the world of alien discourses surrounding it and from which it cannot initially separate itself what Bakhtin is saying I think is that indirect speech is a tool for someone to emerge as an independent voice out of this myriad of voices that surround us we can see how this question or problem that Bakhtin raises is somehow present in the description I have been giving of the other attest songs to capture spirits the voices of others uttered by the shaman voices that in themselves also refer to other voices the gods quoted by a shaman spirit cited by his grandson spirit all of this uttered by a shaman in what they are debating is precisely who is human, who and who is not who can be called prey and who can be called person however could we actually connect this with what Bakhtin is saying could we equate the difference between the use of equal and poor in a charitable art to the distinction between linear and pictorial styles of reported speech at first the division in two blocks in the other attest songs seems to be a quite neat presentation of the opposition between direct and indirect speech the spirits quoting their grandparents maintaining their speech in a linear style while the gods singing the spirits actions in a pictorial style that dissolves the spirits' authorial content but this is strange how could Bakhtin's analysis work in the Amazon if anything Bakhtin focuses on the relationship between the development of indirect speech and the emergence of modern day individualistic ideology would prevent me from stating that the poor form is a simple form of indirect reported speech we shouldn't be able to separate their analysis from this particular moment in history where a conscious creative writer is struggling to find her own voice and yet it's clear to me that poor involves some sort of paraphrasing that is different from the most common form of reporting speech in the other attest language the equal I started this talk with my next door neighbour the red girl and mentioned that she was attacked by the enemy spirits song one which I have presented here was a revenge like event in which a shaman red girl's father set out to capture the spirits in the process he voices them and also voices the gods thus presenting us with a unique interplay between different styles of singing in fact with the difference between speaking and singing and more importantly for this talk with different ways of conveying another's point of view through reported speech practices in itself it shows the values I believe of language documentation efforts to see to collaborate with indigenous groups around the world in recording and translating such incredible examples of verbal artistry the main question for me in this paper was is the poor used by the gods to report the spirit's speech a form of indirect speech I believe so and following back then it is perhaps linked to a specific that is an right there way of thinking about what a person is the concept of person or the position of person, human or author is ultimately in dispute several beings are capable of ascending to that position that says this is me and I'm speaking but the gods wish to hold this possibility away from the spirits by not quoting them directly they deny them the possibility of speaking as a person the second question they address here is perhaps a little bit more general for this is the question whether it is possible to understand linguistic structure in this case forms of reported speech without taking into account how the speakers of a language in this case the Eroeter conceptualize and think about it and practice it the answer to the second question is to me still very difficult I would suggest however that looking at the way in which people talk about and describe language and also how they play and make art with it can be a powerful tool to imagine the possibilities that languages can have I hope that my paper has given you some food for this thought but this presentations title does mention two songs and so far I've only been talking about one I'm aware that my time is ending and unfortunately I won't be able to talk about this second song today song two as I said is a different spectacle it concerns bringing back to life the red girl's stranded soul it involves other spoken techniques it's still a song but one in which the relationship between names and things don't seem to add up people call each other by their own names creating referential as we know words sometimes point to unusual reference such as what this presentation has done a presentation entitled two songs but they only talked about one thank you to give you more time maybe I just started my question I was really puzzled in your presentation by something that you also pointed out yourself how the interlocutors hello these very different layers and indexes and I was wondering to what extent it would be helpful to look at this these discourses in terms of voice footing and because clearly there must be some degree of conventionalization so that the heroes can recognize particular social personally gods and spirits grandfathers so I wonder if you have something to say about that okay yes that's a really good question and of course this dividing and alanizing of the layers was only possible to be done in collaboration with young adults who as I suppose were not that interested at the beginning but at the end of the film work they were quite interested and really hard for them especially to it I don't know with whom I worked the most to work with me in the spirit speech as I played before it's really fast and it's really difficult to get and to understand what's being said so he frequently wanted to let's just go back to the shaman singing because that's what and as I said the music of the gods most of these songs are just the second block just the melodic singing of the gods which and the deceased Kim that is the most common the most popular form of a lot of the songs and these I found that people are incredibly aware of the metaphors the special languages being used the people there in none of these songs the deceased that is actually being voiced by the shaman is mentioned ever and the whole thing about listening to them is how it's kind of of a game to try to find out who's actually singing because in these songs there's no the song can only be sung once so it's never sung again not by this the same shaman sorry and it's always the deceased who sings in these songs and since in the village where I worked there were four active singers they sang pretty much every other day from like 45 minutes to even 3 hours and so it kind of creates this landscape where everyone's singing but these songs are of course recorded and then reproduced but never sung or presented again by the same shaman or by a different one so every song is in the sense a new song but people are usually really used to the metaphors and the discourse in these songs the spirit speech the first block of these captured songs are as I said much harder but in comparison to the songs and comparison to the other big musical genre the music of the enemies they are quite fixed so it doesn't deline what's being said doesn't change that much from song to song and these are songs that people don't like listening to them that much and they happen at night when everyone's sleeping there's a very strict audience is usually the shaman and his helper who's basically the guy that kills the spirits with the machete and basically the guy because there's no formal training for that, it's just someone that goes with the shaman and the occasional crazy linguist or ethnographer who's doing field work that goes around as well so these that's what I say if they are much harder to listen and to understand they are much more fixed than the other songs yeah, does that kind of address a little bit? and maybe a follower so then it would make sense to say that these are voices in particular that have become unregistered to some extent so that the audience knows what to expect and that helps into mutation I was also wondering when listening to the songs clearly it was not just morphosyntactic elements that differentiated the different blocks not also rhythm and voice quality we didn't see a video but I would imagine that there may be other parts of the interaction that would differ and so in that sense my question would be to what extent it's useful to focus on the unliquistic elements that set these registers hard at the beginning if you remember and I presented the difference between the last and the refrains that is one of the ways coming out of the linguistic analysis and trying to think of what the means in which these blocks are different so I suppose one way to start is by how the other had themselves described these two blocks so one is described as a spoken block as the verb to speak the other one is a sung block so that's why I've been calling these speech songs so it's spoken it has the laughs it's very fast and also it includes these direct speech so these are all kind of things that I try to keep together although I have focus of course a bit more on that I'm only wishing a bit today there is of course in terms of gesture and movement the difference between two blocks is mainly indexed by the sound of the rattle so the way it sounds in this circular motion very fast circular motion to capture these periods while the shaman is standing it's very different from the way that it sounds when he's crouching down and singing and just beating the rattle in his arm so I try to but yes definitely I mean there's a thing that have to go together you said that these songs are never repeated so how do they feel about your recording them? they're fine so one of the other things about the shamanism mainly which is the difference between the other genre in which the songs can be repeated but this genre the songs are thought of as belonging to the deceased and the spirits that are being voiced so from Dierarte's point of view the songs are not dead yeah so when I ask them about to record them they're like that's fine that those songs they're just fine it's they were fine but the only song that was more difficult but not in terms of recording but in terms of listening to is the healing songs but that only for the person who had been ill and whose voice or whose soul was being voiced by the shaman in the song so that of course created a discomfort for the person to hear her own soul being voiced by a different by a shaman right so that created difficulty for her to listen but not only me and the reason why I became so I didn't go to Dierarte to study their songs at first but the reason I became interested is because Dierarte themselves record and play and listening listening to their own songs all the time all the time they had been doing this with cassette recorders before but these days they have you've probably seen them in different places but there's more radio battery radios which of course in the village don't you have no radio except for one broadband radio from Brasilia Broadcast from government radio there's no local radios that you can capture so what you do is just insert a flash drive and then you play these songs and these radios they act as recorders as well so they record and listen to these songs all the time yeah talk about there's a cast which I've written about and I was just wondering about the general beliefs about language and about kind of you sort of mentioned about who counts as what counts as human and I just wonder whether you could say a little bit more about beliefs about language for the other way they connected to so of course that's a great question and of course the Vedic Astro's theory is this general theory about humans, gods and plants and animals trying to put together a lot of different and very complex Armenian traditions so what you will have for different groups is what that it's not this general belief or this pan humanity where anything is human and anything goes it's not like that doesn't sound it's way more specific than that so for example apart from gods which are fundamental to the Eroeter they turn into them when they die these are cannibal gods so they eat the deceased Eroeter and then make them people again the gods actually speak and sing and so they share they share with the Eroeter this sense of being human this sense of being us so what's and that's perhaps the most interesting thing in terms of perspectivism is that the word for people in a lot of places in Amazonia is the word for us so it's the pronoun for us so that's why he calls it phenomenal or cosmological pronouns or if you wish phenomenal cosmologies so it is exactly here so what I translate as not people you could translate as not us as well but what's interesting is that spirits use the same word to say us the gods use the same words to say us and that's my point in saying that who is actually human is in dispute and there's a lot of interesting stuff in terms of in Amazonia for example on how you have to transform babies into humans so babies are not born humans meaning here a specific humanity so you have to transform babies into a specific Eroeter that involves body techniques it involves over of the midwife making the babies like a newborn after two hours making it round and then stretching his skin shaving eyebrows and all that two or three hours after birth so it's this effort to make them be and look and have a body that is Eroeter meaning human but what's also interesting is that divinities in the case of the Eroeter you also have enemies so as I was telling you before we started the second most important genre is music that you learn from people that you've killed so these victims the victims double a soul travels to the end of the world comes back, wakes you up teaches you songs and these songs you have to perform these songs are completely different they're not sung by a shaman they're a group in a large beer drinking party they have a complete different structure but again so the idea of being people being enemy they kind of shift as well and what's interesting in the case of the Eroeter is that this idea of humanity does not apply in general to all humans so although you have one important mythical narrative that or a narrative of initiation so about the time in which humans and animals spoke the same language or had the same body the same visible body although you have several animals listed there what seems to be important to them is the ability to sing so you have very few enemies and here the category of animals and enemies is conflated because every time you kill a howler monkey a big howler monkey a cappuccino monkey, a jaguar you have to sing as well so they are victims of warfare not of hunting but that does not apply to fish that's what I mean so it's not just general animals or all humans not really this is the end of course in the case you have more very common ideas such as a jaguar which is perhaps one of the most important animals in terms of cosmology and Amazonia but also in terms of the howler monkey just the simple waking up in the morning or late in the afternoon when they are singing as well and then you have different comments stuff like how the howler monkeys they have their own drinking parties and they have their own fights and all these descriptions that sometimes you get through the song about the song from the howler monkeys victim or a human victim that are about the macaws so they are talking about the macaws and the kinship about the macaws so it's this very beautiful play or verbal art in which humans are together in a block singing songs from howler monkeys howler monkeys point of view talking about macaw kinship yeah so you see how all these things kind of come together right so does that make sense? so like this kind of suggesting that sort of along the same type of lines with the difference between the and the boy so yeah the problem that I have again as I said I haven't been trained as a nucleus I certainly would have wanted to but you know life happens children and stuff but and it's very unfortunate that the language that have worked although with the other language didn't focus on reported speech it's very unfortunate to me they're doing their job you can never do everything but so it seems quite clear in the case of equal that it is the direct speech but it's easy to and it's very straightforward translations in terms of like this being of a bait in citation then here you have the quotitive and here usually like the other simple or kind of simple example I suppose so it's I will go said he, she or them this is like everyday stuff in the morning with people trying to organize what they do during the day and it's like you know I will go said grandfather said uncle said grandma said my dad so it seems quite okay my personal difficulty in stuff is with the poor right here so this is this is the grill the big grill to make and they continue with the same to make this is right side third person quite common in the songs it's very difficult for me to analyze them sometimes what they actually mean they don't seem to actually have much influence in the sentence sometimes in all of the songs not just here then here you have something important which is a topicalizer or as a focus and kind of highlights this bit here so they continue saying they continue to say or she's saying something which seems to me to be a form of paraphrase the problem is that because of back then I suppose it seems to need and it's weird that back then should work in the Amazon to me maybe it's not but to me it is and and usually now it's starting to change I mean there's been some work with Matzez with David Fleck the very important linguist who has been working with Matzez for 30 years I think and he used to say that there's no such a thing other than direct speech in Amazonia and with Matzez and he came out with some of the people saying about four years ago a paper saying well maybe actually here there's stuff there's paraphrasing there's no actually changing person so right? so you get these things yes sorry this is just reminds me of a beautiful talk by my friend Ford I need to look up the language but the language is spoken in Tarah and he is actually looking at the language itself but at the Portuguese and he says they have always been chastised for making a grammatical error in the verb conjugation in Portuguese but he has actually analysed it as a form as a quotitive so officially it looks as if they are making a grammatical error but it is actually a grammatical distinction that they have introduced into Portuguese because it exists I can definitely amazing yeah exactly so that's the thing that's my thing with the poor is it indirect speech is it not do you notice this being using more to refer to the speech of the gods than the equal or is that not really a clear question this is a very good question so as I said you have the music of the gods which mainly is shamans bringing deceased and gods to sing and it sounds like the second block of these songs so these songs, the spear capturing songs they are like a subset of the music of the gods they have the music of the gods on one block and they have the spoken block at the other one so the music of the gods in general they use a lot of equal the other forms which seem to be much more common in singing than in daily conversations so the dare they are very common but here and that is the crazy thing the songs of the gods in this spear capturing songs have no equal at all it's completely absent so it's really striking from when you compare to the whole it's like this is unusual so it's kind of moved to the spoken block and here you have the Pue so I have a few examples of Pue this is the most difficult one and the one that I brought because the one that seems to be paraphrasing I have some which are clearly direct speech as well with the Pue but it's inverted so instead of the verbatim coming before it comes after so it's Pue and that's considered verbatim but not here and there are very few of these examples and it was a bit of a struggle to kind of to actually find what they could mean does that make sense just wondering as well how it interacts with the different modalities singing and speaking whether singing has more connotations of kind of the divine or you know whether that impacts on the kinds of quotitives that are being used whether you're referring to utterance or physical speech exactly and that's the most striking thing because I would expect that in the singing there would be a lot of quotitives but in this case there is these types of glossing and paraphrasing and that's quite unusual that makes it really interesting as well and my kind of connection or my way of thinking about it was to think what seems to be in dispute here or it seems to be in debate or in you know is this problem of who's human so this seems to be what this thing is going and what seems to be happening is that the gods are not allowing the spirits to speak not quoting them not allowing them to act as a speaker or as a full speaker does that make sense because in the end the spirits are saying no because the gods are not people they're kind of bragging all that what would they actually kill the gods and they're like they could have to do that that's just silly so the overall kind of sometimes they do escape that is amazing it's an amazing thing when they escape it's quite rare but the spirits do escape so the shaman just runs out just like whoop whoop the spirits just go somewhere and then you have to run run after him with your recorder at 3am but they are killed so they kill that's the whole point of the thing it's this alliance between the other 10 and the gods to hunt these guys and keep them away and it's one of the it's incredible it's a lot of deaths amongst the other 10 are caused by these spirits and the piercing of people tonight was almost up and maybe it's time to continue this discussion in the lovely summer afternoon thank you very much