This paper describes the ways that cultural values relating to interaction with the more-than-human world are embedded in traditional stories of the Awajún, an indigenous nation of Northwest Peruvian Amazonia. The Awajún traditional territory is a biodiverse region in the eastern foothills of the Andes. A large part of the territory is held collectively under native title, with various overlapping indigenous organisations responsible for aspects of governance.
Although biological and ecological studies studies have been conducted in the area, and linguists have published extensively on the Awajún language, there has been little overlap between these two fields. This paper reports on work currently underway that aims to fill the gap between ethnoecology and linguistics. Three aspects of the project are presented:
– Processing a collection of traditional stories into a searchable archive. Researchers have made numerous recordings of traditional stories and songs, and the first stage of the project involves putting these into a searchable digital format, annotated with grammatical features.
– Ecolinguistic analysis of the stories. This involves tagging mentions of flora and fauna in the stories, and identifying mythological roles, attitudes and cultural values embedded in the discourse surrounding them.
– The final stage involves searching for grammatical correlates of cultural values. It is a well established linguistic principle that grammatical structures (e.g. affixes or prepositions), develop from highly frequent combinations of lexical items (e.g. nouns, verbs) as they are used in discourse. Consequently, grammatical structures themselves should reflect and encode themes that have been the subject of conversation for generations of speakers.
Our goal is to provide not only a detailed description of the ways that the more-than-human world is reflected in Awajún stories and grammar, but also to articulate a methodology that can be applied to similar collections of recordings for other languages and cultures.