Landscape terms in Alto Perené Kampa (Arawak) of Peru

‘This is not the jungle, this is mybarbecho’: semantics of ethnoecological landscape categories in the Bolivian Amazon

“…In this study, there was no indication of covert categories, because consultants labelled all groups of photographs, although not as consistently as individual photographs. While other Amazonian groups were reported to consistently lexicalise category organisation through the use of classifiers, for instance, using a suffix for 'running water feature' (Mihas, 2015) the Takana did not lexicalise their higher level landscape categorisation. Moreover, vegetation or water was not an organisation principle, but geographical regions, which has been reported as an organisational principle before (Jungerius, 1998).…”

“…Focusing on a variant of Spanish spoken by indigenous Takana people and relying on extensive fieldwork to arrive at a bottom-up categorisation of landscape without imposing Westernised concepts of landscape organisation, our study thus complements previous ethnoecological work in the Bolivian Amazon (e.g. Mihas, 2015;Riu-Bosoms et al, 2014).…”

“…In the following, we present a case study that investigated ethnoecological landscape categories of Spanish-speaking Takana people in the Bolivian Amazon. Using a triangulation of ethnographic methods for investigating both the ecological underpinnings and cultural significance of landscape categories, our work complements existing research on landscape classifications of Amazonian indigenous peoples (Gilmore, Ríos Ochoa, & Ríos Flores, 2010;Mihas, 2015;Riu-Bosoms et al, 2014), and thus contributes to exploring the relationship between people and their environment in a region considered a global biodiversity hot spot. Furthermore, we compared ethnoecological vegetation units with a scientific botanical classification, highlighting convergence and divergence between the two systems.…”

Language-specific resources in talk: A study of epistemic stance coding in Alto Perené (Arawak) agreements

“…Many verbs and nouns constitute linear strings of segmentable affixes, typically assigned to particular slots. The verb plays a key role in Alto Perené grammar (see Mihas, 2015 for details). In talk, turns are often expressed by verbs in clausal function.…”

Book review: Elena Mihas, Conversational Structures of Alto Perené (Arawak) of Peru

“…This timely book represents a first attempt at a ‘discourse-oriented’ grammatical description of a lesser-studied language, designed as a companion to the traditional descriptive grammar of the same language, Alto Perené (Mihas, 2015). Inspired by recent cross-linguistic work in conversation analysis (CA) and interactional linguistics (IL), as well as calls by documentary linguists to focus more on everyday talk, the book describes key aspects of informal conversation in Alto Perené.…”