Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual by Elena Mihas (review)

What began in 2009 as a project to fulfill Mihas's linguistic PhD dissertation requirements evolved into a much larger ethnographic documentary project in scope and product. This anthology is the end result. It comes from sixteen months of linguistic fieldwork spanning five years and with collaborative community effort at its core. Within are fifty-eight texts based on oral performances of thirty Upper Perené indigenous Ashéninka speakers authors (fifteen women and fifteen men). Of primary interest to the readership of this journal are probably the texts in Section Three, Ritual; yet these cannot really be separated out from Mihas's ethnographic project as a whole, and in fact, as will be seen, materials pertinent to ritual and witchcraft are scattered throughout the book. Mihas's hope and organizing principle was that this anthology collectively constitute a broad perspective of the Ashéninka Perené world provided by indigenous speakers. Mihas includes introductory notes treating the subjects of historical context, modern day socioeconomic realities, distinctive linguistic and cultural qualities, and detailed commentaries on each of the thirty speaker-authors, including pictures, professional/educational backgrounds, relevant kinship relations, and language fluency and linguistic knowledge of each. The text also includes illustrations, orthographical notes (lxxv), and text synopsis (lxxix).

All texts are transcribed in Ashéninka Perené by contributors with Mihas providing accompanying English translations. Ashéninka Perené remains a "highly endangered Amazonian Arawak language, spoken by approximately one thousand speakers in Chanchamayo province of central-eastern Peru" with an extant population of around fifty-five hundred people (xxxiv). Mihas is a specialist in Northern Kampa language varieties and currently a postdoctoral associate in anthropological linguistics at James Cook University in Australia.

The fifty-eight texts represent only a segment of the Upper Perené documentary corpus Mihas and community members produced. They were selected from a fifty hour-plus multigenre corpus (audio and video recordings) featuring over fifty speakers from twelve villages. Two hundred-plus recorded oral performances are available in the Upper Perené documentary corpus (xxxi). Texts came to be included in the anthology via multiple discussions with and amongst "contributors, family members, neighbors, & cadre of tribal governance to ensure general approval of the project's ultimate product" and preserve the integrity of representing native Upper Perené worldviews and life ways as well as their autochthonous cultural identity (xxviii). Final decisions were further predicated on two influential factors: 1) speakers' recommendation and 2) availability of comparable material in Ashéninka Perené with translations in English (xxxi).

Mihas's introduction further extrapolates research methods and data collection that include close observation, interviews, and documentation (recordings), transcription and translation of collected materials, and archiving data with local research organizations and international digital archives (xxviii-xxix). Mihas distinguishes four Ashéninka Perené genres for the reader: kinkitsarentsi (narrative), pantsantsi (song), vishiriantsi (chant; a repetitive song performed by more than one person), and kamenantsi (oratory; literally "advice," "instruction") but divides the anthology under tripartite thematic structure: History (Part One), Landscape (Part Two), and Ritual (Part Three). All four genres show up in each section. What is relevant here is that multiple genres are included, but are organized under themes rather than by genre. What is fundamental in specifying genre in this context is the way it departs from traditional Westernized senses of genre. The narrative genre, for example, includes history and mythology as much as history-cummythology and mythology-cum-history, the two narrative times overlapping in the Ashéninka Perené conceptual imaginary and spoken accounts that result. Each of the three parts also receives its own introduction.

In her history section, Mihas clarifies the Upper Perené conception of history as well as situating the texts and reader in regional historical context. Two time frames are delineated in the Upper Perené fluid space-time continuum: pairani (ancient times, long ago, in the remote, mythic past) and...