I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community

Note on Translation, Transcription, and Orthography

Kim — U of N Press / Page xv / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE [-15], (15) Lines: 286 to 301 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-15], (15) NOTE ON TRANSLATION, TRANSCRIPTION, AND ORTHOGRAPHY I recorded all the narratives featured in this book. I then replayed the tapes for either one or sometimes two of the men who were assigned by the village chief to teach me Kayabi. One of them then repeated the Kayabi for me very slowly so that I could write it down. Next, either one or both of them gave me a line-by-line translation into Portuguese. A few hours of tape would therefore take many days to transcribe and translate, especially if, as often happened, they took time to explain references to Kayabi cosmology, kinship, myth, ritual, and so forth. From memory, we would all try to reconstruct the gestures of the narrator as we listened to the tapes. In most cases I was also able to go back and ask narrators about aspects of their performances. Much later, only after I left the field, I was able to work closely with the linguistic material produced by sil (Dobson 1988) on Kayabi to better understand the transcripts. Finally, I translated the texts that appear in this book into English. I have tried to maintain some of the stylistic features of these narratives, given the constraint of also trying to make the texts readable and engaging. I have, for example, preserved repetitions (Tedlock 1981) or, at least in some of the longer songs, indicted which lines were repeated or where a choral refrain was sung. Key gestures, pauses, and changes in volume are also noted—though each of these features is not signaled in every narrative. Rather, I only represent these features when they are important for making a larger point about how the narrator is relating to his audience (see Sammons and Sherzer 2000, xvi; Sherzer and Urban 1986, 11–12). Because I make different points about each ritual genre, the texts in the three genres I discuss here are each presented in very different ways. In transcribing the Kayabi language I adopted the orthography developed by the sil missionary-linguists who worked in Kayabi communities. This system is used by some Kayabi, including education monitors residing in the village where most of my research took place. According to sil orthography, a tilde (˜) denotes a nasalized vowel or consonant. A single apostrophe denotes a glottal stop. A y is used for i , a sound that can be approximated by English speakers by making the vowel sound found in the word look while pulling one’s lips back into a partial smiling position. A is pronounced as the a in the word park; e as the e in the word egg; i as the vowel sound in the word feet; o approximately as the o in the word north; and u as the ue in the word pursue. sil also uses j to represent both j and dj—sounds similar to the y in the word yes or, in the case of dj, similar to how an English speaker would pronounce the y Kim — U of N Press / Page xvi / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE note on translation, transcription, and orthography [-16], (16) Lines: 301 to 308 ——— * 374.79001pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: PageBreak [-16], (16) of yes if preceded by the d of dog. The consonants f, k, m, n, p, r, s, t, and w are pronounced as they are in English. I have made a few slight changes in sil orthography to simplify the process of presenting texts and to maintain certain consistencies in the literature. For example, I use ng where sil orthography uses g to stand for ñ. This is pronounced as the ng in the word sing. I also use the spelling “Kayabi” rather than “Kajabi” or “Kaiabi.” Although, according to the orthography I use here, the spelling should be either “Kajabi” or “Kaiabi” (depending on the pronunciation), I use “Kayabi” to be consistent with the spelling usually found in the ethnographic literature (including that produced by sil). xvi Kim — U of N Press / Page xvii / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE [-17], (17) Lines: 308 to 317 ——— * 455.18001pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: PageBreak [-17], (17) I FORESEE MY LIFE Kim — U of N Press / Page xviii / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE [Last Page] [-18], (18) Lines: 317 to...