Burst of Breath: Indigenous Ritual Wind Instruments in Lowland South America

3. Soundscaping the World: The Cultural Poetics of Power and Meaning in Wakuénai Flute Music

3. Soundscaping the World The Cultural Poetics of Power and Meaning in Wakuénai Flute Music jonathan hill In this essay I will document and analyze two complementary processes of creating musical soundscapes among the Arawakspeaking Wakuénai of the Upper Rio Negro region in Venezuela .1 The first of these can be called “cultural soundscaping” and is concerned with the creation of local identities through employing the power of mythic ancestors and primordial human beings to socialize animal nature. The second musical process of “natural soundscaping” is a naturalizing of social being, or a production of “otherness,” through movements of flute and trumpet players away from the socializing space of mythic ancestral power into more naturalized places of animals, deceased humans, and “other people.” In previous works (Hill 1993, 2004), I have demonstrated how these two complementary processes of sound-and-meaning production arise from the interplay of language and music, or lexicality and musicality, in the genre of ritually powerful sung, chanted, and spoken speech (malikái) performed in rites of passage and shamanic curing rituals.2 “Cultural soundscaping” privileges the classificatory, or taxonomic, power of verbally constructed categories of powerful mythic beings over the more dynamic, transformative effects of musicality and musical sounds, which are understood as creations of and/or journeys through mythichistorical times and spaces. Cultural soundscaping transforms and constrains the explosive creativity of musical sounds into lexical categories of spirit names and is a logocentric process of constructing images of continuity, gradual change, and an ideal of perfect transmission of cultural knowledge and linguistic forms across the generations of time separating mythic ancestors from living human descendants. In contrast to the logocentrism of cultural soundscaping, natural soundscaping privileges the dynamic, transformative power of musicality and musical sound over the more stable lexical categories of powerful mythic beings and the stabilizing process of cultural soundscaping. Natural soundscaping , which I also refer to as “musicalization” (Hill 1993, 1994), transposes verbally constructed meanings into musical sound as a way of creating naturalized social being through movements away from and back to the center of mythic space. Musicalization is about the creation of an expanding world of culturally differentiated peoples and geographically distinct places as musically dynamic processes of transformation, movement, displacement, and discontinuity. The twin processes of cultural and natural soundscaping can also be understood as complementary ways of using musicality and musical sounds to link the human life-world as a verbally constituted community to the Upper Rio Negro’s rich diversity of fish, forest animal, plant, and other nonhuman life forms. Whereas cultural soundscaping uses “language”—verbal categories , naming processes, and speech—as a symbolic template for musical performance, natural soundscaping draws its inspiration from sounds and behaviors—especially eating and reproductive ones—of fish, amphibians, insects, and other nonhuman life forms. Natural soundscaping is a mimetic process in which natural behaviors are “reintroduced” into the human social world in both material and symbolic ways as a means of renewing and regenerating the social world through exchanges of surplus foods and the creation of alliances and intermarriages.3 In short, there is a recursive relation between people and the riverine ecology of the 94 hill Upper Rio Negro in which the nonhuman world is imbued with social meanings through cultural soundscaping and, at the same time, reintroduced into the social world as a process of naturalization , or natural soundscaping. The Wakuénai, or Curripaco, as they are known in Colombia and Venezuela, are northern Arawak-speaking peoples living along the Isana and Guainía rivers and their tributaries at the headwaters of the Rio Negro. They form part of the larger region of fishing and horticultural societies of northwestern Amazonia and organize themselves into internally ranked, named, localized phratries consisting of five older-to-younger brother patrisibs. Daily subsistence activities revolve around fishing and bitter manioc cultivation , with some hunting and much gathering of plant materials from the surrounding forests. Their subsistence economy can be summed up in the phrase “Let the fish and game come to us.” Human communities, fishing traps, and gardens are set up along riverbanks to take advantage of seasonal spawning runs and migratory movements of fish and game. The timing of ritual and ceremonial activities is closely related to the natural movements of fish and game animals and to seasonal changes between periods of relative scarcity when river levels are rising and times of relative abundance when...