Examining the storytelling practices of the Napo Runa, a Quichua community in Ecuador’s Amazonian region, this volume details the manner in which Napo Runa narrative practices are intertwined with the somatic being and with the natural and spiritual worlds. Well-researched and integrated into anthropological and ethnopoetic theory, the volume presents transcriptions, descriptions, and explanations of more than two dozen narratives told by a variety of both male and female Napo Runa community members. Impressively, the written volume has a companion website (http://spokenwordecology.com) where readers can access audio and video clips of the collected stories. The website is organized to accompany the reading of the book, but is also a wonderful resource of audio and visual information in its own right. Though the website’s principal language is English, its main page is translated into Quichua and Spanish, making its contents more widely accessible.
This volume examines narratives that touch on a wide range of topics, and its authors separate the narratives into chapters organized by either the manner in which the narratives were told or the theme which they exposit. The first chapter, entitled “Somatic Poetry: Toward an Embodied Ethnopoetics,” explores the multimodal art of Amazonian poetry and storytelling, in which emphasis is placed on the bodily creation and reception of words and music. This chapter explores several poetic descriptions and incantations performed during healing rituals or during the search for medicinal plants. The second chapter, “Primordial Floods and the Expressive Body,” focuses exclusively on three distinct narratives about the izhu punzha, or great flood. The transcriptions of these narratives are rendered with reference to the bodily gestures made during the telling, which can also be seen in the video recordings on the website. The next chapter, “The Iluku Myth, the Sun, and the Anaconda,” examines, in great detail, two narratives: one of the Iluku story, or a story having to do with the moon, and the other a story on the origin of the sun. This chapter explores the manner in which these narratives about the celestial world discuss issues of love, desire, and sorrow in the cycle of human life. Female voices first enter the collection in the fourth chapter, “Birds and Humanity: Women’s songs.” Six women’s songs performed by both men and women feature issues related to the relationships between women and animals such as birds and fish. These songs highlight notions of female attraction and the embodiment of nonhuman beings, and touch on themes such as power, gender, and history.
A chapter entitled “The Twins and the Jaguars” offers a discussion of the method of verse analysis developed by Dell Hymes in the 1980s and 90s, and then applies this method in the analysis of a story central to the Napo Quichua mythology—the story of the twins and the jaguars. Two later chapters, “The Cuillurguna,” and “The Petroglyphs and the Twins’ Ascent,” continue with the twins narratives, examining five stories related to the birds of prey, the mundopuma (or “world jaguar”) story, and the petroglyphs the twins left behind on earth as well as their ascent and transformation into celestial beings. The final chapter, “Cosmological Communitas and Contemporary Amazonian Music,” departs slightly from the more traditional themes of the previous chapters by exploring contemporary musical practices. This chapter focuses on a new genre of music called Runa Paju which combines modern technology, musical practices of past times, and messages of mythological truths. This chapter serves as a fitting conclusion to the volume’s discussion of traditional storytelling practices and their role in the contemporary world.
The volume’s introduction sets up an unnecessarily negative comparison between the “modernized, dominant language-speaking” populations’ limited knowledge of and lack of appreciation for artistic and poetic expression that extend beyond alphabetic writing, and the richness of the artistic life of the Napo Runa. But the chapters that follow dispense with this negativity and offer, instead, a beautiful and detailed rendering of narrative practices that are, indeed, richly artistic. The volume and its website are wonderful resources for students and researchers interested in ethnopoetics, linguistic anthropology, and folklore, and constitute an enlightening contribution for anyone interested in storytelling, Amazonian culture, or Quichua language
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[Review length: 694 words • Review posted on September 26, 2012]