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March 28, 2006

Rain Forest Visions

The Rainforest Visions Exhibit at the University's Spurlock Museum will go on until August 20, 2006.

In conjunction with this exhibit, a talk will be held on April 8th:
Soundscaping the World: The Cultural Poetics of Power and Meaning in Wakuénai Flute Music
by Jonathan Hill of Southern Illinois University

The talk will document and analyze two complementary processes of creating musical soundscapes among the Arawak-speaking Wakuénai of the Upper Rio Negro region in Venezuela. 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.’

I will illustrate the first process, or ‘cultural soundscaping,’ through exploring ritual performances of the molitu flute in which men ‘speak’ to women in semi-lexical patterns of intonation and rhythm. The second process, or ‘natural soundscaping,’ will be demonstrated through attention to sacred rituals in which molitu flute players and groups of men playing waliaduwa flutes move into a more naturalized social space. I will also explore the use of flutes and trumpets played in pudali exchange ceremonies at the beginning of the long wet seasons as a collective movement of men and women into a naturalized social space. The talk will conclude by considering how these twin processes of ‘soundscaping’ are at the center of a recursive relation between the ecology of riverine fishing and horticultural peoples and forms of cultural creativity that supported the pre-contact expansions of long-distance trade relations and political alliances among Arawak-speaking peoples across vast areas of Lowland South America. These same processes of cultural creativity and ecological adaptability are at work in the ways that contemporary indigenous peoples are struggling to create new social identities with deep historical roots in contexts of modernity and globalizing national states of South America.

The Rain Forest Visions exhibition features the art and imagery of three indigenous peoples from the tropical rain forests of Central and South America: the Waounam of Panama and Colombia, the Canelos Quichua of Ecuador, and the Shipibo-Conibo of Peru. In addition to over 100 ceramic, wood, and vegetable-nut objects, the exhibition features song texts, rain forest photographs, photographs of native people at work, and more.

Sponsors: The Rain Forest Vision exhibit is curated by Dorothea S. Whitten and Norman Whitten and co-sponsored by The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies through the auspices of the United States Department of Education Title VI Program. The exhibit is also supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

For further information, contact Kim Sheahan at (217) 244-3355

Posted by undergrad at March 28, 2006 10:47 AM

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This file last modified 06/01/09