Soundscaping the World: The Cultural Poetics of Power and Meaning in Wakuenai Flute Music

• Event Date: Saturday, April 8, 2006
• Time: 2:00 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Jonathan Hill
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.

This lecture is held in conjunction with the exhibit Rain Forest Visions. This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Spurlock Museum and The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Center through the auspices of the United States Department of Education’s Title VI Program. The exhibit is also supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.