Projekt

The essence of this project consists in the documentation of Cashinahua, an Amazonian language spoken on the Brazil-Peru border. Cashinahua culture is progressively disappearing. Traditional expressions such as 'rites of passage' (tchidin, katcha nawa), traditional chants, and musical instruments are no longer being performed. The language is dying out. The new generation speaks Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, the national official languages of their countries, neglecting their own language. In the project's phase I starting in 2006, an extensive corpus of new and older linguistic and cultural material was accumulated, two workshops for indigenous teachers were held and part of the corpus material prepared for publication and partially published. In the one-year final phase the French-German team (Eliane Camargo, Philippe Erikson and Sabine Reiter) aims to complete the data corpus with newly recorded speech and other material newly made available to the project by the Berlin anthropologist Barbara Keifenheim and hopefully also by the ethnographer Kenneth Kensinger, who lived with the Cashinahua from 1955 until 1963. The Cashinahua community themselves had expressed a strong wish for the integration of data from these two people, and at the same time this will broaden the diachronic dimension in the data.

• Prof. Dr. Bernard Comrie

  Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre
  Anthropologie
  Abteilung für Linguistik
  Leipzig