The Awiakay and Meakambut of Papua New Guinea, by Darja Hoenigman, Interview - #Cultures | ILARA
Channel: ILARA
Date: 2022-04-14

The Awiakay are a largely endogamous community of nearly 400 people living in Kanjimei village in the lowland rainforest of the Sepik southern flood plain in Papua New Guinea. They subsist mainly on sago, hunting, fishing and gathering, while gardening is of minor importance. People tend to spend long periods of time in their bush camps, which are scattered all over their land. Their language, Awiakay, is a Papuan language belonging to a small Arafundi family. All children learn Awiakay, but everyone is also fluent in Tok Pisin, which is the lingua franca in the region.

The Awiakay's southern neighbours, the Meakambut, are a group of no more than 62 individuals. Unlike their neighbours, they do not have a permanent settlement, but move between camps and rock shelters in their limestone mountainous territory where they hunt wild pigs and other animals and process sago for their daily staple. The Meakambut language, belonging to the Arafundi family, remains vital despite the growing pressures for lifestyle change and an increasing amount of Tok Pisin spoken in the neighbouring communities.

The videos you have been invited to watch (free registration on https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-live-interview-with-darja-hoenigman-cultures-ilara-314572684367) are vignettes from Awiakay daily life, selected to present a wide repertoire of speech styles: ‘hidden talk’, which the Awiakay developed to mask their conversation whenever they are among strangers in town; ritualised fighting talk; melodic weeping, through which people express their grief but also grievances for wrongs done to them; the language of spirits, who communicate messages through mediums in spirit possession events, and the ‘untranslatable’ spirit language of night-long song and dance cycles.  The last video is a fragment from the daily life of the Meakambut as they hunt in their mountain forest. Each video is preceded by a short text that introduces the (speech) practices shown in the film.

On April 14, 10h (UTC+2) here on YouTube, Darja Hoenigman will answer your questions about those videos, and the two groups' ways of life, and language repertoires.

Here you can watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/Q-oxztus7ko

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Darja Hoenigman is a linguistic anthropologist and a lecturer in Tok Pisin at the Australian National University (ANU). Her doctoral thesis ‘The talk goes many ways’: Registers of language and modes of performance in Kanjimei, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (ANU 2015) is a study of different ways the Awiakay people use their language in different social situations. Darja’s ongoing linguistic-anthropological research with the Awiakay and Meakambut communities of East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea, focuses on the nexus between continuity and change as perceived – and responded to – by the members of these two small face-to-face societies. Darja’s methodology combines conventional ethnographic and linguistic field methods with those of ethnographic filmmaking.