Item details
Item ID
LSNG14-CR08
Title CR08 Warapa (in Idi)
Description Coconut site: Old coconut just east of the path down from Zeri hamlet to the landing place. Interview with Warapa, first in Nen, then in Idi (Idi section preceded by a brief statement in Nen about why he speaks Idi). Again contains various statements about coconut trees, clan entitlements of Blag etc.
GPS location of coconut tree: 8 74407 S, 142 08044 E.

This is a short interview made by Nick Evans at the small hamlet of Zeri, including statements about coconut trees by the person who planted them. Where possible, versions are given in two langauges (Nen and Idi, or Nen and Nambu) by the person concerned. Corresponding video files exist for most of the interviews (though most were shot by Michael Binzawa, shooting for the first time, and are of poor quality with regards to sound and camera angle); the relevant primary notes are in NS2014a:35-49.
Origination date 2014-09-14
Origination date free form
Archive link https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/repository/LSNG14/CR08
URL
Collector
Nicholas Evans
Countries
Language as given Nen
Subject language(s)
Content language(s)
Dialect
Region / village Bimadbn
Originating university Australian National University
Operator Julia Colleen Miller
Data Categories primary text
Data Types MovingImage
Discourse type interactive_discourse
Roles Warapa : speaker
DOI 10.26278/7xpx-xa84
Cite as Nicholas Evans (collector), Warapa (speaker), 2014. CR08 Warapa (in Idi). MPEG/VND.WAV. LSNG14-CR08 at catalog.paradisec.org.au. https://dx.doi.org/10.26278/7xpx-xa84
Content Files (2)
Filename Type File size Duration File access
LSNG14-CR08-01.mp3 audio/mpeg 6.79 MB 00:07:24.899
LSNG14-CR08-01.wav audio/vnd.wav 245 MB 00:07:24.862
2 files -- 251 MB -- --

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Collection Information
Collection ID LSNG14
Collection title Languages of Southern New Guinea: Coconut Interviews
Description From cathedrals to dreaming sites, every culture needs its monuments. But the landscape and built culture of southern New Guinea conspire to erase physical memory. In the ever-changing environment of mud, plants, and water, there are no rock formations to serve as durable traces of the past. Wooden houses decay within a decade or two. Garden clearings grow back after a few years. The savannah edge, if not maintained by regular bushfires, is soon recolonized by forest. Against this mutable environment, stability of external memory is given by the coconut trees planted anywhere a plant can grow: beaches, swiddens, old villages, house yards. Almost every coconut palm serves as a tab (sign)—a reminder of stories of garden clearings, resettlements, disputes, pledges, or intentions. For most, there are individuals with the special knowledge needed to tell their stories. These trees form an arboreal history anchored in their durability and in the clear symbolic and practical intentions that accompany each planting. In this paper, I illustrate the trees' mnemonic value, drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted by local interviewers in their own languages—Nen, Nmbo, and Idi. Responding to the flexible interactions between each interviewer and interviewee, they cover many topics, from memories of old gardens, abandoned houses, or temporary periods in other villages, through reconciliations, to girl-abducting teenagers and midlife contraceptives. In presenting this corpus of material, I marry linguistic and anthropological analyses to show how a network of communities, linked by marriage and exchange across language boundaries, uses these living monuments to maintain its histories across a broad range of spokespeople.

Results from these recordings have been written up in the following article:

Evans, Nicholas. "One Thousand and One Coconuts: Growing Memories in Southern New Guinea." The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 32 no. 1, 2020, p. 72-96. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cp.2020.0004.
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