Item details
Item ID
LSNG14-II7
Title II7 Wagra Karwai (Carua)
Description Coconut site: Wagra Karwai (Carua), an Äkämär man who lives in Gubam as part of a Karata trip arrangement, in his yard. Bebek (Yosang's baba) joins in to explain in a mixture of Nen and Nambu (though others try shutting him up), then Gima, then Bebek again. Interesting life story, including reading from Motu Bible and talking about learning Motu as a young man working on rubber plantations elsewhere which is where he learned Motu. At the end his wife is asked how she feels about having stayed in her own village and talks in Nambu. Wagra comes from the Qandara clan, which his son belongs to (in swamp area near Mär).
GPS location of coconut tree: 8 61337 S, 141 92078 E.

This is recorded during the second visit to Gubam. Recordings for this trip (CR79, CR80, CR81, CR82, II7) include a number of other interviews with Nen speakers in Gubam, either people from Bimadbn who married into the village (2 women, 1 man) or people raied in Gubam who had learned Nen by other means (from mother/wife).
Origination date 2014-10-22
Origination date free form
Archive link https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/repository/LSNG14/II7
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 Wagra Karwai : speaker
DOI 10.26278/p0fd-8j52
Cite as Nicholas Evans (collector), Wagra Karwai (speaker), 2014. II7 Wagra Karwai (Carua). MPEG/MP4/MXF/VND.WAV/JPEG/TIFF. LSNG14-II7 at catalog.paradisec.org.au. https://dx.doi.org/10.26278/p0fd-8j52
Content Files (46)
Filename Type File size Duration File access
LSNG14-II7-01.mp3 audio/mpeg 41.6 MB 00:45:24.710
LSNG14-II7-01.mp4 video/mp4 3.67 GB 00:25:50.420
LSNG14-II7-01.mxf application/mxf 34.1 GB
LSNG14-II7-01.wav audio/vnd.wav 1.46 GB 00:45:24.679
LSNG14-II7-img01.jpg image/jpeg 1.1 MB
LSNG14-II7-img01.tif image/tiff 42.8 MB
LSNG14-II7-img02.jpg image/jpeg 1.06 MB
LSNG14-II7-img02.tif image/tiff 42.7 MB
LSNG14-II7-img03.jpg image/jpeg 745 KB
LSNG14-II7-img03.tif image/tiff 42.7 MB
10 files -- 39.4 GB -- --

Show 10 Show 50 Show all 46

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.
Countries To view related information on a country, click its name
Languages To view related information on a language, click its name
Access Information
Edit access
View/Download access
Data access conditions Open (subject to agreeing to PDSC access conditions)
Data access narrative
Metadata
RO-Crate Metadata
Comments

Must be logged in to comment


No comments found