Composite ideophone-gesture utterances in the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’, an...

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John Benjamins Publishing Company

Composite ideophone-gesture utterances in the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’, an Amazonian Arawak society from Central-Eastern Peru

Elena MihasThe Cairns Institute, James Cook University

Based on extensive fieldwork in Peru among Ashéninka Perené Arawaks, this study is a preliminary report on ideophone-gesture composites, with special focus on the meaning and functions of ideophone-gesture couplings within participatory learning frameworks. In expert-novice learning environments, ideophone-gesture composites appear to carry a unique cognitive-commu-nicative load by forming scaffolding knowledge structures on the basis of the conventionalized ideophone-gesture inventories. The data are illustrative of Streeck’s (2009) vision of the hands’ involvement in meaning-making, i.e., that some of the ways in which depictive gestures evoke the world ascend from a basic set of everyday activities of hands in the world, within particular ecological and cultural settings.

Keywords: ideophone-gesture coupling, composite utterance, participatory learning, Ashéninka Perené, Arawak

Introduction

This preliminary study focuses on the interaction of ideophones with gestures, both depictive and deictic, and seeks to highlight the contribution that ideo-phone-gesture composite utterances, characterized by a mutual elaboration of two fundamental modalities, speech and gesture, make to social interaction among Ashéninka Perené, a Northern Kampan group of Peruvian Arawaks. Composite utterances are defined as “signs co-occurring with other signs, acquiring uni-fied meaning through being interpreted as co-relevant parts of a single whole” (Enfield, 2009, p. 7). When combined together, ideophones and gestures create a “whole that is both greater than, and different from, any of its constituent parts”

Gesture 13:1 (2013), 28–62. doi 10.1075/gest.13.1.02mihissn 1568–1475 / e-issn 1569–9773 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2013. John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAll rights reserved

Composite ideophone-gesture utterances in the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’ 29

(Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011, p. 2). The ideophone-gesture composites are perhaps one of those exemplars par excellence of multimodality, i.e., of “the pro-cess in which different kinds of sign phenomena instantiated in diverse media […] are juxtaposed in a way that enables them to mutually elaborate each other” (Goodwin, 2000, p. 1489).

Ashéninka Perené is a highly endangered language spoken by around 1,000 people in the Upper Perené valley of the Peruvian Amazon. The language is part of the Ashéninka/Asháninka dialect chain which includes Ashéninka Pichis, Ashéninka Pajonal, Ashéninka Ucayali, Ashéninka Apurucayali, and Asháninka Tambo-Ene, which have various degrees of mutual intelligibility. Among the Ashéninka/Asháninka groups, Ashéninka Perené Arawaks are reportedly best-in-tegrated into the market economy. Currently, many native households grow citrus fruit, pineapples, papaya, plantains, cacao, or coffee for sale. Males often work as hired hands during the coffee-harvesting season; many females are skilled artisans who sell hand-made jewelry and other handicrafts to tourists.

A primary goal of this study is to investigate the role of ideophone-gesture couplings, or composite utterances in Ashéninka Perené procedural discourse, or ‘how-to-do-it text[s]’ (Longacre, 1974, p. 358) within participatory, guided learn-ing frameworks. The term ‘participatory’ characterizes “actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within structures of talk” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004, p. 222). This work aims to complement the existing scholarly analyses which have so far examined ideophone-gesture composite utterances in narratives, storysong, and conversation. In particular, in the narrative genre of storytelling, Japanese mimetics and co-expressive gestures are described in Kita (1993, 1997); Luwo ideophones and gestures are elaborated on in Storch (2013); Shona gestural ideophonic performance in a ‘hybrid genre’ of storysong (cante fable) are discussed by Klassen (1998), and Siwu ideophones and gesture in ev-eryday conversational speech are addressed in Dingemanse (2011). These impor-tant studies have indicated that a discourse genre has a significant bearing on the frequency of ideophone-gesture utterances and on their role in social interaction. For example, Luwo narratives abound in composite utterances, which due to their ‘affective-imagistic’ nature, evoke a physical sensation of the depicted event, en-abling the audience to vicariously partake in the sensory experience described by the narrator, whereby “the speaker simulates- or raises an illusion- that the verbalized event happens simultaneously the moment of its production/ pronun-ciation” (Kilian-Hatz, 2001, p. 155). In Shona storysong, ideophone-gesture com-posites are extremely common; they function as a rhetorical device par excellence which grabs the listeners’ attention and provides “additional layers of expressivity and meaning” (Klassen, 1998, p. 8). In conversational Siwu, ideophones co-occur with gestures less frequently (62% of the ideophone tokens, 108 out of 174, do not


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co-occur with gestures), since in non-narrative discourse genres, as Dingemanse notes, “the main business may be something else […which] does not call for much performative elaboration” (2011, pp. 349–350).

In conversational Ashéninka Perené, composite utterances are indeed used significantly less, in comparison with narratives, and often have an evaluative connotation, demanding a corrective social action on the interlocutor’s part. The evaluative function is exemplified by the ideophone shiririri ‘slow motion action’, coupled with the speaker’s enactment of a shuffling gait. The composite utterance, paniitzi shiririri p-anii-tz-i shiririri [2s-walk-real ideo] ‘you are walking shiririri ‘slow motion action’, is used to tease or scold a child who is walking slowly, by imi-tating the child’s foot-dragging gait.1 Social pressure is also exerted on the child when he is instructed to stoically endure pain and warned not to cry, expressed in a momentary enactment of wiping away imaginary tears from the parent/speaker’s face and co-articulated with the ideophone shi, shi : airo pira, shi shi airo p-ira shi shi [neg.irr 2s-cry-real ideo ideo] ‘don’t cry, shi shi ‘the action of wiping away [tears]’.

In Ashéninka Perené oratory, exemplified by a tribal chief ’s speech, the ideo-phone-gesture composite chiki chiki ‘cutting action’ is used to clarify the kind of job community members are going to do as part of their mandatory community work. While giving an order, pichikero inchashite kameetsa, chiki chiki pi-chik-e-ro inchashi-ite kameetsa chiki chiki [2a-cut-irr-3nmasc.o grass-aug well ideo ideo], ‘cut the grass nicely, chiki chiki ‘cutting action’, ’ the chief lowers the edge of his hand a few times, evoking the action of cutting. Cutting tall grass with ma-chetes is a tedious maintenance job performed regularly by males at the commu-nity entrance. The chief sounds very business-like while instructing his fellowmen, perfectly aware of the tribesmen’s intimate familiarity with the routine task. He uses the composite utterance to casually sum up his explanation of the job, resort-ing to what appears to be a common didactic technique in instructive situations.

In the context of the Ashéninka Perené learning and apprenticeship situations, I argue that composite utterances serve a highly distinct purpose of facilitating guided learning when they are employed as a scaffolding device in adult-child or adult-adult social interaction within the participatory learning framework. Composites function as culturally-specific, concise, holistic depictions of the ac-tivity practiced. As such, ideophonic-gestural multimodal utterances are embed-ded into the dyadic hands-on participatory learning sessions, relevant to the ac-tivities of identifying and using medicinal plants, making adornments, weaving a basket or a mat, planting a garden (see Anderson, 2000, Chapter 5).

The Ashéninka cultural schema of guided learning includes the parent set-ting aside time to teach the child, “presenting” the skill, while providing explicit explanations how to handle the tool and/or the material involved, and sometimes



“modeling the skill”; during practice, verbal “feedback” is provided “to improve skill performance” (Anderson, 2000, pp. 135–136). Importantly, parents show a lot of patience and persistence while teaching the skills. Currently, this socialization practice is in effect only in a handful of remote villages, located in the uplands along the Perené valley. Due to the additional University of Wisconsin Institutional Review Board’s requirements on work with human subjects younger than 18 years old, which this project did not meet at the time of its commencement in 2009, the Ashéninka Perené documentary corpus does not contain video recordings of the adult-child situated activities. Nonetheless, I was able to record adult-adult social interactions in other didactic situations, in which I participated as a learner.

With regard to the adult-adult skills transmission, the learning situations which I was able to capture on video primarily revolve around cooking and herbal therapy, due to the exceptional value Ashéninka Perené Arawaks attribute to the knowledge of prophylactic and curative techniques. These practices are thought of as a way of body nurturing and redressing psychophysiological harm done by demonic spirits, especially, by matsi ‘human witch’. Ethnomedicine is a critically acclaimed knowledge domain of the Ashéninka Perené community (see Lenaerts, 2006). People acquire traditional knowledge of curative herbal treatments throughout their childhood and adolescence either from their family members, or are trained during a prolonged period of apprenticeship by professional shamans or healers, if they wish to make their living this way (see Luziatelli et al., 2010).

Adult-adult training is done within the ‘dyadic face-to-face participatory’ framework (Duranti, Ochs, & Shieffelin, 2012). The locus of learning is always a skills-focused interactive activity, into which ideophone-gesture composites are deeply ingrained. As evident from the video recordings, both herbal practitioners and individuals commonly use composite ideophone-gesture utterances while ex-plaining the symptoms of a given disease, ways of preparing native foods, eye drops, concoctions, ointments, syrups, and methods of their application. In such instruc-tive expert-novice learning environments, ideophone-gesture composites appear to carry a unique cognitive-communicative load by forming ‘scaffolding’ knowledge structures, in Vygotsky’s interpretation (1987), constituting the conventionalized ideophone-gesture inventories. Vygotsky understood ‘scaffolding’ as instructional assistance provided by an expert to a novice/ apprentice, necessary to enable the learner to achieve a higher level of cognitive development (1987, pp. 208–214).

Following Kendon, this study draws on the understanding that speech and gestures are employed together as partners in meaning-making, when “the ges-tural component and the spoken component interact with one another to create precise and vivid understanding” (2004, p. 174). When extrapolated to ideophone-gesture couplings, this view suggests that the composites “point to a third thing:


32 Elena Mihas

both are enriched by their co-occurrence, and together they are taken as signs of a single informative intention” (Dingemanse, 2011, p. 351).

With regard to the directionality of the ideophone-gesture relationship, the elaborate imagery of the ideophone amply satisfies the addressee’s expectations of communicative clarity, even when the ideophone is used on its own, without a cor-responding gesture. In contrast, the schematic and abstractive nature of gestures (Calbris, 2003, p. 29) renders them ambiguous to the addressee in a situation when the speaker articulates them without a matching ideophone. For example, ambigu-ity is bound to arise when a cutting gesture is used without a particular ideophone, either cheki cheki ‘cutting action’, or viri viri ‘cutting in pieces’, or hiri hiri ‘shelling action’, e.g., shelling an ear of corn.

It is the rich and complex imagery of ideophonic depiction which adequately meets the addressee’s need for clarity, whereas the economic and ‘ergonomic’ ges-tural depiction, which, as Streeck asserts, merely serves “to evoke a single feature for the practical purposes of the activity at hand”, may need speech in association with it if the speaker’s communicative intention is to be understood (2006, p. 73). Figure 1 illustrates the articulation of the composite utterance cheki cheki ‘cutting action’, and Figure 2 — viri viri ‘cutting in pieces’, both featuring the ‘cutting’ hand gesture of a similar shape and trajectory when the speaker’s edge of the dominant hand method-ically moves up and down within the spatial boundaries of the imaginary scene.

Figure 1. Bertha Rodríguez de Caleb articulates the ideophone cheki cheki ‘cutting action’, co-occurring with a cutting gesture when she raises and lowers the edge of her hand.

Figure 2. Delia Rosas Rodríguez uses the ideophone viri viri ‘cutting in pieces’, co-articu-lated with a cutting gesture.



An explanation of the pervasive use of ideophone-gesture composites in Ashéninka Perené situated learning contexts is sought in Streeck’s perspective on the hands’ contribution to meaning-making which considers “how gesture serves persons — embodied actors — who are acting in the world together, within specific ecological and cultural settings, and together making sense of it” (2006, p. 71). This approach offers an efficacious heuristics by suggesting that “some of the ways” in which the so-called depictive gestures “evoke the world […] correspond to the fundamen-tal modes of […] activity of human hands in the world” (Streeck, 2008, p. 285). Crucially, Streeck argues that when the hands make depictive gestures they often draw on “a repertoire of habitualized postures and actions” which they learned in a specific life setting because the “inherent significances” of the “familiar schemata” can become part of the gesture “construal” (Streeck, 2008, p. 286). This observa-tion is of special interest to this study which aims to investigate a degree of consis-tency and individual, intergenerational, and gender-based variation, if present, in the production of ideophone- gesture couplings across the sampled native speaker population.

The composite utterance database was compiled on the basis of video record-ings, observations of speakers’ daily interactions, my interactions with my men-tors, and elicitations. The recorded corpus consists of about 20 hours of video re-cordings of narratives, conversations, songs, oratory, demonstrations of healing techniques, cooking, craft-making with accompanying commentary, discussions of various plant species, and explanations of lexemes’ meanings, including folk definitions of ideophones. In particular, to clarify the meaning of a given ideo-phone, I asked language consultants from various villages to explain to me the sense it has in a particular situation, and whether it is possible to use this ideo-phonic word in other contexts. The consultants’ responses were nearly always ac-companied by illustrative gestures whose morphology was consistent across the pool of data providers. The observed similarity of gestures, co-articulated with ideophones, was greater in the guided learning situations, when my mentors ex-plained to me the basics of native cooking and herbal treatments. In the learning/apprenticeship contexts, there was no significant variation observed on the basis of the speaker’s gender or generation, with the sampled speakers belonging to the grandparental or great-grandparental generations.

All video recordings were made in natural settings, either at consultants’ homes or on the premises of a relative or neighbor’s house, often with family members and/or neighbors present as the audience. About 6 hours of the recorded video texts are transcribed, from which approximately 60% is narratives. The spot check of the remaining data tentatively points to the observed tendency of ideophones to be coupled with gestures of several types (depictive, deictic, and emblematic). The data were recorded in the villages of Bajo Marankiari, Villa Perené, Pampa Michi,


34 Elena Mihas

Mariscal Cáceres, and Pumpuriani of the Chanchamayo and Perené Districts of the Chanchamayo province of the Junín department of Peru during the documen-tation fieldwork project of 2009–2012.2

This analysis examines the following questions. What is the typology of ideophone-gesture composites in Ashéninka Perené? What are the functions of the composites in the participatory learning contexts? What are the practices by which speakers seek to bring ideophones and gestures into alignment? The pa-per will proceed as follows. A brief summary of Ashéninka Perené ideophones’ morphosyntactic properties, functions, and uses is provided in the next section; it follows a discussion of the typology of Ashéninka Perené ideophone-gesture com-posites. Ideophone-gesture composites and their functions in participatory learn-ing contexts are dealt with in the next section, which is followed by conclusions.

Ideophones in Ashéninka Perené

This section provides a brief summary of the ideophonic system and ideophone use among Ashéninka Perené Arawaks (see Mihas, 2012, for a comprehensive ac-count of Ashéninka Perené ideophones). By definition, ideophones constitute a special class of “marked words that vividly depict sensory events” (Dingemanse, 2009). Apart from having special phonology (e.g., non-canonical stress assign-ment), ideophones reveal distinctive morphology. Word class-specific reduplica-tion of the word-final syllabic segments -ri, -ro, -ra, -pi, -po, -mi, -vi expresses temporal structure, spatial distribution, or intensity of the reported event, while word class-specific word-final Vk-suffixation denotes punctual/perfective aspect. Syntactically, ideophones are placed on the clausal edge. The bulk of Alto Perené ideophones function in the manner of independent clauses, having a sentence-like character and encoding an action, activity, or process, as well as participants, man-ner, aspectual structure, and spatial distribution of the sensory event. They modify events at the clause level and are commonly pronounced in isolation, marked by a perceptible pause separating them from the preceding clause.

Ideophones abound in semantic domains dealing with a wide variety of ac-tions and processes, ranging from human bodily functions to everyday activities to motion events and happenings of the non-human world. There is a dearth of ideophones describing states, such as physical appearance, e.g. terempiri terem-piri ‘curved object’, and physical and emotional bodily states, exemplified by tzinik ‘static, frozen state; lack of movement’. There are no ideophones which denote colors and sensations of taste, smell, and odor. These gaps may be explained by the well-developed nominal and verbal derivational morphology allowing ex-



pression of degree, quality and stativity concepts via diminutive, augmentative, classification morphemes, verbal inflectional stativity suffixes, and relativizer -ri.

A majority of the collected ideophones are created from the corresponding verb roots, exemplified by itapotatya pava, tapo tapo i-tapo-t-aty-a [3masc.s-be.round-ep-prog-real sun ideo ideo] ‘the sun is round, tapo tapo ‘the state of be-ing round’. Evidence in favor of the unidirectionality of the verb > ideophone rela-tionship comes from language speakers who have noted on a number of occasions that ideophones (or, as they call them, palabras expresivas ‘expressive words’) can be created ad hoc from a broad range of agentive action verbs, the most common being action verbs and verbs of motion. In addition, deverbal ideophone coinage neatly falls into a pervasive pattern of using verb roots and stems as a source of adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. Other ancillary sources of ideophones are either noun roots, e.g., tsomi tsomi ‘walking with bouncing breasts’ is derived from the noun tsomitsi ‘breast’, or unknown sources, e.g., varok ‘a startle reaction to sudden stimuli’ does not have a corresponding verb or noun. Derivational processes can go in the opposite direction: onomatopoeic, ‘noise’ words imitating animal and bird sounds have been attested to give rise to nouns.

Ideophones are known to package multiple aspects of the reported event in a single word. For example, pakararak ‘punctual action of breaking into multi-ple pieces of a fallen fragile object, e.g., a plate, a mirror, upon contact with the ground’, evoke acoustic perceptual experiences, providing information about the described activity, participants, temporal aspect, and spatial distribution of the reported action. Ideophones often encode multi-modal sensory perceptions, e.g., tsapok tsapok ‘movement in and out of water produced with minimal splashes’, e.g., by jumping fish, evokes the upward exit from the water, followed by the down-ward entry into the water, as well as low-level sound made by the event partici-pant. Overall, Ashéninka Perené ideophones have been found to capture sensory perceptions across three sensory channels such as acoustic, visual, and haptic, the latter exemplified by shee ‘a quick release from pain’.

As far as their functions are concerned, ideophones are able to generate highly detailed and incredibly rich images of the directly experienced events and states. As Kilian-Hatz puts it, “the hearer…becomes a direct witness of the ideophonic event” (2001, p. 155). This unique ideophonic ‘affect-imagistic dimension’ has been recognized to be “equivalent to sensory input or affect arousal” (Kita, 1997, pp. 380–381) when ideophones are understood to “enable others to experience what it is like to perceive the scene depicted” (Dingemanse, 2011, p. 358).

Since the information packaged in an ideophone is grounded in the speak-er’s sensory experiences, the ideophonic word pinpoints the exact source of the speaker’s experiential knowledge (cf. Dimmendaal, forthcoming; Nuckolls, 1996, p. 114), i.e., how the speaker came to know it, whether it happened through seeing,


36 Elena Mihas

hearing, or touching, what Aikhenvald calls ‘firsthand’ experience (2004, p. 26). For example, Luwo storytellers often use ideophone-gesture composites to high-light their firsthand visual sensory experiences as the basis of their knowledge (Storch, 2013, p. 65). In Ashéninka Perené, information source can be experienced through acoustic, visual, and haptic perceptions. For example, in okantapaintana tsinkari o-kant-apaint-a-na tsinkari [3nmasc.a-happen-once-real-1sg.o ideo] ‘it did to me tsinkari ‘a sudden feeling of a stir inside the body’’, the speaker’s report on her wellbeing is based on the directly experienced haptic perception, encoded by the ideophone tsinkari.

Finally, because of the expressive nature of ideophonic phenomena, the speak-er’s performance engages the audience more directly and intimately (Kock, 1985, p. 52). Ideophonic performances serve as a means of the listener’s “involvement” for the purpose of achieving “deeper awareness and understanding” of the depict-ed action (Nuckolls, 1992, p. 53). Based on my observations, a common reaction to ideophones occurring in a fellow speaker’s speech is the lighting up of the hearer’s face, often accompanied by a grin. Speaker’s use of ideophones usually prompts a variety of verbal responses from the audience, ranging from the interjection aha ‘expression of understanding, recognition’ to short comments, e.g., arima ‘might be’, to more extensive commentaries.

When it comes to Ashéninka Perené speakers’ own evaluation of the ideo-phonic functions, i.e., when asked why an ideophone was used in oral commu-nication, they enthusiastically agree on its archetypical didactic task of clarifica-tion, para clarificar bien ‘to explain well’. Based on the video-corpus, this particular function of ideophones is especially prominent in instructive settings when speak-ers provide an in-depth explanation of how a meal is prepared, or herbal treatment is administered, or a tool is fabricated.3

Typologies of ideophone-gesture composites

This section deals with the types of Ashéninka Perené ideophone-gesture compos-ites. In light of Kendon’s proposal (2004, p. 107) to treat gesture typologies as local schemes, grounded in the particular context of speakers’ communicative practices and ecologies and academic research agenda, two dimensions of Ashéninka Perené composite ideophone-gesture utterances are considered here. First, the degree of codification of the observed gesture forms are discussed, due to the specific con-cern of this ideophone-gesture study with the stability and distribution of socially shared ideophone-gesture pairs across the Ashéninka Perené population. To this end, the next section provides an account of Ashéninka Perené ‘codified’ and ‘cre-ative’ (non-codified) gestures (Poggi, 2008, pp. 48–49). Second, in the following



section, the sensory perception encoded by the ideophonic word is taken into ac-count for the purpose of identifying patterns of coupling of gesture forms with the sensory class (acoustic, visual, or haptic) a given ideophone belongs to. The clas-sifying terms ‘pointing/deictic’, ‘depictive’, and ‘emblems’, characterizing gesture functions, are also used throughout the discussion.

Codified and non-codified gestural components

Ashéninka Perené ideophone-gesture couplings are considered here on the basis of the cognitive parameter of codification of gestural components, i.e., whether gesture forms are stored in the interlocutors’ minds and easily retrieved from their long-term memory. In this presentation, Poggi’s term ‘codified gesture’ (2008, p. 48) to a large extent overlaps with that of the ‘conventional component of com-posites’ introduced by Enfield (2009, pp. 12–13). The meanings of codified gestures are understood to be socially shared, while those of non-codified ones, dubbed ‘creative’, which are “invented on the spot” by the signer, are not found to be in cir-culation within the speaker community (Poggi, 2008, p. 49). Codified gestures can be thought of as having types and tokens (i.e., instantiations of types), while non-codified gestures function as token ‘singularities’, and become meaningful only in concrete contexts (Enfield, 2009, p. 13). Gesture codification is a cline, revealed in an intermediary status of some attested depictive gestures whose meaning can be familiar to some speakers, but not to the others.

Codified gestures enter into fixed companion relationships with ideophones, forming stable ideophone-gesture pairs. A codified gestural component of such pairs is instantaneously recognized and interpreted even without an ideophonic component. Characterized as ‘quotable’ by Kendon (1990, 1992), ‘emblems’ are by far the best example of codified gestures (Eckman & Friesen, 1969). These are “culturally-defined” gestures, “understandable in the absence of speech” which have an “arbitrary […] form-meaning mapping” (de Ruiter, 2003, p. 338; Holler & Beattie, 2002, p. 31). In Ashéninka Perené, an example of an emblematic gesture involves flapping the united fingers of the hand, with the forearm and upper arm being at a 90 degree angle, co-articulated with the ideophone vako vako. The com-posite utterance has a concise definition ‘invitation to talk’. The ideophonic com-ponent of the composite utterance is articulated notwithstanding the addressee’s location at a considerable distance, when he may not hear the words. The emblem was used in the past between young people, implying an attraction to a person of the opposite sex. Currently, the use of the composite is limited to contexts involv-ing females calling out to each other, wishing to share the latest gossip, or is used by speakers as a sign for the passing driver of a moto ‘auto rickshaw’ to stop and


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pick up a passenger. Figure 3 illustrates the composite utterance, recorded during an interview whose purpose was to elicit folk definitions of ideophones.

Figure 3. Delia Rosas Rodríguez articulates a composite consisting of the codified em-blematic gesture co-articulated with the ideophone vako vako ‘invitation to talk’.

Deictic signs are subsumed here under the rubric of non-codified creative ges-tures since their “proper interpretation […] depends partly on convention and partly on context” (Enfield, 2009, p. 13). Deictic gestures are taken to provide sup-port in identifying and directing attention to the location of a contextually situ-ated referent (Bohnemeyer, 2001, p. 3373). Pointing gestures in Ashéninka Perené are executed either with the index or middle finger, or with two fingers, or with the open flat hand (see Wilkins, 2003, on a variety of pointing hand gestures in Arrernte, an Australian Aboriginal language; Enfield, Sotaro, & de Ruiter, 2007, on the ‘small’ and ‘big’ types of pointing gestures). Chin-pointing, accompanied by gaze, is sometimes used to refer to an object located within the speaker’s inter-actional space. Lip-pointing has not been observed. The common speech affiliates of the pointing hand gestures are demonstrative adverbs aka ‘here’, ara ‘there’, or anta/anto ‘over there’, which indicate a relative distance of the referenced object to the speaker.

When coupled with ideophones, two types of deictic gestures are attested, one with the open hand and another with the index finger. The token meaning of an ideophone and a co-occurring deictic gesture is interpreted in the context of a par-ticular pragmatic situation and local settings. For example, in Figure 4, the speaker Ernesto Manchi López points with the open flat hand to the imaginary location of the story’s female character on a ladder, while co-articulating the ideophone tsirik ‘action of releasing from a state of being stuck together’. The ideophone and the pointing gesture form an ad hoc coupling, created to convey the speaker’s commu-nicative intent. The situation described in example (1) involves a cannibal woman who was planning to grab a young woman climbing a ladder and push her off the ladder into a pot of boiling water. The speaker’s statement was made during a re-cording of a narrative about the native cultural hero Naviriri. In (1), G stands for the stroke phase of the deictic gesture.



Figure 4. ‘Creative’ deictic gesture, pointing to the referent’s imaginary location, coupled with the ideophone tsirik ‘action of releasing from a state of being stuck together’.

(1) O-nint-tz-i arika atai-t-an-ak-i kooya=ra 3nmasc.s-want-ep-real when go.up-ep-dir-pfv-irr woman=dem o-n-tsiri-ako-t-ak-e-ro ataitamento-ki=ra, 3nmasc.a-irr-unstick-apl-ep-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o ladder-loc=dem G G o-n-kant-ako-t-e-ro tsirik. 3nmasc.a-do-apl-ep-irr-3nmasc.o ideo ‘She wanted when the woman goes up [the ladder] to push her off the ladder,

she will do to her, tsirik ‘action of releasing from a state of being stuck together’.

Non-codified gestures include iconic or depictive gesture forms which “depict as-pects of the accompanying speech topic” (de Ruiter, 2000, p. 285). Non-codified depictive (iconic) gestures may have “no necessary meaning outside of a particular context in which [… they are] taken to have meaning” (Enfield, 2009, p. 14). Non-codified depictive gestures are exemplified by Figures 5–6. In Figure 5, Cristobal Jumanga Lopez makes a ‘creative’ iconic gesture consisting of a small vertical down-ward movement of both hands, accompanied by the ideophone tsapon ‘falling into water’. The hand gesture depicts the trajectory movement of the protagonist’s fall into the water. In Figure 6, Elena Nestor makes a non-codified depictive gesture coupled with the ideophone tsari tsari ‘unrolling action’. In this particular pairing, the gesture evokes the activity of unrolling a ball of yarn by making horizontally-oriented stretching hand movements away from the speaker. The non-codified gestural components in Figures 5–6 are sheer oddities representing at the mo-ment the activities of diving into water and unrolling yarn, respectively. The state-ments in (2)–(3) were made during the interviews with me, when speakers were asked questions about place-naming practices and past customs. In (2), Cristobal Jumanga Lopez comments on the etymology of the place-name Mapinini ‘Little Stones’ where the native supreme divinity Pava trapped his offspring and trans-formed them into fish species. After Pava dove into the water, his cannibal son fol-lowed the father’s lead, and was transformed into a fish. Elena Nestor de Capurro


40 Elena Mihas

in (3) recalls the past custom of the pubescent girls making cotton threads and weaving traditional robes during a three-month-long seclusion period.

Figure 5. Cristobal Jumanga Lopez articulates a non-codified depictive gesture, coupled with the ideophone tsapon ‘falling into water’.

G G (2) Iri int-ak-a-ro pava, i-tsitsiy-ak-i, tsapon. he begin-pfv-real-3nmasc.o deity 3masc.s-dive-pfv-real ideo Pava initiated it: he dove into the water, tsapon ‘falling into water’.

Figure 6. Elena Nestor de Capurro articulates a non-codified depictive gesture, coupled with the ideophone tsari tsari ‘unrolling action’.

G G G (3) A-ak-i hiro-paye antaro-paye, atsari-ap-ak-i, tsari tsari. take-pfv-real yarn-pl big-pl unroll-dir-pfv-real ideo ideo ‘She would take big balls of yarn and unroll them, tsari tsari ‘unrolling action’.

Some iconic gestures may become codified within the speaker community, when used widely and persistently with a particular ideophone (or a fixed set of seman-tically-related ideophones). In the course of time, such ideophone-gesture cou-plings become “memorized” as stable pairs (Poggi, 2008, p. 55). An example of a codified depictive gesture is a hitting gesture, shown in Figure 7. It is synchro-nized with the ideophone pak pak pak ‘delivering devastating blows’. The hitting



gesture is characterized by the forceful up and down movement of the speaker’s folded hand, the downward movement occurring on its speech affiliate pak ‘de-livering devastating blows’. The speaker Elena Nestor de Capurro depicts a killing scene, demonstrating how the mythical creature, which used to inhabit the hills surrounding the village of Pampa Michi, would use his killing club to murder the speaker’s fellowmen. The descriptive statement was made during a conversation with a fellow speaker who was asking questions about the ‘master-owners’ of the Pampa Michi environs. The transcription of the composite utterance is given in (4), where G stands for the stroke phase of the depictive gesture.

Figure 7. Elena Nestor de Capurro articulates a composite comprised of the ideophone pak pak pak ‘delivering devastating blows’ and a codified hitting gesture.

G G G (4) I-saik-ashi-t-ap-ak-a, pak pak pak. 3masc.s-be.at-apl.int-ep-dir-pfv-real ideo ideo ideo ‘He would sit with the intention to kill, pak pak pak ‘delivering devastating

blows’.

It will be demonstrated in the sections on verb + composite utterance combina-tions, on composite utterances used in the learning activity of cooking, and on composite utterances used in the learning activity of herbal treatments that in the context of apprenticeship learning, a variety of depictive gestures (e.g., pound-ing, cutting, scraping gestures) exhibit a high degree of codification, being widely shared in the Ashéninka Perené community. Moreover, codified depictive gestures will be shown to co-occur with a particular ideophone (or a limited set of ideo-phones) in procedural discourse.


42 Elena Mihas

Typology of composite utterances based on the perception-class membership of ideophonic words

This section provides a brief summary of composite utterances’ types on the basis of the perception class of ideophonic words. As mentioned in the Introduction, ideophone-gesture composite utterances occur across three sensory modalities such as acoustic, visual, and haptic. Olfactory or gustatory sensory perceptions have not been found to be expressed via composites. In the Ashéninka Perené ideophonic-gestural performances, acoustic sensory experiences account for dif-ferences in intensity, pitch, and loudness of the depicted event (see Tufvesson, 2007, p. 54). For example, kori kori ‘quiet sound made in the throat during the action of gulping water’ and pooo ‘abrupt and brusque sound made by a loud dis-abling blow’ illustrate two acoustic events characterized by a highly contrastive degree of loudness and intensity. The word-final vowel [o] in pooo is significantly prolongated with the purpose of highlighting the intensity of the described hitting action.

Ideophonic-gestural couplings expressing visual perception capture move-ment patterns and physical appearance. In particular, the ideophone moiriririri ‘smoke rising up, e.g., from the fire’ is paired with a momentary head tilt pointing upward to evoke the vertical trajectory of the rising smoke, moriririri ‘emitting bright light at regular intervals, e.g., by a lightning bug’ is coupled with the per-formative blinking of the speaker’s eyes. The reduplicated ri-segment in the ideo-phones foregrounds the durative, open-ended temporal structure of the depicted activity.

Some composites encode mixed acoustic-visual sensory input. For example, tsakorok ‘falling/stepping in water, producing no splashes’ can be enacted, with the performer taking small, barely audible steps in an imaginary watercourse. The ideophone-final k-segment highlights the punctual aspect of the described activity of stepping into water, with every token movement having a clearly defined end-point. The word-initial obstruent [tsʰ] in tsakorok is associated with water-related and rustling sounds.

Haptic sensory perceptions encoded by composites capture differences in the internal bodily experiences, exemplified by tzinik ‘static, frozen state; lack of move-ment’. This sensation is experienced while walking in the jungle, when one freezes as a reaction to the intuitively perceived danger. The haptic sensory perceptions expressed by the attested composites refer to the physical states of the speaker’s body. There is an abundance of ideophonic-gestural couplings depicting acoustic, visual, and acoustic-visual sensory perceptions whose number exceeds 150 (and still counting), versus the mere ten evoking haptic experiences. In view of the fact that there is a large class of composites which describe acoustic, visual, and mixed



acoustic-visual sensations, and a small class related to haptic sensory perceptions, they are grouped here into non-haptic and haptic macro-classes, respectively.

Based on the transcribed corpus, the preliminary pattern observed is such that ideophones which convey non-haptic perception of events, usually co-occur with depictive gestures, whereas ideophones which convey haptic sensory experiences tend to co-occur with deictic gestures. The pointing gesture is used to indicate where exactly the bodily sensation is felt. Although robust generalizations are not possible to make at this point due to the ongoing nature of data collection, the ob-served tendencies can be possibly accounted for by the sensory class (non-haptic or haptic) of the ideophone and specificity of the ideophone’s semantics. Both the ideophone’s class and the ideophone’s meaning are broadly suggestive of the type of the co-occurring gesture (depictive or deictic) employed. For example, consider three ideophones from the haptic-perception class. The ideophone tsinkari ‘a sud-den feeling of a stir inside the body’ is not articulated with manual gestures or any kind of body movement, perhaps due to the ideophone’s diffuse meaning, while the more narrowly defined hempariri ‘feeling pain-free and numb’ and hemimim-imi ‘feeling of spreading numbness in the mouth’ are typically coupled with point-ing gestures making reference to the affected body area.

Figures 8–9 illustrate the ideophone-gesture couplings on the basis of their perception class membership. In Figure 8, the speaker Elena Nestor is depicting swirling water motion in the whirlpool. The speaker articulates ideophone te te te ‘swirling movement of water’, of the non-haptic-perception class, while making a quick circular movement with both hands, one hand moving clockwise, another counterclockwise. The statement was made during her conversation with a fellow speaker who was asking her questions about the malevolent ‘masters-owners’ of the surrounding hills and rivers. Elena Nestor described the whirlpool made by the anaconda-like kiatsi ‘water sprite’, a creature which used to inhabit the river Perené. The transcript of the composite utterance is given in (5).

Figure 8. Te te te ‘swirling movement of water’, which refers to the speaker’s acoustic and visual perceptions, is co-articulated with a depictive gesture.


44 Elena Mihas

G____________ (5) Oh, antaro omotonkani=ve, te te te. intj big whirlpool=foc ideo ideo ideo Oh, the whirlpool was huge, te te te ‘swirling action’.

Figure 9 and example (6) illustrate the composite utterance hempariri ‘feeling pain-free and numb’, which belongs to the haptic-perception class, with the deictic gesture directing attention to the speaker’s chest. The speaker Ines Pérez de Santos points to her bad lung, where a sensation of numbness was experienced, after she had drunk her herbal concoction. The recording was made during the speaker’s battle with an unidentified disease, in response to my questions about the state of her health.

Figure 9. The ideophone hempariri ‘feeling pain-free and numb’, which expresses the speaker’s haptic sensation, is co-articulated with a deictic gesture.

(6) Te o-n-kim-a-vi-t-ah-ia-ro, ari neg 3nmasc.a-irr-sense-ep-frus-ep-regr-irr-3nmasc.o be.the.case G kapichi, o-kant-an-a hempariri. little 3nmasc.s-do-dir-real ideo It [the side of the body] didn’t feel it [the herbal treatment], only a little bit, it

was doing hempariri ‘pain-free feeling of numbness’.

Ideophone-gesture composites in participatory learning contexts

Learning activities

This section deals with a heterogeneous set of ideophone-gesture composites at-tested in participatory adult-adult learning contexts among Ashéninka Perené. Learning activities that I observed and participated in were largely concerned with cooking and herbal treatments, the prominent knowledge domains in Ashéninka



Perené traditional culture. To acquire the relevant insights into the targeted ar-eas of native expertise, I worked with three women from different households who were frequently helped in the demonstrations by their nuclear family mem-bers. Two women are lay individuals, Bertha Rodríguez de Caleb (from Bajo Marankiari) and Elena Nestor de Capurro (from Pampa Michi), and one is a pro-fessional herbal healer, Ines Santos Pérez (from Bajo Marankiari). The assisting family members included the daughters and son-in-law of Bertha Rodríguez de Caleb, namely Delia Rosas Rodríguez, Victorina Rosas de Castro, and Gerardo Castro Manuela, respectively, and the husband of Ines Santos Pérez, Moises Santos Rojas. The mentors, five women and two men, belong to an older generation of speakers, the youngest, Delia Rosas Rodríguez, being 43 years old, and the oldest, Elena Nestor de Capurro, 73 years old. I also regularly consulted Elsa Areyano Francisco de Pichach, a professional healer and a speaker of Ashéninka Pichis from the native community of Cuidadela, La Merced, on matters of disease and herbal healing. In doing so, my goal was to identify a degree of consistency of the composite utterance inventories, relevant to healing and herbal treatments, among healers and individuals, and capture gender- or age group-motivated variation.

During our learning sessions my mentors and I were either positioned face-to-face or were placed side-by-side, depending on whichever configuration suited best the purpose of our work, as well as accommodated my video equipment. Our flexible spatial alignment always allowed for the participation of other parties and ensured easy access to tools and other materials used in the demonstration.

Cooking demonstrations involved a practical activity of food preparation which was later consumed as a communal meal, while explanations of herbal treatments intended to educate me as to what plants are used to cure a certain disease, and how the cure could be prepared and administered. In addition, on some occasions I was permitted to observe and sometimes record on video how eye drops were administered, or herbal mass was rubbed onto the patient’s body, or the patient was bathed by the vapor coming from a pot filled with herbs and hot stones.

Verb + composite utterance combinations

Before dealing with the specifics of composite utterances employed in the Ashéninka Perené adult-adult learning contexts of cooking and herbal treatments, it will be illuminating to take a close look at the verbs which combine with them. As data reveal, in the targeted learning contexts, two classes of verbs are used with ideophone-gesture couplings, namely action verbs, describing activities in ques-tion (with the action verbs subsuming those from the semantic domains of hitting and deformation), and experiential verbs depicting physical processes and states


46 Elena Mihas

of the body (see Nuckolls, 2012, on a wide range of verb types which occur with ideophones in Pastaza Quichua). This account is limited to the afore-mentioned two classes of verbs, predominantly used in the cooking and herbal healing in-structive contexts. In non-didactic settings, other types of verbs have been found to be combined with ideophone-gesture composites (e.g., perception verb kim ‘hear’, cognition verb kimi ‘seem’), but a discussion of those goes beyond the goal of the present study.

A given composite utterance can combine with various action verbs, e.g., the ideophone koshe ‘scraping a layer from a surface’, co-occurring with a codified de-pictive gesture, is attested with the verbs tot ‘cut’, ‘saw’, koshe ‘scraping a thin layer from a surface’, and kant ‘do’, ‘happen’. Another tendency is manifest (although I didn’t quantify the data): when a verb is combined with a corresponding com-posite utterance, only the latter is co-articulated with a gesture. However, when the composite utterance is not present, depictive or pointing hand movements are likely to co-occur with the verb. Plus, the recorded data make it clear that my mentors have tapped into the same repertory of composite utterances, combined with the verbs of making, to illustrate various practical activities. In particular, the composite utterances relevant to cutting, pounding, crushing, and grinding are found to be prominent in both food and herbal medicine preparation.

The list (it is not exhaustive by all means) of the fourteen commonly used ac-tion verb roots with the corresponding composite utterances is given below. All ideophones on this list co-occur with a depictive gesture, a majority of which are codified and form stable ideophone-gesture pairs. Non-codified creative gestures are attested with the ideophones tsatzi tsatzi ‘action of tearing into two pieces’ and tziri tziri ‘rubbing action’.

Action verbs moy ‘boil’+ moye moye ‘boiling action chek ‘cut’+ cheki cheki ‘cutting action’ viri ‘cut into pieces’+ viri viri ‘action of cutting into pieces’ tot ‘cut’/kant ‘do’, ‘happen’/koshe ‘scrape a thin layer from a surface’ + she(k)

she(k) ‘scraping action’ tot ‘cut’/ kant ‘do’, ‘happen’/koshe ‘scrape a thin layer from a surface’+ koshe

koshe ‘scraping a thin layer from a surface’ hiri ‘shell with a knife’+ hiri hiri ‘shelling action, e.g. shelling a corn ear with

a knife’ shemi ‘pound a hard substance’+ shemi shemi ‘pounding a hard substance’ tsink ‘pound a soft mass’+ tsinka tsinka ‘pounding a soft mass’ tsat ‘tear into two parts’+ tsatzi tsatzi ‘action of tearing (a thread or a leaf)

into two pieces’ picha ‘crush’+ piche piche ‘grinding a hard substance’ picha ‘crush’ + tok tok ‘hitting action’



pichov ‘grind’+ pichori pichori ‘grinding a leafy mass’ tziri ‘rub’+ tziri tziri ‘rubbing action’ kaaki ‘bathe (introduce into eyes)’+ pite(k) pite(k) ‘liquid falling in drops’ aa ‘take’ + pite(k) pite(k) ‘liquid falling in drops’

Listed below, a variety of experiential verbs of bodily states and processes have been found to combine with the composite utterances, pertinent to the domain of herbal treatment and healing activities.

Verbs of bodily states and processes katsi ‘be in pain’+ moye moye ‘have bodily pain’ jemp ‘be numb’+ jempari jempari ‘spreading numbness and pain abating’ kant ‘do’, ‘happen’+ tsinkari ‘a sudden feeling of a stir inside the body’ kant ‘do’, ‘happen’+ shee ‘a quick release from a headache’ kaini ‘itch’+ menkiririri ‘itching sensation’ kant ‘do’, ‘happen’+ hemimimi ‘spreading numbness in the mouth cavity’ kant ‘do’, ‘happen’+ motori motori ‘action of the stomach turning upside

down (typically accompanied by diarrhea)’ katziy ‘stand’+ tonki tonki tonki ‘sensation of knees shaking’

With the experiential verbs, composite utterances contain non-codified gestures, either pointing to the ailing part of the body or the area to which the drug is ad-ministered, or schematically (depictively) communicating the infirmity’s symp-toms or effects of the drug on the body. In rare cases, speakers have not provided gestural elaboration. In this and the following sections, several composite utter-ances, used as teaching tools by my mentors, from two traditional knowledge do-mains, cooking and herbal healing, are discussed.

Composite utterances used in the learning activity of cooking

The composite utterances pertinent to the domain of cooking are exemplified here by those used in the learning activity of manioc beer making. The process of the manioc beer making was recorded on video in 2011 in Bajo Marankiari. The fermented drink, called piarentsi in Ashéninka Perené, is prepared from manioc roots and shelled corn kernels. Shelled corn kernels are added to the manioc mass for better fermentation. As I was told, palm grubs, imoki, can be added to the mix-ture to maximize gastronomic satisfaction. In Figures 10a–c, my mentors, Delia Rosas Rodríguez and Bertha Rodríguez de Caleb, are shown to employ two tools: the knife is used to remove the skin from manioc roots and to shell the corn, and the wooden pounding stick is necessary to achieve the smooth texture of the boiled manioc-corn mix.


48 Elena Mihas

Figures 10a–c. Illustrating manioc cutting (10a), corn shelling (10b), and pounding the mass with a wood crusher (10c).

Along with the recording of practical activities of food preparation, I asked Elena Nestor de Capurro to explain to me the basics of the native diet. Elena Nestor’s brief explanation of manioc beer making cited in (7) is part of my long interview with her revolving around native cooking routines. The interview was recorded in 2011 in Pampa Michi. As seen in (7), two ideophones are used to describe the cut-ting action during the process of manioc beer making: chiki chiki depicts cutting manioc, whereas hiri hiri evokes the imagery of shelling corn. Both ideophonic words are co-articulated with the codified cutting gesture. Figure 11a illustrates complex gestural representations which involve a concerted action of two hands. In Figure 11a, the composite utterance of cutting manioc holistically depicts the action and the objects involved, the knife blade and manioc. The right hand, which methodically goes up and down, is used as a virtual knife blade, and the other hand, which is motionless, depicts a long, carrot-like manioc root, i.e., it models the physical appearance of the object. Both hands are similarly configured: they are held flat, with the fingers held tightly together, but their orientation is different. The motionless hand is held upright, with the open palm facing the moving hand, which is also inverted inside. To evoke the imagery of shelling an ear of corn, the same gestural technique is used, with the virtual knife cutting downward along the imaginary, vertically held ear of corn.

After the manioc is boiled and cut into manageable chunks, it is placed in ko-sho ‘the wood tub’ (or any other suitable recipient) and pounded with the special tool tsinkamentotsi ‘pounding wooden stick’. In the video episode, Elena Nestor de Capurro does not articulate the ideophone tsinka tsinka ‘action of pounding a soft



mass’, due to the high degree of codification of the pounding gesture, and addi-tional contextual disambiguation by the preceding utterance. The codified depic-tive gesture alone carries out the task of evoking an aspect of beer-making imag-ery. Figure 11b illustrates the circular movement of the imaginary pounding tool crushing manioc mass in a tub. The dominant hand depicts the firm grip of the speaker’s hand on the wooden crusher and the tool’s grinding circular movement in the tub, whereas the other hand, which is held flat and is horizontally-oriented, evokes the shapeless manioc mass.

Figures 11a–b. The composite utterances chiki chiki ‘cutting action’ and hiri hiri ‘shelling action’; pounding is depicted gesturally, without the ideophone tsinka tsinka ‘pounding a soft mass’.

G G G G G (7) N-ay-e kaniri chiki chiki, hiri hiri no-hiri-a-vi-t-ia, Ø. 1sg.s-take.irr-irr manioc ideo ideo ideo ideo 1sg.s-shell-ep-frus-ep-irr I will take the manioc, I will cut it, chiki chiki ‘cutting action’, I will shell the

corn, hiri hiri ‘shelling action’, [and pound it, pounding gesture].

Composite utterances used in the learning activity of herbal treatments

The core activities of herbal medicine are comprised of preparation and adminis-tration of the remedy. During the preparation stage, cutting, tearing, and grinding with both hands or with a stone are basic manual activities. A limited number of tools are employed: cutting is done with a knife, kotsiro, or a machete, saviri, and grinding requires a receptacle and a stone, mapi, or a wooden crusher, tsinka-mentotsi. To apply the prepared medicine, hand action is required to wrap the heated leaves around the body, rub plant matter, or squeeze plant juice into the eyes. Other healing treatments — bathing the patient with herbal boiled water or steam-bathing with the vapor from hot stones — require collecting the herbs and mixing them with boiled water, which is less labor-intensive.

When plant matter is harvested, its fruit, nuts, leaves, bark, roots, or sap can be used for medicinal purposes. For example, a vine will be cut and its bark will be shaved in strips to prepare an anti-inflammatory or anti-diarrhea remedy. The


50 Elena Mihas

cutting activity is commonly depicted with the ideophone cheki cheki, co-occur-ring with a repetitive vertical movement of the edge of the hand, to simulate the cutting-with-machete process. The bark-stripping action is performed by me-thodically scraping a thin layer of bark with a knife. The ideophone koshe koshe ‘scraping a thin layer from a surface’ is co-articulated with a tactile movement of the closed fingers of the flat hand along the targeted area of the vine, as seen in Figure 12. The speaker Gerardo Castro Manuela explains to me the basics of the preparation of the anti-inflammatory medicine made from the vine kainipirotsa (unidentified species) in (8). The cure is made from the bark peeled from the vine and applied to the wound.

Figure 12. Gerardo Castro Manuela articulates the ideophone koshe koshe ‘scraping a layer from a surface’ while imitating the knife’s scraping action with the dominant hand.

(8) Arika a-n-chek-ia=rika, a-ak-i-ro=rika, when 1pl.s-cut-irr=cond 1pl.s.take-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o=cond G G a-n-kimi-t-ak-i-ro, koshe koshe. 1pl.a-irr-be.like-ep-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o ideo ideo When we cut ourselves, when we take it [the vine], we will do it like this,

koshe koshe ‘scraping a thin layer from a surface’.

In some learning situations, it is not possible to use an illustrative gesture while articulating an ideophone. The speaker’s hands may be busy doing something, as it was the case with Gerardo Castro Manuela, shown in Figure 13, who was holding onto the vine called kipishiri ‘the bitter one’ (unidentified species), while explaining to me the specifics of the preparation of an anti-diarrhea concoction. The speaker had to keep pulling the vine down to be able to use it in the hands-on teaching activity. According to the mentor, a section of the vine is cut, pulverized into a mushy mass with a stone, then the mass is heated in water to which a hot stone is added. The watery content is extracted by manual squeezing into a pajo ‘bowl’, and the medicine is taken internally. The transcript of the composite utter-ance is given in (9).



Figure 13. Gerardo Castro Manuela articulates the idophone piche piche piche ‘grinding a hard substance’ without a depictive gesture.

(9) A-shaa-vai-tya=rika, a-ak-i-ro, 1pl.s-have.diarrhea-dur-ep-irr=cond 1pl.take-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o a-n-tot-ak-i-ro, a-m-picha-ak-i-ro, 1pl.a-irr-cut-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o 1pl.a-irr-crush-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o piche piche piche ideo ideo ideo. When we have diarrhea, we’ll grab it [the vine], we’ll cut it, we’ll grind it

[with a stone], piche piche piche ‘grinding a hard substance’

A pounding activity may require a stone or a wooden crusher, especially when dealing with nuts, bark, stalks, and big hard roots. Figure 14 shows Moises Santos Rojas who is explaining to me the process of making an herbal remedy having to do with the treatment of a broken limb. In his words, the stalk of marisaro (un-identified species) is harvested, pounded with a stone, and then the mushy mass is rubbed onto the area where the broken bone is, wrapped with leaves, and tightly tied with vines. The transcript of his commentary is given in (10). The mock-up grinding activity is described with the verb shemi ‘pound a hard substance’ and the composite utterance, consisting of the ideophone shemi shemi shemi ‘pound-ing a hard substance’ and a depictive gesture. The gestural performance involves both hands depicting the trajectory movement of the stone crusher and the static surface of the receptacle with the plant matter.


52 Elena Mihas

Figure 14. Moises Santos Rojas articulates the ideophone shemi shemi shemi ‘pounding a hard substance’ and a co-occurring pounding gesture.

(10) Arika a-n-kar-ak-i, a-ak-i-ro, when 1pl.s-irr-break-pfv-irr 1pl.take-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o G G G a-shemi-ak-i-ro, shemi shemi shemi. 1pl.a-pound-pfv-irr-3nmasc.o ideo ideo ideo When we break [something], we’ll grab it [the stalk], we’ll pound it, shemi

shemi shemi ‘pounding a hard substance’.

Speakers use a variety of ideophones to evoke nuanced images of the pounding ac-tion but the morphology of the co-occurring depictive gestures is strikingly simi-lar. For example, pichori pichori is used in the depictions of leaves being pounded, shemi shemi — with raw roots or nuts (much harder to grind due to their solid texture), tsinka tsinka — with a soft mass, e.g., boiled manioc or cotton, and piche piche — with bark and twigs. Nonetheless, all these ideophones are co-articulated with analogous hand movements, as seen in Figures 14 and 15a–d, where one hand, configured as if it were holding a grinding tool, depicts the tool’s circular or vertical movement in the receptacle, whereas the other hand, which is held flat and is horizontally-oriented, evokes the surface of the pounded material. In 15a, the healer Ines Pérez de Santos imitates the grinding action involved in the prepara-tion of the herbal leafy mass for a patient; in 15b, she re-enacts the grinding action involved in the preparation of another herbal treatment, this time, made from the mock-up roots; in 15c, Elena Nestor de Capurro shows with her hands how the cooked manioc is pounded, and in 15d, Victorina Rosas de Castro emulates the grinding action involved in the preparation of a remedy from the vine’s bark. All cited composite utterances were recorded during the learning sessions with my mentors.

Taking stock of the observed similarity in the articulation of pounding ges-tures, it is evident that the exact form of the gesture may vary from speaker to speaker, as pointed out by Enfield in his discussion of variation in the Lao ways



of talking about the size of fish (2009, p. 19) and by Klassen (2012) in her account of generational variation in ideophone and gesture usage in Shona ngano perfor-mance. Nonetheless, the overall schema of gestural performances is “sufficient to signal that it is” a pounding gesture (Enfield, 2009, p. 19).

Figures 15a–d. Pounding gestures co-articulated with the following ideophones: pichori pichori ‘grinding a soft mass’ (15a), shemi shemi ‘pounding a hard substance’ (15b), tsinka tsinka ‘grinding a soft mass’ (15c), piche piche ‘grinding a hard substance’ (15d).

When a remedy is administered, the herbal mass is often rubbed onto the body, or herbal drops are placed into the eyes. As shown in Figure 16, Bertha Rodríguez de Caleb is demonstrating the application process of a remedy used to treat body aches. A small amount of the vine species called kipishiri ‘the bitter one’(unidentifed) is harvested, its bark is shaved, and rubbed onto the ailing part. Sometimes, the thin-ly-spread mass is covered with heated leaves, to intensify the penetration effect. In (11), the speaker is quoting the healer who instructed her to use the remedy in a certain way, by rubbing it onto her body. The utterance contains the ideophone tziri tziri ‘rubbing action’, coupled with a non-codified ‘self-marking’ hand move-ment, when the speaker uses her own body to demonstrate how the remedy is administered (see Streeck, 2009, p. 142). The speaker’s hand quickly moves up and down along her forarm in a mock-up demonstration of the rubbing activity.


54 Elena Mihas

Figure 16. Bertha Rodríguez de Caleb co-articulates the ideophone tziri tziri ‘rubbing action’ with a depictive gesture.

(11) Kapicheeni pi-n-koshe-t-ak-i, little 2s-irr-scrape.a.layer-ep-pfv-irr G G pi-n-tziri-itz-imai-tya-ro, tziri tziri. 2a-irr-rub-icpl-inch-ep.irr-3nmasc.o ideo ideo Scrape a little bit [of the bark], and then rub it [onto your body], tziri tziri

‘rubbing action’.

The administration of eye drops is a common way of treating an ailment. For example, psychophysiological damage done by evil spirits is largely dealt with through the application of eye drops. In Figure 17, Victorina Rosas de Castro demonstrates how the plant juice is squeezed into the eyes, while co-articulating the ideophone pitek pitek ‘liquid falling in drops’. Her dominant hand is positioned right above her eye, configured in a tight grip to imitate the squeezing action. The thumb and the pointing finger are held together, emulating a squeeze given to the imaginary leafy matter. The plant is harvested, washed, torn into small pieces, the plant matter is ground manually with two hands, in consecutive rounds, to accu-mulate enough plant material to work with, and is placed in a dish. After the mass produces watery content, it is placed into a folded leaf, from which the drops are squeezed into the eyes. According to the speaker, the plant is called kamarishi ka-mari-shi [demon-leaf] ‘demonic herb’, and it is believed to counteract the harmful effects from the encounters with demonic spirits. Such encounters may produce a fever, headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, or any combination of these. The transcript of the speaker’s utterance is given in (12).



Figure 17. Victorina Rosas de Castro is co-articulating the ideophone pitek pitek ‘liquid falling in drops’ with a codified squeezing gesture.

(12) A-n-kaa-ki-tz-imaint-ia-ro a-ki-ki=ka, 1pl.a-irr-bathe-cl:small.round-ep-inch-irr-3nmasc.o 1pl.poss-eye-

loc=dem G G pitek pitek. ideo ideo We will bathe the eye with it, pitek pitek ‘liquid falling in drops’.

Functions of the ideophone-gesture composite utterances

As the preceding sections demonstrated, the ideophone-gesture composites per-form a significant function in Ashéninka Perené participatory learning situations. They serve as teaching tools par excellence, drawn from the repositories of tradi-tional knowledge of how one does things with hands. A composite utterance forms a scaffolding knowledge structure tapped into by the experts working within the participatory frameworks of guided learning (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 208–214). As a culture-specific teaching tool, composite utterances are an impressively economic way of explaining complex things to a novice. Two factors may possibly account for this. First, ideophones evoke superbly rich imagery of the depicted event in tandem with hand gestures which abstract from the action schema “only the rel-evant features in the context of speaking” (McNeill, 1992, p. 132). These details add precision to the elaborate sensory imagery evoked by the ideophones, ultimately creating an easily recognizable representation of the familiar activity. For example, pounding gestures in Figures 14–15 schematically depict a variety of aspects of the imaginary actions of making herbal medicine. Among them are the shape of objects, i.e., a round shape of the stone or the wooden crusher, spatial orientation of the tool towards the work surface, motion trajectory, i.e., downward or circular motion of the hand grasping the tool, and speed of the depicted actions.


56 Elena Mihas

Next, the rationale for branding composites ‘a teaching tool par excellence’ also includes a critical role they play in the learner’s orientation to the talk. As seen in Figures 11–17, composites are nearly always coordinated with the mentor’s gaze, used to direct the learner’s visual attention to the gesture. According to Streeck, “gestural depiction is […] a focal process: the gesturer attends to the gestures, glances at the hands every so often during a depiction episode, and so does the recipient” (2008, p. 289). When the mentors look at their hands while articulating a composite utterance, their steadfast gaze signals to the interlocutor that their attention is solicited. Thus the ideophone-gesture composites are especially ame-nable to capturing the learners’ undivided attention, facilitating the task of getting across the mentor’s ‘communicative intention’ (Enfield, 2009, p. 8).

The composites have a prominent role in the maintenance of the knowledge-preserving mechanism in the Ashéninka Perené oral culture. The collected video recordings of procedural discourse show that inventories of composite utterances are highly routinized in individuals and are widely distributed across Ashéninka Perené population. As demonstrated, in procedural discourse, a majority of the at-tested ideophone-gesture composites are codified, i.e., they are stored in the speak-ers’ long-term memory and constitute steady pairs, being regularly associated with a particular meaning (see Poggi, 2008, pp. 48–49). For example, the culturally-specific practices of manioc-cutting and pounding, or pounding and grinding of roots, bark, or leaves for the purposes of herbal treatments, depicted by ideophones and schematically represented by gestures in the participatory guided learning contexts, are shared in the Ashéninka Perené community. Central to the participa-tory learning frameworks of the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’ (Lave, 1991), composite utterances appear to constitute a conventionalized inventory of holistically-packaged knowledge structures, grounded in the speakers’ sensory ex-periences with the world. Unfortunately, this powerful resource is projected to disappear within one or two generations of Ashéninka Perené speakers due to the accelerating shift to Spanish and socio-economic integration into mainstream so-ciety. Because of the total strangeness of the native instructive scaffolding resource to mainstream Castilian culture (see Nuckolls, 2001, p. 284), formal schooling of Ashéninka Perené children does not make use of ideophone-gesture composites in the bilingual classrooms, which further restricts the use of composites among younger generations of native speakers.

Conclusions

Drawing on a set of illustrative fieldwork data from the Arawak language Ashéninka Perené, this study has demonstrated that composite ideophone-gesture utterances



are a prominent resource in native social interaction. Two typologies of compos-ite utterance have been suggested above, based on a degree of the gestural com-ponent’s codification and on the perception class of the ideophone in question. With regard to the codification parameter, gestural components of composites are grouped around either of the two poles of the codification cline — ‘codified’ and ‘non-codified’/‘creative’. In Ashéninka Perené, certain types of gestures are codi-fied, exemplified by emblematic and depictive (iconic) gestures in Figures 3 and 7, respectively. Codified gestures are deeply entrenched in the speakers’ long-term memory and are shared within the community. Codified gestures have the so-called “type meaning (raw, context-independent, pre-packaged)” (Enfield, 2009, p. 14). Codified gestures enter into stable ideophone-gesture relationships, and are readily retrieved on demand from the mental lexicon by the speaker and easily interpreted by the hearer. In contrast, the bulk of creative depictive gestures, illus-trated by Figures 6–7, simply occurs at the moment to communicate the “speaker’s token informative intention” (Enfield, 2009, p. 14). Deictic gestures are considered to be closer to the ‘non-codified’ end of the cline since their token meaning is context-dependent, as illustrated by Figure 4 and example (1). The pairings of de-ictic and some depictive gestures with ideophones are not rule-governed, and their meaning is not subject to social convention.

In terms of the occurrence across sensory modalities, two macro-classes of composites are distinguished above: a sizable class of non-haptic (acoustic, visual) and a smallish class of haptic composites. Olfactory or gustatory sensory percep-tions have not been found to be expressed via composites. As illustrated by Figures 8–9, the observed tendency is such that composites which contain ideophones conveying visual or acoustic perception of actions, or both, are predominantly found with depictive gestural affiliates, whereas ideophones which convey hap-tic sensory perceptions tend to co-occur with deictic gestures. The patterning of ideophones and gestures is likely to be due to the sensory class membership (non-haptic or haptic) of the ideophone and specificity of the ideophone’s semantics.

Composites stand out in the situated activities of learning due to the contribu-tion they make as teaching tools to the fabrication and oral transmission of tra-ditional knowledge within the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’ where guided learning takes place through apprenticeship (Anderson, 2000, Chapter 5; Weiss, 1974, pp. 391–392). Used by the experts as culture-specific scaffolding tools, composite utterances contribute to the formation and distribution of em-bodied knowledge in Ashéninka Perené society through the mastery of invento-ries of composite utterances (see Lave, 1991; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). As this analysis has shown, in the contexts of cooking and herbal treatments, the reper-toire of ideophones co-articulated with hand gestures is fairly routinized among


58 Elena Mihas

native speakers. I have not found any significant gender- or age group-motivated variation in the production of composite utterances in procedural discourse.

Evidence from other languages, although limited, seems to point in this direc-tion as well. In his account of Siwu ideophones, Dingemanse notes that “depictive gestures that come with ideophones can be highly consistent”, and that there are many cases of “high similarity” of depictive gestures across speakers (2011, p. 223). On the basis of his study of Neapolitan gestures, Kendon observes that gestures “appear to be drawn from a vocabulary of expressive actions which have very gen-eral and abstract significances” and that when using gestures descriptively, speak-ers “draw from a repertoire of widely shared techniques” (2004, p. 174). In a similar fashion, LeBaron and Streeck contend that embodied action in the world of matter and things, transformed into “a symbolic action which abstracts from and sche-matizes” everyday manual practices, can be “converted into components of shared communicative repertoire of a local ‘community of practice’ ” (2000, p. 130).

Composite ideophone-gesture utterances are accorded a special place in Ashéninka Perené apprenticeship learning discourses due to their ability to con-struct concrete and expressive representations of the lived-through events and objects of the surrounding world, highlighting their most relevant and salient aspects. Among such focal features are properties of the objects involved (size, shape) and spatial and orientational information such as the object’s position, speed, angle, and movement trajectory of the action (see Calbris, 2003, p. 21; Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Enfield, 2004; Holler & Beattie, 2002, p. 37; Kendon, 2004, pp. 174–175; Kita & Özyürek, 2003). Further, depictive gestures are often accompanied by the speaker’s gaze focused on her or his own moving hands, which signals the importance of the conveyed information and commands full attention from the addressee (Streeck 1993). This is hardly surprising considering that many behavioral studies on the integration of speech and gesture have con-vincingly demonstrated that addressees indeed pay attention to depictive gestures (Özyürek, Willems, Kita, & Hagoort 2007: 606).

With regard to the practices that bring ideophones and depictive gestures into alignment in the learning situations, this study has confirmed Streeck’s observa-tion about the gestural practices’ haptic epistemology, i.e., gestures are shaped by “the body’s practical acquaintance” with the physical environment which it has “explored and lived in” (2009, p. 150). When hands depict something, they are do-ing what they are accustomed to do in a certain situation, like handling particular tools or objects, but they are doing it “in a stylized and synthetic way in a schemat-ic and ergonomic gesture” (Calbris, 2003, p. 29). In particular, gestural practices of ‘handling’ and ‘making’, in Streeck’s terms (2008), are especially tightly linked to the Ashéninka Perené ecologies of the speakers’ regular manual engagements with the world.



Notes

1. The following abbreviations are used throughout the paper: A – subject of transitive verb; APL – generalized applicative; CL – classifier; DEM – demonstrative; DIR – directional; EP – epenthetic; FOC – focus; FRUS – frustrative; IDEO – ideophone; ICPL – incompletive; INCH – inchoative; INTJ – interjection; IRR – irrealis; LOC – locative; MASC – masculine; NEG – negative; NMASC – non-masculine; NMLZ – nominalizer; O – object of transitive verb; PFV – perfective; PL – plural; POSS – possessive; REAL – realis; REGR –regressive; S – subject of intransitive verb; SG – singular.

2. Many thanks are due to the native community of Ashéninka Perené for participation in this research. I am grateful to the granting agencies, Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Science Foundation (DDIG #BS-0901196), and Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (SG 0002) for their support. I also thank Adam Kendon, Sasha Aikhenvald, and two anonymous reviewers for the very useful feedback on the drafts of the paper.

3. The explanatory/didactic use of ideophones is thoroughly illustrated in the exhaustive analysis of Ecuadorian Pastaza Quichua ideophones by Nuckolls (1996, pp. 109–113). The author pro-vides a transcript of the interview with a consultant which contains a dozen ideophones. The in-terview details the consultant’s demonstration of techniques for fortifying raw clay with tree bark. Nuckolls points out that Pastaza Quichua ideophones co-occur with a variety of gestures (p.c.).

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Author’s address

Elena MihasThe Cairns InstituteSchool of Art and Social SciencesJames Cook UniversityCairnsAustralia

[email protected]

About the author

Elena Mihas has been conducting research into Ashéninka/Asháninka varieties of Kampan (Arawak) languages of Peru since 2008. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010. Her doctoral dissertation deals with the essentials of Ashéninka Perené grammar. Currently, she holds a position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her most re-cent publications include “Ideophones in Alto Perené” (Studies in Language) and “Subordination strategies in Ashéninka Perené (Arawak) from Central-Eastern Peru” (forthcoming, Rivista di Linguistica / Italian Journal of Linguistics).

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