Fruits for Animals: Hunting Avoidance Speech Style in Murui (Witoto, Northwest Amazonia)

Abstract

This paper is describes the hunting avoidance speech style of the Murui, a Witoto people from southern Colombia and northern Peru. Murui men employ a special vocabulary used when hunting bigger game. It is a system of lexical substitution employed to deceive the animal spirits by avoidance of the utterance of the animals' names. Uttering tabooed words would result in an unsuccessful hunting: animal spirits would know they are to be hunted and, therefore, they would escape. Animals are, therefore, 'renamed'. This culturally significant speech register, which is subject to a high degree of metalinguistic awareness, is referred to by native speakers as 'skilled speech'. Avoidance terms and their referents appear to be iconic: substitute terms are generally based on physical similarity or characteristic behaviour between the animal whose name is avoided and some, typically non-faunal, natural objects (commonly fruits) (cf. Stasch 2008). The iconic aspect, and the consistent rank shifting from the faunal term to the floral term, suggest important ideological aspects to the register. Nowadays, this special avoidance speech style is on the wane. With the increasing influence of Christianity, and subsequent decrease of importance of evil spirits, the 'hunting' avoidance speech style is almost exclusively indicative to older generations of the Murui people.