The Caquetá-Putumayo Area lies, as described in my most recent post, between the Caquetá and Putumayo Rivers in Southern Colombia and Northern Peru. It is a region of "relative cultural homogeneity", as put by Kasia Wojtylak in her 2020 grammar of the Murui-Muina language (Wojtylak 2020: 15). While this means at first that the people living in the area share traditions and other cultural elements such as myths, songs, and philosophies, it also bears implications about their languages.
This series on the Caquetá-Putumayo Area consists of four parts:
- Peoples
- Cultures
- Histories
- Languages
As you can see, I've intentionally pluralized these titles. In my opinion, while we like to categorize and generalize, lumping together ethnic groups and languages to further compare them and convey their similarity, every group, every community, and every individual has their own version of the story. When we speak about "peoples" and "languages", but talk about a singular "culture", and a singular "history", my question is whether we generalize too much. In writing this series I also try to focus on this plurality of voices.
Having said that, let's talk about peoples.
Who lives there?
The first question that might arise from being confronted with this topic is probably: who are the people living in this area. While in other cases delimiting an area within a larger area, specifically in the context of cultural or linguistic areas, might prove itself to be rather difficult, the peoples of the Caquetá-Putumayo area are actually a very coherent grouping. In fact, as I have been told in traditional meetings in Leticia, the people of Northwestern Amazonia divide each other into groups themselves:
- the People of the Center, which live in the Caquetá-Putumayo area
- the People of Water, which live in the area of Leticia and Tabatinga
- the People of the Yurupari Jaguar, which live further to the northeast
The People of the Center were first introduced to the anglophone academic literature in Juan Alvaro Echeverri's 1997 PhD thesis on their culture (Echeverri 1997). It is the People of the Center that I work with — and hence I write about my research with them here.
Alright, now we have delimited the area we are dealing with, but again we can ask: who are the People of the Center?
The People of the Center
The People of the Center, or dɯiɲṍʔĩ ʌɲõẽ, as the Andoke call them, consist of the Bora, Féénemɨnaa, Ocaina, Nonuya, Witoto, Resígaro, and Andoke. In case you are familiar with the literature, you may know the Féénemɨnaa by the name 'Muinane', which is however a Witotoan exonym. An exonym is a name a group gives to another group — think how English speakers call German, well, german, but Germans call themselves deutsch. In the same vein, Witoto is an exonym, i.e. a term given by another group, in this case presumably the Carijona, a language in which wɨtoto means 'human, enemy'. The term 'Andoke' on the other hand is an exonym from a Witotoan language: ádokɨ means 'mountain', and it is assumed that incoming Peruvians used the word for 'mountain' as a denomination for the people that lived there. The Andoke themselves, however, call themselves pʌ́ʌsiʌ́hʌ — 'axe people'. We will learn more about this name and its backstory in Part 2.
The People of the Center, as Kasia worded it above, are "relatively homogenous". However, this does not mean that they are all the same. In reality, all of the ethnic groups named above consist of various clans and lineages of varying sizes. The Andoke, for example, currently number about 500 individuals, which are subdivided into two lineages (red, and white) and a set of clans, such as toʔbeɤ̃siʌ́hʌ, the Deer clan, kadanɤ̃isiʌ́hʌ, the Hawk clan, ĩɒ̃ʌ́hʌ, the Sun clan, and so on. Each Andoke clan has a captain (poʔsoʌ) and the entire group is lead by a chief, the tɤ̃ʔnɤ̃ɸoa.
Just as the Andoke, other People of the Center groups are also organized into clans, with lineages generally being patrilineal and virilocal. In modern times this organization has become increasingly loose; one of my consultants is the daughter of a Nonuya man and an Andoke woman, but generally identifies as Andoke. As opposed to the Vaupés region to the north, the practice of exogamy is not very wide-spread in the Caquetá-Putumayo area. In fact, it seems that in earlier times, intermarriage between groups was even less common than marrying within your group. More on this will be said in future posts.
How many people are there?
The last question we will be dealing with today is the number of People of the Center in total. Again, Wojtylak (2020) provides some numbers, comparing them with numbers from Whiffen (1915), one of the first works on the area. The data presented there is somewhat inaccurate, but it serves as a good approximation. After all, while numbers are numbers, they only come near what the reality actually depicts, especially for speaker numbers.
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| Fig. 1. Approximate population numbers. |
As seen in the table on the left, the population of the People of the Center before the so-called Rubber Boom was much higher than nowadays. The exact consequences of the Rubber Boom and the historical background behind it will be discussed in Part 3.
Conclusion
So to conclude: the People of the Center is an auto-denomination, which means it is a term the groups use for themselves; there are some give-or-take seven ethnic groups within that denomination, which in turn are divided into clans and sub-groupings. There are only few speakers of the groups' languages left today, and especially compared to the beginning of the 20th century, the changes are drastic.
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