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 singul...

 Welcome to this blog! This post is meant to explain why I decided to start writing here, and what this is all about. Let us perhaps begin with its name: The Amazonianist. I generally refer to myself as an "Amazonianist", although this has led to confusion in the past — as I was misidentified as a linguist working with Amazon at one point at a conference in Athens. Considering the distance between Athens and Amazonia, I did not take it as overly insulting, but it was very funny nevertheless. The term "Amazonianist" itself is not quite parallel to the Spanish term "amazonista", while in German I would probably use "(der) Amazonist". I do not know why, but the flow of English "Amazonist" simply does not appeal to me as much. When an Amazonianist is a person studying Amazonia, then Amazonianistics is the field of Amazonianists. The name of this blog is purposefully set as the term referring to the person. In other words, it's my b...