Andean Aymara

MPI (with DOBES funding) has a call for papers from Master’s students for a workshop from 30 May to 4 June 2010:
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics will award five student bursaries for participation in the workshop Hunter-gatherers and semantic categories and we hereby invite talented young Master’s students to submit applications. Preference will be [...]

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The writers, Virginia Beavert and Sharon Hargus have authored the dictionary, which comes with over 9000 sound files.  According to the University of Washington Press:
Sahaptin, or Ichishkíin Sínwit (literally, “this language”), is a Plateau Penutian language spoken in south-central Washington and northern Oregon. This dictionary documents the dialect of Sahaptin that is spoken by the [...]

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Foreign Policy magazine has an article online about modern Tibet. It deals with a variety of political and religious implications of a modern China, but one of the more interesting facets of the article has to do with the effect of tourism on native populations. Such realities are, of course, not just limited to Tibet, [...]

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David Eberhard has published his Mamaindê grammar with the LOT dissertation series (236).  The abstract can be seen on the LinguistList. An excerpt can be found here.
Cross-posted from Leo Wetzels’  Amazonian Linguistics website.
Incidentally, the TLS has a review of a new collection, published in Gallimard’s Bilbiothèque de la Pléiade, of Lévi-Strauss’s collected works. Wilcken writes:
The Pléiade edition [...]

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The journal Child’s Nervous System has what appears to be an interesting article by Schijman on this interesting cultural phenomenon in pre-Columbine Andean culture. The article includes a picture to illustrate the “artificial deformation” of an Aymara skull from Humahuaca (Jujuy, Argentina). Schijman mentions the Aymara in his text only twice. He writes:
In certain pre-Columbine cultures like the [...]

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Below is a slideshow of some artefacts shown to me by denizens of some small villages in the Moqueguan altiplano. I have a handful more, but these are the ones which Charles Stanish, an expert in Andean archaeology, has kindly identified (see captions).
The ominpresence of history in these remote locations is something fascinating and unique. [...]

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The Americanists in the Netherlands event, AiN6, is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen (details on their website).
I will be presenting a talk entitled ”Expressing degrees of certainty: A sketch of the Aymara evidential system”. The abstract is below. If you’re in the area, why not stop by.
The Aymara evidential system encodes [...]

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In a recent exchange about the death of the last speaker of Bo, Lyle Campbell summarized very well the current status of Amerind languages.
He writes that when the first Europeans arrived, there were some 280 languages or so in the US which could be divided into 51 families (incl. isolates). Currently some 150 survive and [...]

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On 18 February the Americanists in the Netherlands will be meeting from 2-5 at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in room E203. The three talks will be made by Pieter Muysken and Mily Crevels, Loretta O’Connor, and myself. Muyskens will present on the “Lenguas de Bolivia” project, O’Connor will talk about geographical information systems, and I [...]

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There is a photo exhibit by Odileiz Cruz, a fellow alumnus of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam open until the end of this month at CEDLA (UvA) on Keizersgracht 395-397 in Amsterdam, in which she shows some photos from her fieldwork with this group in Roraima, Brazil.
There are only a few pictures, but it is still [...]

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