Bulletin

Issue: April 2006

Research in Action

Important words from the last of the stolen wives

Only 20 remain alive, the last of many hundreds of girls and young women stolen by a tribe of South American Indians in violent raids on neighbouring villages to capture wives.

All of them, now in their sixties or older, are on first name terms with La Trobe University post doctoral fellow, linguistics expert Dr David Fleck, a leading world authority on Matses.

Matses, one of the Panoan family of languages, is spoken deep in a very remote and pristine part of the Amazonian jungle.

Dr Fleck is currently on a three-year post doctoral fellowship at La Trobe’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, studying and collating his recordings and notes taken in the village of San Juan in Peru near the border of Brazil, 100 km from the nearest town, Colonia Angamos. His post doctoral project is to ascertain how other languages have influenced the Matses language.

He has had plenty of time to get to know the stolen wives, their personal histories and above all their languages. Over the past decade Dr Fleck has spent a total of five years in the village, has his own hut, and has been adopted into the tribal kinship system.

Originally from Peru, Dr Fleck grew up in the USA and first came to the village as a zoologist to study, with the help of the Indians, the biodiversity of local mammals – armadillos, monkeys, sloths, anteaters, wild boars, opossums and rodents.

To quiz them about their prey, he had to learn their language – and his passion for their language caused him to change his speciality from zoology to linguistics. He subsequently wrote the first Matses grammar as his PhD thesis.

Maish, captured from the
Chankueshbo tribe, with
her Matses husband, Tumi.

‘The role of the stolen wives – in as much as they represent an important outside influence – is vital in the evolution not only of the Matses language but helps us understand the development of all languages,’ says Dr Fleck who speaks four languages fluently and can make a good fist of several others.

‘For most of the time human language has existed, there were no languages like English, Mandarin, French and German spoken by large numbers of people. All languages were spoken by relatively small groups – exactly the situation we still have today in isolated parts of the globe like the Amazon Basin,’ he said.

‘It was only in 1969 that the outside world made direct contact with the Matses.

‘Only five years before that they were still raiding other villages – some of them up to 300 km away – for wives. There are writings by Europeans in South America 320 years ago about bloody attacks by Panoan groups on other villages for wives. I suspect that raiding occurred for hundreds of years before that.

‘The Matses have a strong hunting culture. The better a hunter, the more wives a man can have and one of the ways his hunting prowess is determined is by the number of synonyms he has for his prey. As in other cultures, having a large vocabulary is a way to obtain social prestige in Matses society.

‘The Matses language has many synonyms because the wives they acquired by raiding other villages where a different language was spoken were a very important vehicle for “lexical borrowing” – bringing new words into the language.

‘This was important because their culture forbade the mentioning of a person’s name, or any words remotely sounding like the name, after a person’s death, resulting in a constant turnover of words.

‘I am fortunate to have the opportunity to learn first hand the linguistic influence of the very last group of stolen wives still living in isolation. Their region is one of thick jungle and rivers and travel is only possible by canoe on the rivers or walking jungle tracks.

‘San Juan is so isolated it takes a day by boat and three days hiking through the jungle to reach it from Colonia Angamos.’

Dr Fleck said that the Matses’ situation, that of hostile relations coupled by incorporating captives from many different groups, is one that has received little attention in the past.

‘By studying the languages of captives living among the Matses we can get some understanding how these languages have impacted the Matses lexicon, grammar, and phonology,’ he said.