Cultural and Linguistic Annotation of Hopi Song

FAIN: RZ-50362-05

Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)
Emory Sekaquaptewa (Project Director: November 2004 to August 2008)
Dorothy K. Washburn (Project Director: August 2008 to January 2009)

The transcription, translation into English, and annotation of a large body of publicly performed Hopi songs currently stored on wax cylinders and tape reels at the Library of Congress and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. (24 months)

This project involves the transcription into written Hopi, the translation into English, and the linguistic and cultural annotation of a large body of publicly performed Hopi songs currently stored on wax cylinders and tape reels in the Library of Congress and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. In its present state the material is unavailable to anyone not conversant with Hopi language and culture. The goal of the project is to interpret this material so that it is accessible to scholars. The translated texts will be accompanied by 1) extensive linguistic annotations that explain how the lexically unique song word form is derived from combinations of Hopi words and 2) extensive cultural annotations that decode the metaphors that underlie the meaning of the song words and phrases. The stimulus for this project came from an initial research project that deciphered the meaning of 15th century prehistoric kiva murals by demonstrating the similarity of the images to verbal metaphors in 20th century katsina songs. The insights gained from the project revealed the scholarly value of song and prompted the preparation of the present proposal to transcribe a much larger body of song while elderly speakers of Hopi who are knowledgeable about Hopi culture and cosmology are available to collaborate on the project. Importantly, the transcriptions, translations, and annotations wilL be done by Hopi speakers who will work with a linguist and an archaeologist to produce text and annotations that will be from the Hopi perspective. Each song will be re-sung by the transcribers and, with the transcriptions, translations and annotations, will be put on CDs that will be available to scholars at a number of repositories.