The Second World of Wanano Women: Truth, Lies, And Back-Talk in the Brazilian Northwest Amazon

Speakers of Wanano, an Eastern Tukanoan language, strategically combine the rhetorical dialogic device of reported speech, one type of “voicing,” with choice of a grammatical evidential to indicate a speaker's relationship to the information conveyed, in order to expand available repertoires of knowledge, agency, and responsibility. By complicating the messaging through these means, the young women whose song is cited here demonstrate the nuanced and powerful mechanisms with which speakers may claim, deny, and otherwise orchestrate, their relationship to speech production. The example allows us to consider rhetorical choice, grammar, and speaker values within the larger schema of epistemological positioning to which the Wanano adhere, providing us with a Wanano ethnologic on speaking and knowledge. The paper takes up several themes suggested in the pioneering work of Jane Hill in her explorations of voicing, evidence, and responsibility.