When tree trunks speak
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| 5 EUR, reduced 2,50 EUR |
| 16 years and older |
| German |
| Ground Floor, Hall 3 |
| Part of: WeSearch |
Communication at a distance can be difficult in the impassable Amazon region. This is why the Bora, who live on both sides of the Colombian-Peruvian border, use a language substitute: drum sounds. The deep sounds produced by the hollowed-out tree trunks known as manguarés reach much further than the human voice.
Strictly speaking, the instruments used are not drums, but ‘idiophones’: the sound is not produced by a vibrating membrane, as is the case with classical drums, but the entire body of the instrument vibrates.
Linguist Frank Seifart and ethnomusicologist Maurice Mengel discuss with each other and the audience how such signal drums are created and how messages can be reproduced with just a few tonal sounds.
Participants
Sabrina N’Diaye studied ethnology and political science. She learnt the craft of journalism at ZDF, after which she worked for SWR and ARTE. She has been with RBB since 2016, where she presents the rbb24 Spätnachrichten and realizes longer documentaries as an author.
Frank Seifart researches linguistic diversity at the CNRS laboratoire Structure et Dynamique des Langues, Villejuif, France, and is a private lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has been working on the Bora language in the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon region since 1999. His research focusses on language documentation and description, language history and contact, and language comparison in the Amazon region and worldwide.
Maurice Mengel is an ethno-musicologist and completed his doctorate with a thesis on a Romanian music archive in Bucharest and its role in socialist cultural policy until 1970. Since 2019 he has been head of the Media Department of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, which includes extensive and historically important holdings of film, photo and sound recordings such as the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.