Sent to the List Serve of the Society for Ethnomusicology
January 25, 2015
Announcement of New Websites by a
Researcher in Honduras Interested in Music, Dances, Musical Instruments, Songs,
Dance Costumes, and Ceremonies with Music and Dance and Their History and
Problems Affecting Their Future Survival ---January 2015
People who are interested in African Diasopora music, Latin
American Rainforest Indian Music, and Mesoamerican Indian music in syncratic
ceremonies may wish to look at the new websites of Wendy Griffin, an independent researcher in
Honduras for most of the last 30 years. These new websites might be of interest to researchers of dance,
music, musical instruments, dance clothes, roles of shaman in music and
religious ceremonies where dances and music are used among Honduran Rainforest
and Mesoamerican Indians, Afro-Indigenous groups like the Garifuna and the
Miskito Indians, and Anglo-Caribbean people who immigrated to Honduras. Almost
all Honduran Indian and Afro-Indigenous groups also live in other countries. The Afro-Honduran groups in particular have
participated in multiple diásporas from Africa to the Caribbean, Carribbean to
Honduras, from Honduras to other Central American countries, and often ending
up in the US, which now has more Garifunas than any single Central American
country, and most North Coast Black English speakers also immigrated to the US.
Some Honduran
rainforest Indians and Afro-Indigenous
peoples like the Pech, the Tawahka, the Miskito, the Tolupanes and Jicaques and
the Garifunas were able to live quite
isolated from the influences of the outside cultures until very recently and
also have kept their languages, so that ceremonies with music and dance are
either still carried out like among the Garifuna or are living memories among
the older people of the other groups.
Other Honduran Mesoamerican Indians like the Maya Chorti
(the builders of the Ruins at Copan Ruinas, Quirigua and Joya de Ceren), the
Lencas, and the Nahuas incorporated dances and music into ceremonies both
related to Patron Saint Fairs (Guancascos) or into the rites associated with
the solar calendar and agriculture and rain with dates of ceremonies unchanged
since observed among the Nahua speaking Pipils of El Salvador and Guatemala
during the early colonial period and some of which can be correlated to rites
described in the Mayan glyphs at Quirigua or known to have existed for the
cenote and cave at Chichen Itza. Although
perhaps not well known in the US, major work on documenting everything related
to dance and music and ceremonies has been undertaken in Honduras and among the
Garifunas of neighboring Belize and among US Garifunas, too, partly as research
to support bilingual intercultural education which was made state policy with
the approval of ILO Convention 169 in 1995. The Garifunas have for their own
reasons been concerned with documenting and rescuing their music and dance,
declared Masterpeice of World Intangible Heritage by UNESCO in 2001, one of
only two Afro-Descent groups in the Americas to be included in that UNESCO
Intangible Heritage program.
Wendy Griffin is most famous for her books Los Garifunas de
Honduras (2005) and Los Pech de Honduras (2009) both of which include
information on music, dance, ceremonies with dance and musical instruments, and
the role of shamans. In the field of music, dance, ceremonies, and their
histories, she is also famous for her work with David Flores (2003) in writing
“La Evolución Histórica de la Danza Folklórica Hondureña” (The Historical
Evolution of Honduran Folkdances) which includes information on the musical
instruments, music, dances, ceremonies, and their history for 70 dances from all the 9 minority Indian and Afro-Caribbean ethnic
groups currently recognized by the Honduran government and for 70 from the
Ladino majority with 125 photos.
She is also well known as a writer for Honduran English
language newspapers about Honduran Indians and Blacks history, culture
including music and dance, and current problems including the environment, or
Projects, including Honduras This Week (1992-2006—online 1995 -2013) and
HondurasWeekly.com (2013-Present). Her
article reviewing David Flores’s book, its importance and its impact published
in HondurasWeekly.com in February 2013 has already been read over 5,000 times
as has her first article there on the 2012 released Garifuna in Peril movie
which has 19 cuts of Garifuna music, most accompanied by traditional dances.
This blog includes a mix of new articles with lists of
reference materials available like Cd’s, books, videos, photos of Honduran
Indian and Garifuna dances, musical instruments, and people, maps, newspaper
and Internet articles, related especially to Afro-Honduran cultures like the
Garifunas, Black English speakers, Miskitos, and Afro-Mestizos and vendors of
these audio-visual materials. This
includes of her own work, published, unpublished, in museums, and current, and
that of other authors, specifically noting which authors are Afro-Hondurans or
Garifunas from Belize themselves. This is part of an ongoing personal project
with SALALM.org, an association of Latin American collection librarians to help
researchers find the relevant materials related to Afro-Hondurans which many
published books report not having been able to find.
For example an ethnomusicology student who came to Honduras to
study Garifuna dances with a grant arrived at the beginning of the rainy season
and left just before Christmas (during the Christmas season at the end of the
rainy season in some Garifuna communities they dance up to 14 different kinds
of dance and they do not dance outside in the rain) said Garifuna music and
dance are not well known in the US of which his choice of research dates for
his grant showed he at least could not find the relevant information, even
though it was on the Internet in Honduras This Week articles. A Master’s thesis
on ethnomusicology published in 2009 in Tomas Avila’s Black Carib-Garifuna said
it was a shame no materials were available on Honduran Garifuna dances and
ceremonies and music when Wendy Griffin’s studies were published in 2003 and
2005 and were in US libraries shortly after that, and a whole series of her Honduras
This Week articles were available on the topic on the Internet. Studies done by
Cubans on Afro-Latin American music and dance also completely left out the
Garifunas, so there does seem to be a need to help researchers find the
resources available, which number in the hundreds, many still for sale or for
free on the Internet.
Some of the recent
new articles and a list of resource materials specifically of interest to those
interested in ethnomusicology have been added to this website, including where
are live traditional Garifuna music groups found in the US as well as resources
for books, CD’s, videos, and photos and who are their vendors or if they are in
US libraries and thus available for Interlibrary loan. Wendy Griffin is very
interested in the African dances, ceremonies, classes of songs, and musical
instruments related to those of the Garifunas, a topic about which she already
has some results. Her studies also
include things like the life path of a Garifuna shaman, where do Garifuna songs
come from and how are they learned and why is the intergenerational system
breaking down, the role of Garifuna women’s dance clubs in Garifuna local
leadership and society, rites associated with making and using ceremonial
drums, environmental, school policies, and religious issues affecting Garifuna,
Miskito, Black Bay Islander, Miskito Indian, and Pech music, dance, the local
languages in which the songs are sung, and the ability to make musical
instruments, etc.
She also has a Spanish language only blog.
Right now most of the articles on it are about the history
and successes of the Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans to resolve two
principal demands—bilingual intercultural education of which music, dance, traditional
dance clothes, ceremonies where these are used, and musical instruments are a
signficant part of, and the issue of indigenous land struggles to control the
lands from which they get the resources for thier culture. Most of the ethnic groups use wild resources
for making their musical instruments and the Central American rainforest, dry
forests, beach, coral reef and fresh wáter resources are currently under heavy
pressure and have many legal issues related to recent founding of national
parks, land titling, control of wild resources, etc. This blog also has short
biographies of most Afro-Honduran authors and the researchers in Honduras who
research Afro-Hondurans.
Her other blog was designed to be only in Spanish , but it
also has by accident a number of her English articles related mostly to the
Garifunas, a problem related to working until 3 am on putting them up. Because Garifuna ancestor ceremonies are part
of the health beliefs of Garifunas as responses to illnesses caused by unhappy
ancestors, the female buyei or Garifuna shaman Wendy Griffin worked with and
wrote the biography of was also a midwife and a healer with traditional plants,
and there are tens of thousands of Garifunas in the US, and Wendy Griffin was
speaking at a World Health Conference in Seattle in 2014 about the issue of
traditional peoples in US style health care systems, many of the current articles
focus on those themes and resources for teaching medical students and medical
anthropology students about the issue.
Information about her current and past research projects are
on her English blog so that if people do not see what they are looking for, but
it seems to related to what she has researched, they can contact her. She has a
lot of material that is not yet up on the blog as she is updating it and also a
lot of her research such as the biography of the Garifuna female shaman Yaya
and the study of all the crafts of Honduras including musical instruments are
not yet quite in publishable form. The new material by David Flores on The
History of the Folkdance clothes of Honduras, which she helped with, is also
currently being diagrammed for publication and reléase this year.
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