lunes, 26 de enero de 2015

Description of Wendy Griffin's blogs in English and in Spanish for the Ethnomusicologists


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
By Wendy Griffin

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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