Congreso General Kuna de noviembre de 1981

Congreso General Kuna de noviembre de 1981

Object Details

Subject LanguageKuna, San Blas
Language PID(s)ailla:119499
Title [Indigenous]
Language of Indigenous Title
Title
Language Community
Country(ies)Panama
Place CreatedComarca de Kuna Yala
Date Created1981-11-28
Description [Indigenous]
Language of Indigenous Description
DescriptionThese recordings were made of a Kuna General Congress on the island of Ustupu that took place November 27-29, 1981. James Howe, who was attending the Congress to speak on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution and to present historic photographs and audio recordings from the visit of Kuna delegates to Washington in 1924, was given permission to tape the proceedings and made more or less complete recording beginning on the morning of November 28. The first afternoon and evening, November 27, were not recorded, except for a speech by James Howe.

Unfortunately, several of the cassettes are missing and are presumed to be irrevocably lost. A few years after the congress, Howe worked with an organization called Interlock Media of Cambridge, Massachusetts to help produce a radio program on the situation of the Kuna that was broadcast in 1987. It appears that several cassettes from which copies were made for transcription remained in the Interlock files or with an assistant in Panama, and by the time a search was made for the cassettes years later, the storage company responsible for the files had thrown out the cassettes. It is possible that a few speeches from the missing cassettes remain on copy tapes.

Several important questions were discussed at length at this General Congress. A special commission presented a report with suggested revisions of the enabling law of the Kuna Comarca, Ley 16 de 1953, after which the proposed revisions were debated and modified. Cultural issues, including traditional forms of marriage were discussed. Extensive reports and discussion focused on the Utirpi or Udirbi project, later renamed the PEMASKY project. A foreign company presented a proposal to build temporary towers for the purpose of mapping offshore waters. (The proposal was rejected.)

Qualified researchers studying the tapes may write James Howe for clarifications based on his field notes, for the text of the draft of Law 16, and for transcriptions and translations of a number of speeches.
GenresHistory
Conversation
Source Note
References
Contributor(s) Individual / RoleArchibold, Guillermo (Speaker)
Morris, Milton (Speaker)
Arias, Gilberto (Speaker)
Howe, James (Researcher)
Contributor(s) Corporate / Role

Details