An interdisciplinary team of linguists, filmmakers and plant geneticists will conduct endangered language documentation of agricultural practices associated with Ayöök maize over the course of one planting season in the county of Totontepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. There are two objectives: 1. Apply language documentation methods to revive memory of a near extinct domain of cultivation of one of the world's most productive and nutritious corn varieties; and 2. Apply the linguistic data to guide a genetic analysis that can lead to improved corn varieties worldwide.
Linguists and filmmakers will employ a methodology adapted from documentation of Passamaquoddy (SIL code PQM) that uses documentary techniques, speaker facilitators, and video feedback routines to record natural group conversation and activity, including memories, oral histories, practices and associated language use. This data will inform the geneticists as to motivations and activities that selected for attributes that shaped Ayöök corn varieties. Understanding these practices in the context of a life system that used all parts of the plant for clothing, building materials, and medicine, as well as nutrition, can clarify how desired traits were molecularly structured in the genome through agricultural practices. This can lead in turn to the ability to introduce these attributes into corn grown elsewhere.
The documentation will also help younger farmers who desire to return to traditional practices after a generation of chemically-based agriculture caused extensive ecological damage and interrupted transmission of associated language. Finally, the project will lead to an expandable visual and linguistic archive of practices and language that will guarantee the preservation of valuable indigenous agricultural knowledge, representing an example of the revival of endangered domains and associated language.
What strategies can small communities successfully employ to maintain their local linguistic and agricultural heritage? And how can they balance those efforts against the promise of economic growth? At stake for members of such minority groups is their sense of identity and capacity to feed themselves and prosper on their own terms. At stake for the rest of the world are all of the risks associated with the global decline of linguistic diversity and biodiversity. To begin to address these broad questions, this project set out to document and analyze the sociocultural conditions and cultivation methods that have helped make Totontepecano maize one of the world’s most unusual and robust landraces. Many of these traditional methods are falling out of use due to the recent advent of heavy fertilizer and pesticide use. Fertilizer abuse has fundamentally altered the seeds that Totontepecano farmers produce and threatened the integrity of heritage seed stocks. At the same time, the project set out to create a rich archive of language use that could provide the data for future linguistic analysis and community efforts to maintain and revitalize Ayook, an endangered language spoken in Totontepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The key innovation in our project was our attempt to address language loss and the loss of sustainable farming practices in an integrated fashion. The principal investigators were linguistic anthropologist Daniel Suslak (Indiana University) and documentary filmmaker and endangered language specialist Ben Levine (Speaking Place). They conducted the research in close collaboration with plant scientist Pablo Zamora (University of California, Davis) and the Ayook-speaking maize farmers of Totontepec. Working together, they produced an archive of over 45 hours of high definition audiovisual documentation of local maize farming methods and related activities. The archive also contains interviews, and still photographs covering the complete yearly cycle of seed selection, soil preparation, planting, cultivation, and harvesting. They also produced a catalog of seed types, uses, and histories, as well the other plants that grow in and around milpas (corn fields) and their culinary and medicinal uses. Seven hours of Ayook language use in this video archive were transcribed, translated, and coded. Several dozen previously unrecorded terms were added to Suslak's lexical database of Ayook. A crucial element of the project was to assemble video footage and show it to various groups of community members in order to elicit further discussion about local maize farming. These feedback sessions were also filmed and added to the archive. Zamora was able to view the footage alongside local farmers and share his own observations. He explained how his research was showing that the overuse of chemical fertilizers was having a detrimental effect on the soil and that their fertilizer-dependent seeds were producing ears of corn that appeared more robust but lacked some of the nutritional benefits of the maize growing in non-fertilized plots. Zamora also used the opportunity to ask farmers about one very unusual feature of their maize and what, if anything, they did with it.Totontepecano maize features unique areal root structures that drip copious amounts of mucilage as the plant flowers. The microbial content and function of this mucilage continues to be a central focus of Zamora's investigations. One of the video sequences we showed to the group featured previously unrecognized irrigation techniques. These irrigation scenes caught Zamora by surprise stimulated him and his colleagues to formulate new hypotheses about the evolution and function of the mucilage. The feedback session dialog initiated a science-informed, problem solving process to address the challenges that local farmers were facing. At the same time, it contributed in a meaningful way to ongoing scientific research. We hope that projects such as this one can serve as a useful model for collaborative efforts between endangered language specialists and other scientists who do research in minority-language communities.
