ESRC Festival of Social Science

Every Language Matters: Documenting and sustaining endangered languages

Thursday, 8 November 2012, 6 pm

WRITING PANARE: Portrait of a linguist at fieldwork (1996, 30 minutes)

Film screening & discussion with director Paul Henley

Marie-Claude Muller is a linguist who has worked for many years with the Panare, an Amerindian people of Venezuelan Amazonia. In the 1980s, she was commissioned by a government literacy programme to prepare reading primers in Panare.  Writing Panare shows her gathering a range of materials for the primers, from zoological taxonomies to myths.  She is also shown working with Panare schoolteachers on an alphabet to accommodate local dialectical variations.  These scenes are intercut with an interview in which she describes the principles underlying the literacy programme and considers its role in helping the Panare confront the consequences of contact with the national society.

Paul Henley is director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. After doctoral and post-doctoral research among the Panare, he trained for 3 years at the National Film and Television School. Although he has had a major research interest in the indigenous communities of lowland South America, he has also made films on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and in Britain for both specialist and more general television audiences. He has a particular interest in subtitling and will be happy to answer questions on this aspect of Writing Panare.

Organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Film Committee and SOAS Department of Linguistics, Endangered Language.

This is a free event but please reserve your place: RAI Film Officer, Susanne Hammacher, film@therai.org.uk