Ättä Edemi Jödö: Memory and Music in an Inauguration Ritual of the Ye’kwana Round House

Abstract

This article describes the Ye’kwana ritual of building their rou­nd house (ättä), which took place in 2016 in the community of Fuduwaadunnha, Yanomami Indigenous Land. The Ye’kwana ättä is built based on the memory and cosmology of this people and was first described by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg in his book “From Roraima to the Orinoco”, a landmark in German Americanism and museology in the Ama­zon. The Ye’kwana are a Carib-speaking people with an esti­mated population of 7,000 people who live in villages spread throughout their traditional territory in Venezuela and Bra­zil. Understanding hearing as a privileged sense for accessing knowledge and using different acoustic codes, the Ye’kwana build their houses by relating them to cosmology, sounds, me­mory, and verbal arts. To think about these questions, I use the concept of cosmosonics to illuminate the centrality of sonic aspects in the cosmology of these Caribbean people.