Dr Mark Jamieson (Durham) ‘Language and identity among the Sumu people of the Rio Siquia, eastern Nicaragua’ (2005)
I conducted fieldwork principally amongst the Ulwa (Southern Sumu) of Karawala on lower Rio Grande, as well as among the Sumu of the Rio Escondido basin and the Miskitu of the Pearl Lagoon area, in eastern Nicaragua. This work was focused mainly on the relationships between economy, domestic organisation and belief. The peoples of these districts are primarily swidden horticulturalists for whom relations of production and reproduction are organised around the institutions of uxorilocal postnuptial residence and brideservice. This constellation of practices, it was found, have an evident elective affinity with beliefs in ghostly attack and sorcery as causes of misfortune, which have been subject to interesting changes as subsistence in some of these communities has become progressively more dependent on capitalist relations of production.
Publications:
2011. Territorial demarcation and indigenous rights in eastern Nicaragua: the case of Kakabila. In National Integration and contested autonomy: the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, edited by Luciano Baracco. Algora Publishing.
n.d. ‘Serious women’, ‘soft hands’ and ‘cheating bitches’: the effects of remittances and other kinds of money on patterns of residence and social processes among the Miskitu. Submitted to Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
2010. Bloodman, Manatee Owner and the destruction of the Turtle Book: Ulwa and Miskitu representations of knowledge and economic power. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 31-45.
2010. Mother scorpion: women’s politics and affinal relations among the Miskitu and other ‘brideservice societies’. History and Anthropology 21: 173-189
2009. Contracts with satan: relations with ‘spirit owners’ and the economy among the coastal Miskitu of Nicaragua. In Durham Anthropology Journal, 2: 44-53 (on-line).
2009. Contratos con los dawanka y los procesos productivos entre los miskitos de las comunidades costeras de la RAAS. Wani 56: 15-24.
2008. Sorcery, ghostly attack and the presence and absence of shamans among the Ulwa and Miskitu of eastern Nicaragua. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: 554-571.
2007. (with Danilo Salamanca). El trabajo de científicos sociales en la CIDCA y en Wani. Wani 51: 33-38.
2006. In search of the last ‘wild’ Apaches of the Sierra Madre. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 237-239.
