Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato, a masticated yuca drink, was passed around the room. I tried to refuse it as it came to me — I had already shared an entire pot and was feeling woozy from both the alcohol and my full stomach. But this was a celebration and another bowl was pressed into my hands.
The party was the last night of my first field trip to the Amazon in 2012. I had spent nine weeks in Nueva Vida, one of four Maijuna villages, near a tributary off the Napo River in Loreto, Peru. This first trip was to study Maijiki, the spoken language of the Maijuna, an Indigenous Western Tucanoan people of the Peruvian Amazon. As I sipped the yuca drink and watched the party, one pair in particular caught my interest. The interaction was between two men, one who lived in the village and one who did not. What made this conversation worth noting was that one of these men, Raul,* a 27-year-old, was deaf, and the entire conversation was being conducted in signs and gestures. (I do not use the conventional d/Deaf to distinguish between the medical condition of hearing loss and the cultural Deaf identity because the Maijuna do not have the same notion of “Deaf culture.”)
Fascinated by the questions that arose from that interaction, I would return to the Maijuna communities three more times in the following years to study the gestural communication system I first observed at the party. I had many questions to seek answers to: How did the hearing man know these signs when he didn’t live in the same village? Were they just gesturing to each other, making it up as they went along, or was this an established sign language used by the Maijuna? Did all Maijuna know the sign language? This investigation of the sign system used by the Maijuna formed the basis of my doctoral research in linguistics.
