Description:
The study investigates the special characteristics of the performance of a shamanic song that was recorded in the Alto Perené area, Chanchamayo province, Peru, in 2011. The author shows that the Alto Perené Ashéninka singer manipulates ritual language in various ways to differentiate it from the everyday language of Alto Perené Arawaks. The inventory of the singer’s verbal resources includes allusions to the scheme of predation, prosodic microparallelism, and lexical and morphosyntactic manipulations. The singer uses the technique of voice masking to index the interactive character of the performance. It is shown that many characteristics that are reported in ritual discourses throughout the Amazon are implemented in the performance of the Alto Perené singer.