The Mouse

For the Kĩsêdjê, song does not originate within human society but is acquired from beings outside it, and the mouse is among the most important of these donors. Narratives tell of a man who came to live among the mouse-people and learned their songs, carrying the knowledge back to the village where it became a recurring ceremony tied to the agricultural season. The mouse thus exemplifies a general cosmological principle Seeger drew out of Kĩsêdjê music: creativity and ceremony flow inward from the animal and spirit world, and a person who can 'hear' such songs mediates between the human community and its powerful others. The figure is inseparable from the ceremony that bears its stamp and from the wider Kĩsêdjê theory of where song comes from.

Domains

• music and ceremony

Powers

• gives songs and ceremony to humans

Sources

• Kĩsêdjê song and ceremony are understood to originate outside human society, learned from animal, plant and enemy others; the mouse is a named donor associated with a major seasonal ceremony.: Seeger, A. 2004 [1987]. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. University of Illinois Press. (secondary)