Barbecue

Today, the term barbecue indicates a form of random meat. Curiously, the indigenous term coming from South America, was known by the Spanish in the Dominican Republic from the Taino people as that, a form of random meat and became popular in the world through North American English. Many people assume that barbecue comes from the English barbecue and do not know that it is not from English, but from an indigenous South American language.

Now, let's see more about the origin of this indigenous word and why the Tainos said it and the Spanish believed it was a method to kill meat.

These photos taken from Commons Wikipedia show the modern concept of barbecue. The meat is wrapped in leaves and hoed that way. The center photo shows the oven on the ground and the last one is a higher oven. That way of eating meat is of indigenous origin. The leaves give a good flavor to the meat, which is why it became popular among the Spanish and later among the English, hence they developed the concept that roasting the meat in leaves in an oven on land was a barbecue. Later all adaptations of this concept became known as barbecue or, with a gringo accent, barbecue.

But have you stopped to think about why a town in the department of Nariño is called Barbacoa and why an Antiochian legend is the Amalfi Barbecue and, furthermore, why the Jaibanás build a barbecue for the guarapo drinking ceremony ?

Let's look at who the Tainos were

The Tainos were an indigenous people of the Caribbean. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the main inhabitants of most of Cuba, Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and the northern Lesser Antilles. The Taínos were the first people of the New World that Christopher Columbus encountered during his voyage in 1492. They spoke the Taíno language, a division of the Arawak language group. Many Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans have Taíno mtDNA, showing that they are descendants through direct female lines.

But since they speak an Arawak language, it puts them as direct relatives of South American tribes:

Arawak or Arawak, is a family of languages ​​that developed among ancient indigenous peoples in South America. Various groups migrated to Central America and the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, including the present-day Bahamas. Among the countries of South America, only present-day Ecuador, Uruguay and Chile have never had people who spoke Arawak languages. Maipurean may be related to other language families in a hypothetical Macro-Arawakan variety.

For this reason, the word barbacoa is an Arawak word. Some researchers say that it is possibly of Mayan origin, but it is more likely that the Mayans learned it from the Arawak peoples with whom they had contact.

The barbecues of Nariño

The history of the municipality of Barbacoas dates back to pre-Hispanic times when the ethnic groups that chroniclers, missionaries and official documents called Barbacoas, Iscuandés, Tapajes, Sanquiangas and Telembíes settled along the Tapaje, Patía and Telembí rivers. The term "barbacoas" refers to the type of indigenous housing on stilts and bus platforms. The others coincide with the names of the rivers.

Here we see the Katíos' dairy farm (see the blog

http://losemberakatio.blogspot.com/2012/). It is a construction on piles and bamboo platforms.

The ancestral inhabitants of the region of the department of Nariño where the municipality of Barbacoas is today are from the Awá people, who speak Awá pit, also known as cuaiquer and kwaiker, an indigenous language of the Barbacoas linguistic family spoken in southern Colombia. and northern Ecuador.

The Barbaco or Barbacoan languages ​​are a group of indigenous languages ​​from Colombia and Ecuador, which constitute a linguistic family. Five Barbacoan languages ​​are still spoken today: Cha'palaachi (Cayapa, Chachi), Tsáfiqui (Colorado, Tsáchila), Awá (Kuaiquer) and Guambiano from Colombia (Curnow and Liddicoat 1998). Between all of them there are almost 50 thousand speakers. Research on the Awá nationality has focused on the relationship with the Mayans, Chibchas, Kwaiker and the Sindaguas.

Without a doubt, the word barbecue in this context indicates the house built on four pallets and with a bamboo floor.

The legend of the Amalfi Barbecue

We Amalfians of Antioquia are descendants of the Tahamiés, relatives of the Katíos and the Nutabes and other indigenous groups that ancestrally populated the northernmost part of the Central and Western Cordillera.

This is how my own father tells the legend of the Barbecue in the municipality of Amalfi, Antioquia:

Here there are two skeletons, but the legend says four and this photo is of a coffin, in the legend it is a barbecue.

There during the forties and fifties of the last century, at the beginning of Camellón avenue towards the center of Amalfi, a brandy factory operated. Many people reported having seen at night, generally at dawn, a barbecue loaded with four barefoot men who, with long steps, reached the main square of the town and without stopping headed towards the Amalfi cemetery which, as is known, is towards the exit of the town towards Medellín. In other oral accounts, there were not four men, but four skeletons

The four men or skeletons carrying the barbecue did not say a word, but they did seem tired from walking and walking, apparently from very far away. The barbecue is a kind of stretcher between two rather long stringers or sticks, of whose tips or ends both front and back, in this case four men put their shoulders.

Something like a stretcher of sticks…

On top of the stretcher or barbecue, as noted by those who claim to have seen the horror, was someone alive, as the people stated that he said: The day was made for you and the night for me.

The stretcher was also covered with a white sheet facing upwards towards the bloomers.

Some people said they saw the barbecue entering the cemetery. Others said that it did not enter, since it must be taken into account that the cemetery remained closed at night. People also said that as the four men moved, the barbecue generated a barely perceptible noise. Some people, mainly women, who were surprised by this horror, even lost consciousness and had to be taken to the hospital.

The complete wardrobe or with everything and even with the men carrying it was called a barbecue. That is to say, when they entered Amalfi with someone wounded or dead, they brought them in or brought them on a stretcher or barbecue. The whole thing was called a barbecue.

The story in Mark 2:1-12 about those who take down a stretcher with a sick person from a roof so that Jesus can see him and heal him, is, in Tahamíe, a barbecue.

The Tahamíes or Tohamines (my ancestors) are a Colombian indigenous ethnic group of the Chibcha family and Macro-Chibcha language, whose territory was the eastern region of the Department of Antioquia, between the Magdalena rivers to the east and Porce and Nechí to the west. Without a doubt, the term barbecue used in Amalfi is very old and must come from the indigenous people. What is the relationship between the Tahamíe use of the word barbacoa as a stretcher and the barbacoa of the Awá and the barbacoa of the Tainos of the Caribbean?

• Tainos: Way of eating meat, which was imposed in the modern world and people believe that it is very gringo.

• Awá: House on four pallets with guadua floors.

• Tahamíes: stretcher between two rather long stringers or sticks, of whose tips or ends both front and back, in this case four men put their shoulders.

It must be seen that the Awá and the Tahamí are related to the Chibcha macro language. The Chibchas occupy from Costa Rica and Panama to the northern and western part of Colombia. These were in relationship and interaction with the Mayans.

The barbecue at the jaibaná ceremony

In the descriptions of the Jaibaná Katíos ceremonies made by Emanuele Amodio and José Juncosa, the use of a zancona barbecue is described. He says like this:

Then they began to make the chicha singing house; the natamba roof covered with milpesos leaves, the balsa forks, the zancona barbecue. Four large and twenty-six small totumas with chicha are placed between this little house. Sixteen for the sample and ten for the disciple; the totumas are covered with a white sheet (Emanuele Amodio and José Juncosa, 1991, p. 108.).

I looked for photos of a katío jaibaná altar, but couldn't find much.Zancona must be made of stilts, that is, made of tall sticks.

This would be a stilt house, no doubt. It is understood that when the barbecue is mentioned on the altar of the jaibaná, this is a little stilt house where the guarapo or the sick person is placed.

In this illustration from the book by Emanuele Amodio and José Juncosa, p. 119, we see a stilt structure and it is the barbecue. The author later says:

The barbecue or altar is built by men, the different woods, leaves and vines are determined by the jaibaná. Palm leaf buds are stretched between the posts of the house, forming bows and ornaments of various shapes (Emanuele Amodio and José Juncosa, 1991, p.121).

Therefore, the barbecue in the Katío context is used in a similar way to the four-stick house (or stilts) of the Awá.

Ref. Emanuele Amodio and José Juncosa (1991). The allied spirits. Shamanism and healing in the Indian peoples of South America. Abia Yala Editions. Link rescued on December 27, 2020 fromhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/315378678_El_Convite_de_los_Espiritus_Notas_sobre_Chamanismo_Choco

The barbecue today

People today understand a barbecue like this:

The meat is placed on a rack and the heat is lowered. Obviously the meat is covered with leaves that give it flavor and season it.

The matching elements here would be:

• A high grill = the stretcher of the Tahamí, the guadua floor of the Awá, the parapet to put the guarapo of the Jaibaná.

• The grill is high to allow the fire below = the palotes of the Awá and Katío houses and, probably, what the traditional houses of the Tahamí and Tainos were like.

• Meat wrapped in leaves for chance = here is the divergence.

It should be noted that meat wrapped in leaves can be placed randomly on a parapet or in an oven in the ground. Both methods are the same, but one is a furnace in the ground and the other is a parapet.

The conclusion could be that the parapet is the barbecue and the first Spaniards confused the parapet with the way the meat was placed, extending this concept also to the oven on earth. That is to say, they thought that the Taino indigenous people called barbacoa the way in which the meat was roasted, which could be on a barbecue or in an oven buried in the ground, which were also very common. The Mayans called the ovens buried in the ground as pib. The linguistic confusions between Spaniards and indigenous people during the conquest and the colony are countless, which is why the confusion of the barbecue, which is a parapet, with the way the meat is hoeed, is one more of them.

The barbecue is a parapet suspended on four stilts / poles / columns (or two), which can be a house, a stretcher (in this case it does not have stilts, but four or two people who carry it) or a ceremonial altar.