woije

Ye'kwana

Variant orthographies

ALIV	woije
Brazilian standard	woijhe
New Tribes	woije

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): [βojçe]

Postposition

woije

1. under the will of, at the direction of, steered by

References

• Cáceres, Natalia (2011) “woije”, in Grammaire Fonctionnelle-Typologique du Ye’kwana‎^[1], Lyon, pages 139, 455
• Briceño, Luis García (2024) Walking with Jesus in indigenous Amazonia: for an anthropology of paths‎^[2], London: London School of Economics and Political Science, pages 118–119:

  Woije, a grammatical postposition in Ye’kwana language, marks where agency resides in relation to the subject (see Cáceres 2011, 139). When this grammatical arrangement is translated to Spanish by Ignacio or by other Ye’kwana, they do so more often with the expression “to be manejado” – to be handled, governed. […] He told me that, to him, the idea of woije is as if a person were a car. A car rolls, he said, but it needs someone at the wheel to steer it along the right direction. That someone, my Ye’kwana dad added, is the person who is “higher up”, namely, the leader of a community or a parent, and it should not be the same person. The other explanation came from an elder Ye’kwana man who, in turn, compared the person to a canoe. The same logic applied here; the canoe by itself does not paddle along a river, it was explained to me; it must be driven and steered by someone.