PUBLIC
DEFINITION
Northern Prinmi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in China by several thousand ethnically Pumi in northern Yunnan Province and an estimated 40,000 ethnically Tibetan in southern Sichuan Province, is increasingly endangered due to the development of large-scale infrastructure in the region, urbanisation, and the influence of Southwestern Mandarin Chinese. This project documents Northern Prinmi oral art, and especially ritual speech, one of the domains of the language that is more severely threatened by disappearance. The collection comprises of video and audio recordings and photos from 12 different locations in the Northern Prinmi area, and contains rituals, traditional songs, folktales and conversational data. Part of the recordings have been transcribed into IPA and translated into Chinese and English.
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Public health is the belief that health – where ‘health’ reflects the breadth of our physical, mental, social and spiritual capacity to flourish – can be improved, promoted and protected through the collective efforts of people working together. This recognises the multi-agency, multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary nature of the public health endeavour. This reflects that public health is a collaborative endeavour, not the work of ‘public health’ people alone, but by everyone – governments, public, private, third sector, communities and people – working collectively with the potential to improve population health and well being’. Referring to the “three domains” model, namely health improvement, health protection (communicable disease, environmental health, emergency planning), and healthcare public health (healthcare needs assessments, clinical guidance – think SIGN or NICE, commissioning processes). These are all supported by health intelligence (surveillance systems and data analytics).
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Northern Prinmi speakers are mostly Tibetan Buddhist and major religious practices (such as funerals) are conducted in Tibetan. However, in a few places where the more traditional shaman still plays a role in religious life, rituals are conducted in the Northern Prinmi language. Lay religious practice, such as the daily incense burning ritual or the calling back of a run-away soul, also uses Northern Prinmi. Religious or ritual speech, as employed in these rituals, is part of Prinmi oral art. Other oral art, such as folk stories, riddles, proverbs, songs and oratory, is normally addressed to humans. Ritual speech can be defined as speech that is addressed to the supernatural world. It is characterized by its chant intonation, its poetic structure of parallelism, stanzas and refrain, and ritual binomials (a combination of two words with a similar meaning that are juxtaposed for poetic effect, and of which the second is often archaic). While focusing on ritual speech, other oral art -especially songs and folktales- has been recorded whenever the opportunity arose.
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