Areytos — the Taíno word a Spanish chronicler turned into a category for oral history, including Europe's
Oviedo describes the sung dances of the Isla Española as a deliberate technique of memory — genealogies and defeats kept "en lugar de libros de su acuerdo" — and then does something no later account repeats: he tells the reader not to call it savagery, quotes an Italian song and a Castilian one about Pavia as areytos of his own world, counts how many years each had already lasted, and concludes the Indians do well to keep theirs.
Why this wins its question: Areyto usually appears in English as a one-line gloss — "a Taíno song and dance ceremony" — sourced to nothing. This object goes to the chapter that gives the word and reads all four pages of it: the leader who may be a man or a woman, the counted steps matched to the verses, the guide falling silent while the ring answers, the hollowed log drum that will not sound unless it lies on the ground and has no hide because the islands had no animals to skin, the songs held "en lugar de libros de su acuerdo", the three hundred unmarried dancers before Anacaona. Its centre is the passage nobody quotes: Oviedo telling his reader this is not savagery, calling a Neapolitan song and a Castilian ballad on Pavia areytos, dating each to show how long European oral memory lasts, and concluding that the Indians do well to keep theirs because they lack letters. And it prints, from the same chapter, the drunkenness he says concludes the solemn ones and the sentence in which he calls their religion diabolical — the defence and the contempt in one pen, which is what makes the defence evidence.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The definition is Oviedo's and it is about memory before it is about dancing: "Tenian estas gentes una buena é gentil manera de memorar las cosas passadas é antiguas; y esto era en sus cantares é bayles, que ellos llaman areyto, que es lo mismo que nosotros llamamos baylar cantando." Book V, chapter I of the Historia general y natural de las Indias, on the Isla Española.
The form is described as a performance with a leader and a chorus. Men and women gather — sometimes the men alone, sometimes the women by themselves — taking hands or linking arms in a line or a ring, and one of them "tomaba el ofiçio de guiar (ora fuesse hombre ó muger)", giving certain steps forward and back "á manera de un contrapás muy ordenado", which all repeat in the same instant, singing in the high or low tone the guide sets, "muy medida é conçertada la cuenta de los passos con los versos ó palabras que cantan". While the crowd answers, the guide is silent but does not stop the contrapás; the answer finished, the guide proceeds at once to the next verse. It runs three or four hours and more, "hasta que el maestro ó guiador de la dança acaba su historia", and sometimes from one day to the next.
He describes the drum, and reasons from its absence of a skin. It is made of a round hollowed log, as thick as a man or more, closed on all sides except where it is struck, played with a stick over two tongues left in the wood, with a further vent that must lie against the ground, "porque teniéndole en el ayre no suena". In the Tierra-Firme some are covered with a hide of deer or another animal, but on the islands the drums are made as described, "como no avia animales para los encorar" — the organology carries a zoological observation about the Antilles inside it.
The content is history, and Oviedo says so in the strongest terms available to a man of books. In these songs "diçen sus memorias é historias passadas, y en estos cantares relatan de la manera que murieron los caçiques passados, y quántos y quáles fueron"; the practice is "una efigie de historia ó acuerdo de las cosas passadas, assi de guerras como de paçes"; and, decisively, "estos cantares les quedan en la memoria, en lugar de libros de su acuerdo; y por esta forma resçitan las genealogias de sus caçiques y reyes ó señores que han tenido, y las obras que hiçieron, y los malos ó buenos temporales que han passado". They are continued "porque no se olviden, en espeçial las famosas victorias por batallas".
The argument against calling it savagery is explicit and it is the heart of the chapter. "No le parezca al letor que esto que es dicho es mucha salvajez, pues que en España é Italia se usa lo mismo, y en las mas partes de los chripstianos (é aun infieles) pienso yo que debe ser assi." He asks in the same breath what else the romances and songs founded on truths are — "qué otra cosa son los romançes é cançiones que se fundan sobre verdades, sino parte é acuerdo de las historias passadas" — and then measures the durability of European oral memory against dates: the ballad of King Alfonso XI setting out from Seville to besiege Algeciras on 28 March 1344, which by his reckoning had lasted two hundred and four years, and the memory of Alfonso VI holding cortes at Toledo for the Cid against the counts of Carrión, four hundred and forty-two.
He then applies the Taíno word to Europe, which is the move that makes the passage unusual. The song composed by King Federico of Naples in 1501 when he lost his kingdom is introduced as "aquel cantar ó areyto" of Italy; the Castilian verses on the capture of Francis I — "Rey Françisco, mala guia / desde Françia vos truxistes; / pues vençido é presso fuistes / de españoles en Pavia" — are "otro cantar ó areyto"; and Caesar's Pavia itself is "semejante areyto" that children and old men will not stop singing. He closes: "Pues luego bien haçen los indios en esta parte de tener el mismo aviso, pues les faltan letras, é suplir con sus areytos é sustentar su memoria é fama; pues que por tales cantares saben las cosas que ha muchos siglos que passaron." An Amerindian term used as a general analytical category, with Europe as one of its instances.
A named performance and its scale. Oviedo records that when the comendador mayor frey Nicolás de Ovando governed the island, an areyto was made before Anacaona, "muger que fué del caçique ó rey Caonabo (la qual era gran señora)", and that more than three hundred doncellas danced in it, all her servants and unmarried, "porque no quiso que hombre ni muger casada (ó que oviesse conosçido varon) entrassen en la dança ó areyto". He adds that when he himself saw the island's areytos in 1515 they did not seem to him as notable as those he had seen in the Tierra-Firme. What became of Anacaona under the same governor is not narrated on these pages and is not claimed here.
The practice had specialists and it had a cost, both from the same page. Some are held among the Indians "por discretos é de mejor ingenio en tal facultad" and invent new cantares and dances; but while the singing lasts others go about giving drink to the dancers, who swallow without stopping their feet, and when the areyto is a solemn one — at weddings, funerals, or a battle and notable victory — most end drunk and senseless on the ground for hours, so that "la misma borrachera es la que da conclusion al areyto". Oviedo notes that other areytos are held often without drunkenness, and that "unos por este viçio, otros por aprender esta manera de música, todos saben esta forma de historiar". The word vice is his.
The counterweight, again from the same chapter and three paragraphs earlier. Before reaching the areytos, Oviedo writes of the same people that their principal physicians are their "saçerdotes adevinos", and that "estos sus religiosos les administran sus idolatrias y çerimonias nefandas y diabólicas". The defence of indigenous oral history in this chapter is made by a man who has just called indigenous religion diabolical, and it is worth more, not less, for being read together with it.
In the Nicaragua book of the third part he generalises the practice beyond the Antilles and adds a point about how such memory works. Areytos and cantares joined to dancing and contrapases are common, he writes, at the obsequies and deaths of the principal caciques, "é que les quedan en lugar de historia é memoria de las cosas passadas, é van acresçentando lo que subçede" — the record is added to as events occur, not fixed — and others are composed about an act of treachery, "como se hiço en la muerte de don Chripstóbal de Sotomayor en la isla de Sanct Johan". The same page also describes areytos made for drinking bouts that end with the singers stretched on the ground.
What this object does not claim. Not one word of any Taíno areyto is preserved on the pages read: Oviedo quotes European verses at length and no indigenous ones, so nothing is asserted here about the language, metre or text of the songs themselves. His comparison of the contrapás to Spanish and Flemish round-dances is his own analogy. A minor internal inconsistency is recorded rather than smoothed: on adjacent pages he computes his intervals from "este de mill é quinientos é quarenta y ocho" and from "este de mill é quinientos é quarenta é siete", which is a trace of a text written and added to over years and a reason to treat his arithmetic as approximate.