Runama Kani icha Alquchu?: Everyday Discrimination in the Southern Andes.

Abstract

In the Peruvian highlands there is a pervasive pattern of racialized social hierarchy in which rural Quechua speakers are the objects of discrimination, despite public discourses of shared citizenship and equality under the law. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the social processes through which hierarchical relations are created and re-created in Cuzco (Peru). I especially concentrate on the ways in which face-to-face interaction is instrumental in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Face-to-face interactions involve multiple intertwined signs including talk, other semiotic forms (e.g., silence and gestures), and material forms (e.g., government forms, desks, chair distribution) that materialize hierarchical relations among participants. The study is grounded in more than 18 months of systematic field work, including participant observation, the study of natural conversation, open interviews, an experimental study, and the analysis of face-to-face interactions in public, institutional, and private settings. My findings are: (1) that despite an official ideology of “mestizaje” or social hybridity that reaches across the Peruvian political spectrum—and is routinely reported by social scientists—first-language speakers of Quechua and of Spanish are able to identify each other unequivocally by means of tacit linguistic cues, regardless of the language being spoken; (2) that the racialized social hierarchy is intertwined to a variety of everyday social practices, so that it is both reproduced and acquiesced outside of the conscious awareness of the persons involved in the interaction; (3) that nonetheless these interactions are frequently the subject of violent and conscious stereotyping; and (4) that these stereotypes are deployed fractally across all levels of social scale, from the most intimate and local setting of a clinic to national politics played out in the Peruvian parliament. An especially important finding is that both the tacit and explicit forms of social discrimination are qualitative in nature.