Speaking Places: Language, Mind, and Environment in the Ancash Highlands (Peru)

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between language and environmental practice among Ancash Quechua speakers in the Río Negro watershed of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in the central Peruvian Andes. Using mixed methods, it demonstrates how specific relationships between people and places—for example grazing routes, place-based kinship, and divination—shape how Ancash Quechua speakers conceive the surrounding world for speaking, thinking, and acting. By juxtaposing two experimental studies of spatial orientation in language with an analysis of its use in everyday conversation, it shows that speakers draw on a rich, embodied awareness of their orientation with respect to an expansive landscape of named places. Analyses of filmed interactions, reveal how this embodied awareness also partly constitutes the common ground of demonstrative reference, a domain of language that is not explicitly spatial. While the experimental studies of spatial language showed that geocentric orientation was the overwhelming preference for speakers in Río Negro, ethnographic research showed that individuals’ familiarity with the landscape varies. Herders work in open ranges among the highest peaks, and farmers in small parcels near urban centers. Furthermore, while both groups share a cultural understanding of the highest peaks as powerful social authorities, herders alone interact with individual mountains through offerings and divination. These cultural distinctions between farmers’ and herders’ environmental experiences correlated with performance on an experimental spatial memory task: herders were significantly more likely to orient to the landscapes, and farmers to their bodies. Moreover, the same correlation also appeared within the community’s sub-population of first-language Spanish speakers. In conclusion, this research contrasts with the commonly held view that the most basic concepts underlying human language are rooted in innate biology, and that their relation to cultural and environmental diversity must therefore be superficial at best. The findings also have broad implications for further research, suggesting that shifting patterns of environmental practice such as large-scale population movement and anthropogenic climate change resonate in human sociality, language, cognition, and corporeality.