Remediating Endangerment: Radio and the Animation of Memory in the Western Amazon

Abstract

In the face of settler colonial expansion, contemporary environmental change, and contradictory revitalization practices, language activists in Napo, Ecuador are increasingly turning to broadcast media to revalorize regional linguistic and cultural forms. Quichua speakers in the Upper Napo region of the Ecuadorian Amazon confront two sources of linguistic domination—from the expected colonial language, Spanish, and, unexpectedly, from a new standard language, Unified Kichwa. Many people in Napo find the well-intentioned use of the standard in bilingual education, national politics, and institutional media to be a serious imposition on and threat to their daily linguistic practices in that Unified Kichwa minimizes regional variations in phonology, morphology, lexicon, and verbal artistry.

To understand the role of community media in regional reclamation and revitalization efforts, this study follows radio media across multiple spaces of production and reception—radio stations, cultural revitalization organizations, and rural households. On the Upper Napo Quichua radio program Mushuk Ñampi ‘A New Path,’ radio hosts and community participants take advantage of the aural and oral possibilities of radio media to reclaim and revalorize regional linguistic and cultural practices. These programs remediate—that is, recontextualize from one medium of transmission into another—and reanimate—bring to life—the interactional time-space of the wayusa upina, ‘the drinking of guayusa,’ for both live and listening audiences. On these programs, the interactional time-space of the ‘the lifeways of the elders’ is transposed (or “remediated”) into live productions and onto the airwaves by radio producers and community participants, allowing the past to be reconstituted in the present. These programs are grounded in the socialization practices of elder Upper Napo Quichua speakers, who express dismay about the ways many people are ‘forgetting’ the voices and knowledge of the past. On these programs, however, knowledge of the past comes to life (or is “reanimated”) in the present, with the hope of informing future modes of relationality and interaction. As they draw together radio producers, community participants, and various receptive audiences, these radio programs become sites of collective remembering and revalorization in order to reawaken linguistic and cultural practices among a mediated community of practice, in which processes of production and reception extend far beyond any singular moment of broadcast. The development of a robust Upper Napo Quichua mediascape creates emergent vitalities for Quichua and provides an alternative medium for revitalization beyond print media and standard language literacy. At the same time, radio media allow regional and standardized codes to find space together in a multivocal public sphere and reconfigure the regimes of value in which language and culture are transmitted.