Spoken Differences: Negotiating Indigenous Contact and Gender in the Peruvian altiplano

Abstract

Spoken Differences: Negotiating Indigenous Contact and Gender in the Peruvian Altiplano investigates the roles and enfigurement of indigenous women in the emergence and maintenance of ethnic group categories and linguistic boundaries between indigenous Quechua and Aymara speakers. In this zone of long-term inter-indigenous contact, female indigenous speakers are socially, politically, and structurally positioned at the center of what inter-indigenous language contact means and what it looks like. Moments of inter-indigenous contact, such as inter-linguistic marriages and kinship networks, often focus on the actions and participation of women. Public areas and domains that also bring about contact and interaction between Quechua and Aymara speakers, such as markets and commercial networks, are also similarly characterized as feminine domains. Placing women at the center of these zones of contact becomes symbolic of the types of linguistic practices that are also recognizable consequences of long-term inter-indigenous contact.

However, these linguistic forms as well as their association with particular female types become problematic as discourses and projects that promote ethnolinguistic boundaries and difference become more prominent in the region. In particular, such projects rely on the management and eventual erasure of female speakers from histories of contact and discourses of ethnic and linguistic purity in the altiplano region. Furthermore, many of these projects also target the practices of female speakers by unevenly placing the brunt of the responsibility of the future of linguistic and ethnic indigenous purity on their shoulders and “tongues.” They are also the targets of institutional and political projects that aim to promote ideologically standardized and purified uses of both Quechua and Aymara in the region. The rise of these discourses and projects not only devalues the shared practices, similarities, and moments of convergence alignment that have emerged through long-term contact but also devalues the speakers and subjectivities indexically associated with those practices, thus marginalizing and often erasing the presence of female speakers from representations of ideal speakerhood or ethnic, indigenous group membership in the past, present, and future.

Thus, the maintenance and mobilization of a distinctive Quechua and Aymara ethnic and linguistic identity in the region compromise the extent to which female speakers are adequately represented in the ongoing refinement of standards of indigenous linguistic proficiency and ethno-indigenous group membership. Instead of being referred to as paragons of perfect linguistic and social behavior, female speakers embody the complications that arise from reinterpreting long-term, inter-indigenous relationships in the region, such as hindering the effective enforcement of monolingual proficiencies and not conforming to ideologically “purified” modes of ethnic, indigenous identification and social comportment. Female indigenous speakers are the figure and persona that challenge the existence of a firm Quechua-Aymara ethnolinguistic boundary, as well as the target speakers whose linguistic proficiencies and social image can be readjusted and shaped in order to conform to the linguistic and social expectations for each bounded ethnolinguistic group. Ultimately, the processes of simplification and differentiation in the region run parallel to practices that erase the impact that female indigenous language speakers have had on the sociolinguistic landscape of Quechua and Aymara contact in Puno and in the altiplano.