Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America

Description

This volume makes a vital and original contribution to a topic that lies at the intersection of the fields of history, anthropology, and linguistics. The book is the first to consider indigenous languages as vehicles of political orders in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present, across regional and national contexts, including Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and Paraguay. The chapters focus on languages that have been prominent in multiethnic colonial and national societies and are well represented in the written record: Guarani, Quechua, some of the Mayan languages, Nahuatl, and other Mesoamerican languages. The contributors put into dialogue the questions and methodologies that have animated anthropological and historical approaches to the topic, including ethnohistory, philology, language politics and ideologies, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and metapragmatics. Some of the historical chapters deal with how political concepts and discourses were expressed in indigenous languages, while others focus on multilingualism and language hierarchies, where some indigenous languages, or language varieties, acquired a special status as mediums of written communication and as elite languages. The ethnographic chapters show how the deployment of distinct linguistic varieties in social interaction lays bare the workings of social differentiation and social hierarchy.

Contributors: Alan Durston, Bruce Mannheim, Sabine MacCormack, Bas van Doesburg, Camilla Townsend, Capucine Boidin, Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, Judith M. Maxwell, Margarita Huayhua.

Several years ago, a researcher from New Zealand who lived in Samoa arrived in Sitka, Alaska with an encyclopedia of Tlingit, an indigenous language spoken today in Alaska. The encyclopedia, which reached beyond language to discuss aspects of Tlingit culture and society, was written over several years as a labor of love, based on written sources that the researcher had found, some in libraries, some on the Internet. The sources dated from the 19th century up to the present day, including the very ethnographic work of John Swanton, which was written before the time of the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas. The work, written entirely in Tlingit was presented to Tlingit elders in Sitka. No one could understand even the smallest bit of the encyclopedia. What happened? There are several obvious answers. Tlingit is what anthropologist Xavier Albó called an “oppressed language,” not only because the speakers could exercise free use of their language only in limited domains—mainly the home, but because even in those limited domains, there has been the specter of another language—most recently English—hovering just beyond, giving Tlingit speakers a “double consciousness” (to use the famous phrase by W.E.B. DuBois) even when speaking their own. For the aficionado from New Zealand by way of Samoa, as for those of us reading this chapter, knowledge of Tlingit is mediated entirely through the dominant language, English, the meanings of words made to fit the meanings of counterparts in English, the grammatical morphology reshaped to fit English grammar, the syntax and the mundane pragmatic calculations that Tlingit speakers use day in and day out to fit English. Even the best intentioned materials developed for promoting the revival of Tlingit carry traces of the presence of English as the “matrix language”. In brief, the answer is painfully obvious. Although the English-language forms—the words and affixes--of English sentences, written following practices of English style, and English pragmatics were replaced with their Tlingit counterparts, using dictionaries, they remained English sentences, no more Tlingit for the Tlingit words. And so to interpret the Encyclopedia, a Tlingit speaker would have had to treat it as a word puzzle, to take every single word and try to find it in a bilingual dictionary (using the English to Tlingit part of course) and then guess at the English concept intended by the writer of the encyclopedia.

I walk you through this anecdote because it speaks to the status of Quechua today in the Andean republics, which like Tlingit is an “oppressed language,” albeit a language family with 10 to 12 million speakers, many—perhaps most—for all intents and purposes monolingual. (By “Quechua speaker,” I mean someone whose default mode o interaction in mundane circumstances is Quechua, regardless of what other languages they my speak; practice not knowledge is critical here.) Here, Spanish is the matrix language, and though official statistics in Peru and Bolivia show a massive erosion since the 1960s in the population that speaks it in everyday contexts, my limited ethnographic experience is that it is being reproduced and transmitted normally—that is, with all children in rural communities learning Quechua at home and being exposed to Spanish only in school. Nonetheless, when one leaves rural heartlands, and when one leaves the contexts of home and agropastoralism, it is eminently clear that Spanish is the language of public discourse. Moreover, Spanish is the matrix language in the same sense as English in Alaska. All public knowledge of Quechua linguistic structure, all grammatical analysis, all documentation of lexical meaning is mediated through Spanish (although it is sometimes retranslated into a third language, such as French or English). Such mundane routines as greeting a fellow traveler on a foot path, giving directions to the nearest town, entering a house, or asking for a drink of water are reformulated into Spanish-language interactional routines, although these are as opaque to Quechua speakers as the Tlingit encyclopedia was to Tlingit elders. Quechua culture is described in the matrix language and Quechua culture, history, and archaeology returned to Quechua-speaking children using Quechua word forms to label Spanish meanings, again as opaque to its audience as in the Tlingit case.

Why would this be so? After all, the Spaniards arrived as settler-conquerors. In policy matters, religious and secular alike, they debated how they were to approach the linguistic differences with their new subjects; there were those who proposed that Spanish be imposed on the new subject population with the same vigor as toward Arabic speakers on the Spanish peninsula, and those who advocated missionizing their new subjects in their own languages, with a pendulum swing between these two approaches, neither of which quite fit the facts-on the-ground. Language policy in itself, whether we are talking about royal decrees, recommendations to the Council of the Indies, or recommendations to missionary priests, is a poor indication of practices on the ground, particularly under as polycephalous an administrative tangle as the Spanish Hapsburgs, whose multiple jurisdictions could adopt and implement policy in very different ways. Moreover, the division of labor between state administrative structures and Church structures looked very different in the Hapsburg dominions than they look today in its successor republics. Language policy was discussed in both Church and state venues; linguistic and cultural practices, in contrast, were implemented by the Church and varied from one diocesanal jurisdiction to another.

(excerpted from chapter 7)

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim

1. “The Discourse of My Life:” What Language Can Do (Early Colonial Views on Quechua)

Sabine MacCormack

2. Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico

Sebastian van Doesburg

3. The Politics of the Aztec Histories

Camilla Townsend

4. Toward a Guarani Semantic History: Political Vocabulary in Guarani (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Capucine Boidin and Angélica Otazú

5. Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru

Alan Durston

6. Mayan Languages: A New Dawn?

Judith Maxwell

7. “Returning to Albó: ‘The Future of the Oppressed Languages’ at 40”

Bruce Mannheim

8. “Building Differences: The (Re)production of Hierarchical Relations among Women in the Southern Andes”

Margarita Huayhua

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Perú
• México
• Linguistics
• Mesoamerican languages
• General officer
• Mayan
• Latin America
• Anthropology
• General
• Mexico
• Guarani
• Peru
• Nahuatl
• Paraguay
• Quechua
• Guatemala

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268103729
• Langue: English

Extrait

INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES, POLITICS, AND AUTHORITY IN LATIN AMERICA
INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES, POLITICS, AND AUTHORITY IN LATIN AMERICA
H ISTORICAL AND E THNOGRAPHIC P ERSPECTIVES
Edited by ALAN DURSTON and BRUCE MANNHEIM
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2018 by University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Durston, Alan, 1970– editor. | Mannheim, Bruce, editor.
Title: Indigenous languages, politics, and authority in Latin America : historical and ethnographic perspectives / edited by Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018011947 (print) | LCCN 2018013951 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268103712 (pdf) |
ISBN 9780268103729 (epub) | ISBN 9780268103699 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 0268103690 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Indians of South America—Languages—Political aspects. | Indians of South America—Languages—Social aspects. | Indians of South America—Languages—History. | Indians of Mexico—Languages—Political aspects. | Indians of Mexico—Languages—Social aspects. | Indians of Mexico— Languages—History. | Indians of Central America—Languages—Political aspects. | Indians of Central America—Languages—Social aspects. |
Indians of Central America—Languages—History.
Classification: LCC P119.32.S63 (ebook) | LCC P119.32.S63 I53 2018 (print) | DDC 498—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011947
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
To the memory of Sabine MacCormack
CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim ONE “The Discourse of My Life”: What Language Can Do (Early Colonial Views on Quechua) Sabine MacCormack TWO Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico Bas van Doesburg THREE The Politics of the Aztec Histories Camilla Townsend FOUR Toward a Guarani Semantic History: Political Vocabulary in Guarani (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries) Capucine Boidin and Angélica Otazú Melgarejo FIVE Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru Alan Durston SIX Mayan Languages: A New Dawn? Judith M. Maxwell SEVEN Xavier Albó’s “The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited Bruce Mannheim EIGHT Building Differences: The (Re)production of Hierarchical Relations among Women in the Southern Andes Margarita Huayhua List of Contributors Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume was originally conceived by Sabine MacCormack (1941– 2012), who invited most of the contributors and asked Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim to take on editorial responsibilities. Now that it is coming out the editors would like to dedicate it to her memory. We thank Princeton University Press for allowing us to reproduce “‘The Discourse of My Life’: What Language Can Do,” chapter 6 (pp. 170–201) of Sabine MacCormack’s On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (2007), as her contribution to this volume.
We are grateful to the authors for their patience with a prolonged editorial process. We would also like to thank Stephen Little, Eli Bortz, and Rebecca DeBoer, of the University of Notre Dame Press, for shepherding the project through to its conclusion, and Elisabeth Magnus for her rigorous copyediting.
Introduction
ALAN DURSTON AND BRUCE MANNHEIM
Indigenous languages have been used to express new understandings of community, polity, and authority throughout the history of Latin American societies. Additionally, specific Amerindian languages have themselves embodied authority as varieties of special standing in the colonial regime, or as emblems of national or ethnic identities. Ethnographic research is revealing how speakers today employ socially stratified registers that index and reproduce hierarchies among them. This volume explores how indigenous languages have functioned as vehicles of social and political orders from the sixteenth century to the present. Our focus is on languages that have been prominent in multiethnic colonial and national societies and are well represented in the written record—Guarani, some of the Mayan languages, Nahuatl, and Quechua are the main examples, but certainly not the only ones.
The work assembled here challenges unspoken but persistent assumptions about the postconquest history of indigenous languages; once these assumptions are set aside, their long-neglected centrality to the political history of the region becomes evident. A first assumption could be termed the “assumption of linear decline”: that indigenous languages have, at best, “held on” in the face of the onslaught of European languages, with some merely declining more slowly than others. It is abundantly clear that indigenous languages expanded into new arenas in the wake of the Iberian invasions and that when they did lose ground the gains often went to other indigenous languages. 1 For example, it appears that in much of the Andes (particularly Peru) Spanish lost ground to Quechua after independence in the 1820s; as late as the middle of the twentieth century Spanish monolinguals were rare in some Andean cities. 2 Similarly, in a pattern far from linear decline, the demographic falloff in Quechua monolingualism in the southern Peruvian highlands is relatively recent, a product of changes in the rural productive economy and in education in the second half of the twentieth century, rather than of colonial-era language policy.
A second assumption, deriving from an ideology of language both anachronistic and acontextual, construes indigenous languages as monoethnic and monocultural, defining clearly bounded populations. 3 Mobility and mutability are the corollaries of enduring vitality: indigenous languages experienced wholesale changes as they acquired new roles and were adopted both by nonindigenous populations and by indigenous groups that had not originally spoken them. It is not just that agents of colonialism appropriated indigenous languages for purposes like religious conversion. Well into the twentieth century, indigenous languages were the common medium of communication shared by all, regardless of socioracial status, in large areas of Latin America (elites being distinguished by the fact that they also knew Spanish). This situation still exists in Paraguay, where the most spoken language is Guarani. In their chapter on the Guarani written record—whose extent and diversity will come as a surprise to many readers—Capucine Boidin and Angélica Otazú Melgarejo argue that this record is the product of a “third space” or “middle ground” that was neither indigenous nor European. While Jesuit missionaries had a major hand in the initial development of a written, colonial form of Guarani, it was taken up and transformed by a variety of agents, indigenous, mestizo, and creole (of Spanish descent). A similar story emerges for the other widely written indigenous languages. To generalize this: languages as formal systems move across populations; they provide resources for the social construction of boundaries, 4 particularly through differential access to linguistic repertoires, but the boundaries of a linguistic system—a named language or a named variety of a language—do not necessarily coincide with a social or political boundary.
A key implication of mobility/mutability is the need to study distinct registers of a language and how they are regimented. Scholars have often failed to notice socially grounded registers because they have tended to focus on the formal, written representation of grammars to the exclusion of everyday contexts. Ethnicity is not the mechanical reflection of abstract knowledge of a set of lexical and grammatical forms or of an equally abstract heritage (inherited from where?). For speakers of K’ichee’ Maya, ethnicity is an interactional achievement, arrived at through a complex layering of linguistic accommodation and differentiation: (1) foundationally at the hyperlocal level that is characteristic of Mesoamerica as a region, in which speakers from local settlements strive to differentiate themselves from neighboring settlements, drawing on historically Mayan and historically Spanish resources to do so; (2) a layer up, where, at a local level again, speakers differentiate themselves by class/ ethnic affiliation through interaction between local varieties of Mayan and Spanish; and (3) at a pan-Mayan level, where Mayan intellectuals differentiate themselves from non-Mayans through a regimented purist register of K’ichee’. 5 Each of these levels has a different, overlapping set of ethnic entailments, and each feeds into the others. These are ultimately observable only through detailed observation and analysis of linguistic behavior, as the more local points of differentiation are not necessarily within the purview of conscious control. The complexity of the linguistic repertoire within which K’ichee’ speakers (themselves of multiple varieties) interact has not diminished—rather, it has expanded as Spanish colonialism, linguistic domination in republican Guatemala, and the pan-Maya movement have left linguistic accretions that, plugged into an older Mesoamerican “pueblo dialectology,” have provided a surplus of politically and socially charged varieties of K’ichee’, controlled to a greater or lesser extent by speakers differently located. 6
The proliferation of