Racism and Social Interaction in a Southern Peruvian combi 1

Erving Goffman’s “interactional order” posed the relationship between social relations produced in face-to-face interaction and large-scale social ascriptions, such as race and class. In this article, I show how a non-scalar model works (Carr & Lempert, 2016) in which relations of domination produced in everyday social interaction are the “large-scale” ascriptions. In the southern Peruvian Andes, interactions among individuals whose linguistic backgrounds are Quechua, Spanish, or both are permeated by evaluation of racial status. This article looks at the interactions between both Quechua-speaking villagers and Spanish-speaking city dwellers who board a combi (minivan) to travel and share the same space. In their everyday interactions, they build up subtle shifting boundaries through the debasement of interlocutors. In this process, boundaries that organize interaction are not constituted through categorical labels (e.g., Indian, cholo, and mestizo) or self-ascription, as Barth (1969) posited long ago; rather, boundaries are constituted through the ascription of racialized attributes to subordinate interlocutors and claim a superior position. Such a process shows how relations of social oppression are produced and are part of the interactional order. Furthermore, the analysis falsifies traditional views of race in the Andean region as a socially gradient phenomenon

Racism · Sociology · Gender Studies · Indigenous Cultures and History · Latin American rural development · Latin American socio-political dynamics

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