Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America

This volume brings together a collection of meaningful essays on 12 indigenous languages from across North and South America in time to commemorate the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages as declared by the United Nations. As the “stuff of everyday social life,” indigenous languages relay multiple layers of identity that demand a close reading (p. 5). The timely essays in this volume provide rich, descriptive examples of the perseverance of indigenous speakers, who face rejection, exclusion, racism, and the historical and political processes that affect their everyday language maintenance. The scholarship in this well-organized book, with themes that connect across the various chapters, relies on a variety of historical, linguistic, and anthropological methods and approaches. The authors' interdisciplinary research moves chronologically, from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. The connecting themes are “political economies of language,” “language choice and authority,” “writing and polity,” and “political concept formation” (p. 11).The first four chapters cover the Andean and Mesoamerican regions and discuss colonial documents. The analyses of both historical and ethnographic data are theoretically and methodologically diverse but are anchored to explorations of Quechua, Mixtec, Zapotec, Chocho, Nahuatl, and Guarani languages in their written and spoken forms as well as the identities of their many speakers.Chapter 1, by Sabine MacCormack, introduces the fascinating transcontinental environment in which Quechua and Latin were used in the seventeenth century and were deemed central to elites who sought to achieve the highest degrees of policía, a Latin term used to describe “social order” (p. 35). The next chapter, by Bas van Doesburg, addresses written culture in colonial Oaxaca and the notable historical presence of indigenous speakers' multilingualism there across the Chocho, Mixtec, Nahuatl, and Spanish languages. Following the success of indigenous independence movements, elites promoted Spanish and rejected indigenous languages as a way to reinforce the nationalist sentiments of the time.In chapter 3, Camilla Townsend analyzes the Nahua tradition of historical record keeping known as xiupohualli, which she explains to be a form of Nahuatl scholarship, a genre in its own right. The hereditary noble lords of Tlaxcala continued producing these manuscripts in the pre-Columbian style for three centuries following the military defeat of the Mexica-Tenochca. Focusing on seventeenth-century manuscripts, Townsend effectively synthesizes this written genre that Nahua lords meticulously kept in order to preserve their own intellectual history. Capucine Boidin and Angélica Otazú Melgarejo's contribution focuses on Guarani semantic history, unfolding many layers of indigenous agency by way of a large corpus of mundane and religious texts spanning three centuries. Their findings demonstrate that the authors of Guarani texts included not only indigenous people and foreign missionaries but also creoles and mestizos.The last four essays of the volume are ethnographic in nature and focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century use of Quechua and Mayan languages. Together, these studies demand that, instead of focusing solely on written versions of indigenous languages, scholars study linguistic behavior, such as when speakers use their languages or the distinct registers of a language. The essays also suggest that revitalization efforts can become new forms of colonialism. In chapter 5, Alan Durston examines the indigenista literature in Quechua used by the Augusto B. Leguía dictatorship in Peru during the first half of the twentieth century. Speeches written in variants of Quechua that borrowed Hispanisms, rather than those speeches that used purist language and included Inca references, were printed in newspapers and clearly utilized the Quechua language for political propaganda.In chapter 6, Judith Maxwell documents five decades of work in Maya-language regions and discusses the consistent struggle that language activists fight against racist attitudes of nonindigenous administrators and government officials. This chapter presents the many challenges that indigenous-language instruction has faced in light of important institutional attempts to revitalize the native languages by world organizations, the national legislature, and local politics, which ultimately have undermined the value of the languages and the people who speak them.In chapter 7, Bruce Mannheim revisits Xavier Albó's essay “The Future of the Oppressed Languages of the Andes” and provides important methodological considerations that question the reach of studies completed by well-intentioned scholars when the speakers of a language are not trained to read those studies.Margarita Huayhua's chapter looks at the differences that result when bilingual Quechua-Spanish speakers typecast and create hierarchies when speaking to monolingual Quechua-speaking people in the Andes. This essay shows how languages change when they are spoken and determines the contexts that define the languages and their layers of value.Indigenous languages exist today thanks to the agency and cultural investment of their speakers. This compelling new book contains essays that are suitable for an upper-division college course, while the content is valuable to a general audience and should be read by everyone. This rich and detailed volume increases our understanding of indigenous languages, their speakers, and their perseverance over the course of five centuries. My only wish is to have had more indigenous scholars added to its list of contributors

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Creole language · Identity (music) · Indigenous · Indigenous language · Linguistics · Nahuatl · Political science · Politics · Polity · Scholarship · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

• Mother Tongue, Father Tongue, Place Tongue

  Bruce Mannheim•Journal of Anthropological Research•2022

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