This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi... more This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi Socio (1983), Rodrigo Bellot’s ?Quien Mato a La Llamita Blanca? (2006), Jorge Sanjines’ La Nacion Clandestina (1989), and Juan Carlos Valdivia’s Zona Sur (2009). While these films differ from one another in terms of the historical contexts of their production and release, and also in terms of cinematic genre, the road, and the national highway in particular, features prominently in them all. Across these films, the road figures as a site of both national aspiration and failure. The road operates in these films as a model of spacetime that functions not only as a spatiotemporal structuring element of the films’ narratives, but also a surface of contact between national subjects and their state. Additionally, building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the picaresque novel that saw the chronotope of the road as key to understanding the “sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country,...
This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression... more This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.
Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which ... more Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of “space-time,” or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti ‘the turning over of space-time’, to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution.
This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and cl... more This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category-the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages. W hile briefly working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with the faculty of an intercultural bilingual education master's program, one of the faculty members related to me an interaction he had had that illustrated the complex valences of class, gender, and race that the term bilingual carries in Bolivia. In his search for a residence in Cochabamba he had been shown prop
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2012
On June 16, 1971 in east Harlem a young leader of the Black Panther Party, Afeni Shakur, gave bir... more On June 16, 1971 in east Harlem a young leader of the Black Panther Party, Afeni Shakur, gave birth to a baby boy who later in his life would become known to millions across the globe, as a performer, a rapper, a poet, and a martyr. Tupac Shakur remains the hip-hop artist with the most albums sold world wide, more than 74 million-making his very name emblematic of hip-hop on a global scale. For Afeni Shakur, the name Tupac was also an emblem, a sign of antiracist, anticolonial resistance recognized by millions of Indigenous people across the Andes as the name of two anticolonial martyrs from the eighteenth century who led insurrections against Spanish colonialism-the Quechua Tupac Amaru the Second and the Aymara Tupac Katari (Hoye and Ali). On that summer day in 1971, when this young revolutionary named her son Tupac, could she have imagined that within decades the descendents of her son's namesake, the descendents of the Tupacs, in cities like El Alto, Bolivia, would look to her son for inspiration? In Hoye and Ali's 2003 biography of Shakur, they quote him as having said, "I was named after this Inca chief whose name was Tupac Amaru. .. He was a deep dude. If I go to South America, they gonna love me. I'm telling you. They know Tupac." (Hoye and Ali, 8). He wasn't wrong. One place where there is tremendous love for Tupac is El Alto, Bolivia. El Alto is one of Bolivia's largest and youngest cities and home to a vibrant hip-hop scene. The panorama of Hip-Hop Alteño, or "El Alto Hip-Hop," includes MCs who rhyme not only in Spanish, but also in the Aymara and Quechua languages, among which the Wayna Rap collective has occupied a prominent role.
This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materi... more This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time's uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.
Conference proceedings of the panel "Conflicting Temporalities in the Anthropology of the Future"... more Conference proceedings of the panel "Conflicting Temporalities in the Anthropology of the Future" at the 16th meetings of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, published in issue 7 of Lectures anthropologiques, also available online https://www.lecturesanthropologiques.fr/823
This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression... more This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.
Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which ... more Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of "space-time," or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti 'the turning over of space-time', to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution. The contemporary experience commits us to the present-akapacha-which in turn contains within it the seeds of the future that emerge from the depths of the past [qhip nayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani]. The present is the setting for simultaneously modernizing and archaic impulses, of strategies to preserve the status quo and of others that
This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materi... more This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time’s uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.
A B S T R A C T This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, li... more A B S T R A C T This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic , and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.
This bibliography brings together studies adopting theoretical and methodological approaches incl... more This bibliography brings together studies adopting theoretical and methodological approaches including linguistic anthropology, variationist sociolinguistics, sociology of language, media and discourse studies that address the study of language and media, media here understood as textual (writing, print), aural (radio, music, sound), visual (television, film), and digital (computer-mediated communication), and that address questions such as the following: What are the affordances and constraints of different media for linguistic expression? How do media figure into the standardization of linguistic norms? Despite expectations to the contrary, the spread of radio broadcasting did not erase regional linguistic variation in the 20th century. Whether and how new communicative technologies intervene in contemporary processes of linguistic innovation is a promising arena for research.
This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi... more This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi Socio (1983), Rodrigo Bellot’s ¿Quién Mató a La Llamita Blanca? (2006), Jorge Sanjinés’ La Nación Clandestina (1989), and Juan Carlos Valdivia’s Zona Sur (2009). While these films differ from one another in terms of the historical contexts of their production and release, and also in terms of cinematic genre, the road, and the national highway in particular, features prominently in them all. Across these films, the road figures as a site of both national aspiration and failure. The road operates in these films as a model of spacetime that functions not only as a spatiotemporal structuring element of the films’ narratives, but also a surface of contact between national subjects and their state. Additionally, building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the picaresque novel that saw the chronotope of the road as key to understanding the “sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country,” I suggest that the roads in these films are not just spaces of heterogeneity but also spaces for its ideological framing, aligning with historical changes in discourses of Bolivian identity, specifically a move away from an integrationist nationalism towards a recognition of the plurinational character of the Bolivian Republic. Where road trip films Mi Socio and La Llamita provide filmic fantasies of infrastructures’ unifying capacity, the films La Nación Clandestina and Zona Sur depict the road as a spacetime populated by personae in conflict. Pessimistic assessments of the possibility for national coherence emerge from these latter two films’ depiction of the road as a spacetime of disconnect and rupture between incommensurate worlds of the city and the countryside, a chronotope riddled with potholes of anti-Indian racism.
Los vínculos entre las prácticas lingüísticas, los hablantes y la autoridad institucional que exi... more Los vínculos entre las prácticas lingüísticas, los hablantes y la autoridad institucional que existen en la más antigua emisora radial de lengua aymara de Bolivia se combinan para consolidar un registro lingüístico de aymara deshispanizado. El Departamento de Lengua Aymara de la radio desarrolla y aprueba guiones y monitorea las emisiones de la radio para identificar préstamos de lengua castellana –“aberraciones”– y los reemplaza con neologismos aymaras. A partir de trabajo de campo etnográfico y análisis de discurso de un programa de radio llamado Lengua aymara, este artículo propone que los protocolos metadiscursivos implementados por el Departamento de Lengua Aymara hacen que este registro sea audible a los radioescuchas y además proyecte como hablante-modelo el aymara rural. En el contexto del resurgimiento político indígena en Bolivia, el idioma se ha convertido en una metonimia de la nación indígena, otro terreno para la descolonización y la transformación personal.
Introduction to a special issue, “Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations." Karl F. Swinehart ... more Introduction to a special issue, “Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations." Karl F. Swinehart and Kathryn Graber, eds.
This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi... more This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi Socio (1983), Rodrigo Bellot’s ?Quien Mato a La Llamita Blanca? (2006), Jorge Sanjines’ La Nacion Clandestina (1989), and Juan Carlos Valdivia’s Zona Sur (2009). While these films differ from one another in terms of the historical contexts of their production and release, and also in terms of cinematic genre, the road, and the national highway in particular, features prominently in them all. Across these films, the road figures as a site of both national aspiration and failure. The road operates in these films as a model of spacetime that functions not only as a spatiotemporal structuring element of the films’ narratives, but also a surface of contact between national subjects and their state. Additionally, building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the picaresque novel that saw the chronotope of the road as key to understanding the “sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country,...
This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression... more This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.
Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which ... more Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of “space-time,” or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti ‘the turning over of space-time’, to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution.
This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and cl... more This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category-the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages. W hile briefly working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with the faculty of an intercultural bilingual education master's program, one of the faculty members related to me an interaction he had had that illustrated the complex valences of class, gender, and race that the term bilingual carries in Bolivia. In his search for a residence in Cochabamba he had been shown prop
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2012
On June 16, 1971 in east Harlem a young leader of the Black Panther Party, Afeni Shakur, gave bir... more On June 16, 1971 in east Harlem a young leader of the Black Panther Party, Afeni Shakur, gave birth to a baby boy who later in his life would become known to millions across the globe, as a performer, a rapper, a poet, and a martyr. Tupac Shakur remains the hip-hop artist with the most albums sold world wide, more than 74 million-making his very name emblematic of hip-hop on a global scale. For Afeni Shakur, the name Tupac was also an emblem, a sign of antiracist, anticolonial resistance recognized by millions of Indigenous people across the Andes as the name of two anticolonial martyrs from the eighteenth century who led insurrections against Spanish colonialism-the Quechua Tupac Amaru the Second and the Aymara Tupac Katari (Hoye and Ali). On that summer day in 1971, when this young revolutionary named her son Tupac, could she have imagined that within decades the descendents of her son's namesake, the descendents of the Tupacs, in cities like El Alto, Bolivia, would look to her son for inspiration? In Hoye and Ali's 2003 biography of Shakur, they quote him as having said, "I was named after this Inca chief whose name was Tupac Amaru. .. He was a deep dude. If I go to South America, they gonna love me. I'm telling you. They know Tupac." (Hoye and Ali, 8). He wasn't wrong. One place where there is tremendous love for Tupac is El Alto, Bolivia. El Alto is one of Bolivia's largest and youngest cities and home to a vibrant hip-hop scene. The panorama of Hip-Hop Alteño, or "El Alto Hip-Hop," includes MCs who rhyme not only in Spanish, but also in the Aymara and Quechua languages, among which the Wayna Rap collective has occupied a prominent role.
This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materi... more This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time's uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.
Conference proceedings of the panel "Conflicting Temporalities in the Anthropology of the Future"... more Conference proceedings of the panel "Conflicting Temporalities in the Anthropology of the Future" at the 16th meetings of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, published in issue 7 of Lectures anthropologiques, also available online https://www.lecturesanthropologiques.fr/823
This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression... more This essay examines the music of Nación Rap, Aymara rappers of El Alto, Bolivia, as an expression of what Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui terms a ch'ixi cultural form, one that juxtaposes seeming opposites into a changed third. I look to earlier moments of Aymara and Quechua cultural production, specifically colonial New World Baroque art, to consider Aymara hip hop as another instance of ch'ixi cosmopolitanism. In examining the lyrical, musical, and visual elements of Nación Rap's performance, I argue that their music intervenes in local ideologies of race and Indigeneity. By reformulating what is understood as Aymara, by situating the Aymara language as poetically equivalent to the colonial lingua franca of Spanish, English, and French, and by wearing Aymara clothing and hairstyles in the performance of an urban musical genre with proximity to Blackness, these artists challenge dominant racial logics of their society.
Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which ... more Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of "space-time," or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti 'the turning over of space-time', to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution. The contemporary experience commits us to the present-akapacha-which in turn contains within it the seeds of the future that emerge from the depths of the past [qhip nayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani]. The present is the setting for simultaneously modernizing and archaic impulses, of strategies to preserve the status quo and of others that
This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materi... more This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time’s uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.
A B S T R A C T This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, li... more A B S T R A C T This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic , and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.
This bibliography brings together studies adopting theoretical and methodological approaches incl... more This bibliography brings together studies adopting theoretical and methodological approaches including linguistic anthropology, variationist sociolinguistics, sociology of language, media and discourse studies that address the study of language and media, media here understood as textual (writing, print), aural (radio, music, sound), visual (television, film), and digital (computer-mediated communication), and that address questions such as the following: What are the affordances and constraints of different media for linguistic expression? How do media figure into the standardization of linguistic norms? Despite expectations to the contrary, the spread of radio broadcasting did not erase regional linguistic variation in the 20th century. Whether and how new communicative technologies intervene in contemporary processes of linguistic innovation is a promising arena for research.
This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi... more This paper examines the cinematic chronotope of the road in four Bolivian films—Paolo Agazzi’s Mi Socio (1983), Rodrigo Bellot’s ¿Quién Mató a La Llamita Blanca? (2006), Jorge Sanjinés’ La Nación Clandestina (1989), and Juan Carlos Valdivia’s Zona Sur (2009). While these films differ from one another in terms of the historical contexts of their production and release, and also in terms of cinematic genre, the road, and the national highway in particular, features prominently in them all. Across these films, the road figures as a site of both national aspiration and failure. The road operates in these films as a model of spacetime that functions not only as a spatiotemporal structuring element of the films’ narratives, but also a surface of contact between national subjects and their state. Additionally, building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the picaresque novel that saw the chronotope of the road as key to understanding the “sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country,” I suggest that the roads in these films are not just spaces of heterogeneity but also spaces for its ideological framing, aligning with historical changes in discourses of Bolivian identity, specifically a move away from an integrationist nationalism towards a recognition of the plurinational character of the Bolivian Republic. Where road trip films Mi Socio and La Llamita provide filmic fantasies of infrastructures’ unifying capacity, the films La Nación Clandestina and Zona Sur depict the road as a spacetime populated by personae in conflict. Pessimistic assessments of the possibility for national coherence emerge from these latter two films’ depiction of the road as a spacetime of disconnect and rupture between incommensurate worlds of the city and the countryside, a chronotope riddled with potholes of anti-Indian racism.
Los vínculos entre las prácticas lingüísticas, los hablantes y la autoridad institucional que exi... more Los vínculos entre las prácticas lingüísticas, los hablantes y la autoridad institucional que existen en la más antigua emisora radial de lengua aymara de Bolivia se combinan para consolidar un registro lingüístico de aymara deshispanizado. El Departamento de Lengua Aymara de la radio desarrolla y aprueba guiones y monitorea las emisiones de la radio para identificar préstamos de lengua castellana –“aberraciones”– y los reemplaza con neologismos aymaras. A partir de trabajo de campo etnográfico y análisis de discurso de un programa de radio llamado Lengua aymara, este artículo propone que los protocolos metadiscursivos implementados por el Departamento de Lengua Aymara hacen que este registro sea audible a los radioescuchas y además proyecte como hablante-modelo el aymara rural. En el contexto del resurgimiento político indígena en Bolivia, el idioma se ha convertido en una metonimia de la nación indígena, otro terreno para la descolonización y la transformación personal.
Introduction to a special issue, “Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations." Karl F. Swinehart ... more Introduction to a special issue, “Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations." Karl F. Swinehart and Kathryn Graber, eds.
Rap de acá: la historia del rap en Argentina [Rap from here: the history of Rap in Argentina] bri... more Rap de acá: la historia del rap en Argentina [Rap from here: the history of Rap in Argentina] brings its readers into the early days of the hip hop scene in Buenos Aires in the 1980s and early 1990s. In a quick read of six chapters, Biaggini situates his many interviews with key players of Argentine hip hop's early days within narratives outlining both the trajectory of popular music in Argentina and the sociopolitical context of a society emerging from military rule and in the grips of neoliberal restructuring and economic crisis. Rap de acá opens 'allá' ('there', in the US) with a history of hip hop's origins in the US among Black and Latinx communities, drawing on the work of Jeff Chang and interviews with figures such as KRS 1. Biaggini continues providing an overview of the 'prehistory' of Argentine hip hop, discussing popular music in Argentina in the second chapter, the shift from the mid-twentieth century when tango remained a popular musical form to its displacement by "nueva ola" which combined twist and rock, to the introduction of what Biaggini, along with others, identifies as the first piece of hip hop in Spanish-"La Cotorra Criolla" (1980) by Malvaho. Its lyrics were written by Venezuelan humorist Perucho Conde who took inspiration directly from the The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" (33). A music industry creation and a bid to appeal to a possible market, this and other early instances of rap, while getting attention, did not launch anything like a movement per se. Biaggini notes that "[t]hese sporadic musical experiences had no continuity nor direct influence in the development of rap in our country." (34) If not the witty rhymes of a Venezuelan comic, what was it that caught the imagination of the early enthusiasts of Argentina's hip hop scene? In the third chapter, as the title "In the beginning was Break" suggests, Biaggini explains through multiple interviews how the breakdancing featured in films like Flashdance (1983) and Beat Street (1984) and the dance moves of the massively popular Michael Jackson consolidated youth communities in Buenos Aires and its suburbs, transforming spaces like the Parque Rivadavia into crucial spaces for bboy crews and encounters among them. In this way, the transition to democracy with the end of military rule in 1983 also meant a literal taking of the streets by bboy crews in places like Parque Rivadavia, an important association made by participants in the early days of this scene in their interviews with Biaggini. These comprise "la vieja escuela" ("the old school") and include people who would go on to be central figures in Argentine hip hop like
This is a book review of "Rap de acá: la historia del rap en Argentina [Rap from here: the histor... more This is a book review of "Rap de acá: la historia del rap en Argentina [Rap from here: the history of Rap in Argentina]" for the online journal ATeM Archiv für Textmusikforschung / Archives of Text and Music Research.
potential of relationality to capture the ambivalence of entities (e.g., the demonic dead in Chap... more potential of relationality to capture the ambivalence of entities (e.g., the demonic dead in Chapter 6) and social relations (for example, children in Chapter 4) under different cultural purviews. For the Korowai, the demonic dead are both deceased dear kinspeople and visually terrifying killers. The multiple valences of social and semiotic entities themselves can become the basis for analyses of social bonds and semiotic units that avoid reductionism by highlighting potentially unstable collections of valences that sit squarely but uncomfortably-more or less-between an "us" and a "them." Though the Korowai may try to stabilize these ambivalences, Stasch is arguing that analysts of society must come to embrace them. And indeed, for scholars of contextualized events of interaction, Stasch's work will most certainly help integrate analyses of the gradient relationality emergent in discourse and events of semiosis to the ethno-theories of social life that guide action and inform experience, now with their gradience firmly at the fore.
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Papers by Karl Swinehart