FROM FAMILIES TO COMMUNITIES

Yokiri was formed by the intermarriage of a handful of Matsigenka and Andean families who migrated from a wide variety of places and circumstances across the region beginning in the 1970s. Some came from remote valleys beyond the Andean agricultural frontier, while others migrated from the nearby Dominican mission of Chirumbia, a rural area of the highland province of Paucartambo, and coffee plantations in the Yavero Valley that used enslaved Matsigenkas as laborers (for historical overviews of Matsigenkas and Andeans in the Alto Urubamba region, see Rosengren Reference Rosengren1987, Reference Rosengren, Santos-Granero and Barclay2004, Sala i Vila Reference Sala i Vila and Jordán1998, A. Johnson Reference Johnson2003, Encinas Martín et al. Reference Encinas Martín, Casado and Ordieres2008, and Emlen Reference Emlen2014). These places were sociolinguistically quite different: people who grew up beyond the agricultural frontier mostly spoke Matsigenka, while those raised in the mission at Chirumbia were also taught Spanish and learned some Quechua from their neighbors. The settlers who migrated from the highlands learned Quechua in the home as well as some Spanish in school, while for the Matsigenkas enslaved on Andean settlers' coffee plantations along the Yavero river, Matsigenka was the language of the home and Quechua was the language of work. Because these Matsigenkas were prohibited from attending school, they had little exposure to Spanish until later in their lives. The intermarriage of these diverse families in Yokiri created a sociolinguistic situation of considerable complexity, and most people are now trilingual. Now that the expanding road network allows for easy travel, Yokiriños are exposed to Spanish and Quechua as they visit nearby towns, and as visitors of all kinds make their way to Yokiri. Many men speak Spanish and Quechua during months-long periods of work outside of Yokiri, and several of the women spoke these languages while they lived with Andean settler men before returning to the community. Schoolchildren also learn Spanish in school, and nearly every house has a battery-operated radio that broadcasts both Spanish and Quechua programming day and night.

It is important to note here the complex role that Quechua plays in the lives of Yokiriños: while in the nearby Andean region it is a marginalized language, many Matsigenka people experience Quechua as the language of agricultural expansion and participation in the dominant capitalist economy and society (significantly, Yokiriños refer to their Quechua-speaking Andean neighbors as gente blanca ‘white people’, a reference to their status as colonizers rather than to their skin color). In Yokiri today, Quechua is associated with incorporation into the local agrarian world, while Spanish is the language of political life, and both Matsigenka and Quechua predominate in domestic contexts—though of course, these are ideological rather than empirical associations, and there is quite a bit of variation in practice. For a detailed sociolinguistic description of Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish in Yokiri, see Emlen (Reference Emlen2014).

The families of Yokiri, who were mostly unknown to each other before the formation of the community, came together to claim the valley (one of the last uncolonized patches of land in the region) through the legal protections of the comunidades nativas law. In this manner, their legal designation as a comunidad nativa preceded their formation as a ‘community’ in the social organizational sense (see Killick Reference Killick2008 for a similar process among Ashéninkas in Central Peru). Indeed, while kinsmen visited each other frequently, hunted together, shared meat, and aided each other in ayni ‘reciprocal labor’, they seldom engaged in such activities with nonkin in Yokiri—in fact, many had never even seen the houses of their nonkin neighbors, in some cases after inhabiting the same hillside for decades. This disposition toward family-level autonomy and lack of engagement with nonkin Yokiriños is reflected in Yokiri's extremely dispersed settlement pattern: in 2012, fewer than 100 people lived in nineteen houses spread out across 3,390 hectares (13.09 square miles, roughly the size of the island of Manhattan below Harlem). Until recently, Yokiriños rarely came together from their far-flung homes to participate with nonkin in activities such as anniversary celebrations, faenas ‘community work parties', and asambleas.

These patterns are consistent with the so-called ‘family-level’ of social organization that has been documented among some segments of Matsigenka society from the earliest records (A. Johnson Reference Johnson2003), and that are common among other indigenous groups in the eastern Andean slopes (e.g. Ashéninkas (Hvalkof & Veber Reference Hvalkof and Veber2005; Killick Reference Killick2007) and Asháninkas (Varese Reference Varese2002:25)). The family-level typological classification was proposed by Julian Steward in his description of the Great Basin Shoshonean people: ‘a family, alone and unaided, could obtain virtually all the food it consumed; manufacture all its clothing, household goods, and other articles; rear and train its children without assistance; take care of its sick except in time of crisis; be self-sufficient in its religious activities; and, except on special occasions, manage its own recreation’ (Reference Steward1955:103). This lifestyle is well suited for subsistence in the Alto Urubamba, as well as for defense against the periodic incursions of outsiders that have ravaged the region, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Gade Reference Gade1972; Camino Reference Camino1977; Rosengren Reference Rosengren1987; Gow Reference Gow1991). In Yokiri as elsewhere, these principles of social organization have also accompanied a tendency to avoid expressions of anger and aggression (A. Johnson Reference Johnson, Renshon and Duckitt1999; Izquierdo & Johnson Reference Izquierdo and Johnson2007), and to resolve disputes with nonkin by simply disengaging from conflicts and, often, moving away (O. Johnson Reference Johnson1978; Rosengren Reference Rosengren, Overing and Passes2000; Rosengren Reference Rosengren2003).

But across the Alto Urubamba region, the introduction of the comunidad nativa political structure since the mid 1970s has led many Matsigenka people to engage in sustained supra-family social commitments. Higher levels of social integration have existed among the ancestors of today's MatsigenkasFootnote ¹ and other people in the eastern Andean slopes at various moments (Rosengren Reference Rosengren1987; Renard-Casevitz Reference Renard-Casevitz1993; Killick Reference Killick2007), often in response to external threats and pressures (e.g. Brown & Fernández Reference Brown and Fernández1991), but in most cases these have been temporary. The comunidades nativas law, by contrast, has introduced an enduring social organizational template modeled on the nucleated peasant villages of the Andean highlands (comunidades campesinas), a structure that was foreign to many Amazonians' traditional principles of social organization (Veber Reference Veber1998:394; Rosengren Reference Rosengren2003:230; Killick Reference Killick2008) (some Yokiriño families, however, had experience with such arrangements in the highlands and in the nearby Dominican mission at Chirumbia). Many of these principles are prescribed by the legal structure itself: members of comunidades nativas own their land and certain goods collectively, petition the government as a corporate body, recognize an estatuto ‘bylaws' for the administration of the community and its resources, elect a presidente ‘president’ (also known as a jefe) and other positions of leadership, and deliberate issues of community concern in the asamblea. Community members are also required to participate in faenas, regular work parties in which all of the community's men (and sometimes its women, during a busy harvest) put aside work in their own plots and invest a full day's labor on a communal project such as repairing the road or maintaining a community agricultural plot. These new community-level responsibilities and privileges create a novel type of political subject—the comunero ‘community member’—who contributes to the public good and expects the same commitment from others. The observation of these public responsibilities, which make demands of private individuals and intrude on personal autonomy, is often described in the idiom of sacrificio ‘sacrifice’ (discussed more below), which is regarded as an important personal virtue within the political and moral framework of the comunidad nativa. The aggregate measure of the comuneros' willingness to sacrifice their private interests for the benefit of the collectivity is referred to in terms of its organización ‘organization’, a quality that is highly valued as the foundation of political modernity, upward mobility, and national integration.

Participation in the comunidad nativa system, however, has not caught on quickly in many Matsigenka communities in the Alto Urubamba (Rosengren Reference Rosengren1987, Reference Rosengren2003; A. Johnson Reference Johnson2003). In most of the communities I visited in 2009–2012, only a small proportion of the residents attended asambleas, faenas, and other activities involving coordination beyond kin groups. In the communities that held regular asambleas at all, only a handful of the comuneros usually attended and participated, and most important decisions were made in private conversations rather than in the asamblea (for a similar case in Piro communities, see Gow Reference Gow1991:206–11). In some communities the only attendees at community events were members of the presidente's family, suggesting that the comunidad nativa governing structure had simply been absorbed into the kinship-based system (Veber Reference Veber1998:401).

But while the comunidad nativa system has not thrived in much of the Alto Urubamba, the situation in Yokiri in 2011–2012 was very different: attendance at asambleas and faenas was nearly perfect, and when a person did not turn up, comuneros from across the kin groups expressed concern for the person's wellbeing and, often, irritation at their absence. When a man failed to appear at a faena, his absence was recorded by the secretario ‘secretary’ and reported in the next asamblea where he was made to either justify his absence, pay a fine, or arrange to make up his day's labor in communal work (indeed, it was common to see a lone man working off his debt in the communal coffee plantation in the days after such asambleas). Yokiri's high degree of organización, which was noted with admiration by neighboring Andean settlers and the municipality's agricultural extension agents, was a point of great pride among Yokiriños concerned with the widely held stereotype of Matsigenkas as antisocial and opposed to socioeconomic development. Observing Yokiri's determined implementation of community-level social organization, one neighboring Andean man remarked to me in Spanish with surprise: ¡los nativos son casi más organizados que nosotros! ‘the natives are almost more organized than we are!’

THE CREATION OF A PRIVATE/PUBLIC DISTINCTION

Yokiri's notable community-level organización is accomplished through the establishment and careful maintenance of a distinction between private (family) and public (community) domains of social life. The private/public dichotomy is a principle of semiotic differentiation (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) that runs through daily life in Yokiri and gives meaning to all manner of experiences and cultural practices, as described by Susan Gal: ‘the ideology of public/private divides spaces, moralities, types of people, activities, and linguistic practices into opposed categories' (2005:24); see also Gal (Reference Gal2002). For instance, certain spaces in Yokiri are conceived as public (e.g. the salón comunal ‘community meeting hall’ and the communal coffee plantation), as defined in opposition to the private spaces of the homes and family plots. Private and public spaces are normatively associated with different regimes of morality and social commitment: discourse and work in public spaces are organized around the virtues of sacrificio and community-level organización (which are themselves connected to modernity, participation in the agricultural economy, and the Peruvian nation), while social and cultural practices in private spaces are based in obligations to kinsmen. I argue below that these spaces and domains are also connected to ideologies of language (Hill Reference Hill, Gal and Woolard2001:90–93), in which Spanish is deemed fit for public discourse, Quechua is associated with commercial relationships on the agricultural frontier, and both Matsigenka and Quechua are used for private communication in domestic contexts (depending on the sociolinguistic background of each family). As in so many societies (e.g. Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo, Rosaldo and Lamphere1974; Landes Reference Landes1998), the private/public dichotomy is also a gendered distinction in Yokiri, and men tend to engage in community-level activities to a greater degree than women. For instance, men usually represent their households in the public labor of faenas while women stay home to look after the children, attend to domestic tasks, and cultivate garden crops; however, women sometimes also participate in faenas as cooks, which is considered the most domestic (i.e. private) form of public labor. In this manner, the gendered private/public distinction is subject to a fractally recursive projection (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) within the domain of public labor itself (Gal Reference Gal2005:26–28). The distinction between private and public spaces in Yokiri is also projected outward in the opposition between community and noncommunity: just as Yokiriños wait patiently on the trailhead rather than approach the private domestic areas of nonkin, outside visitors to Yokiri's asamblea are usually made to wait on the roadside (sometimes all day) before being invited inside to what is, by nature of their status as non-Yokiriños, a private event.

THE ASAMBLEA: CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH PUBLIC DISCOURSE

The asamblea takes place every month, and normally only comuneros are welcome to attend, though occasionally municipal officials, coffee merchants, schoolteachers, and neighboring settlers are invited to discuss particular issues. The primary social function of the asamblea is to institute community-level social organization through the careful differentiation of the private and public domains; indeed, the event is largely dedicated to the negotiation and policing of that boundary. This policing also goes on in other contexts such as faenas, celebrations, and countless other supra-kin interactions, and institutionalized forums such as the asamblea are not the only site of politics (Myers & Brenneis Reference Myers, Brenneis, Brenneis and Myers1984:3); however, Yokiriños understand it to be the most important and salient expression of community-hood. The asamblea is ideologically structured as a ‘public’, in Habermas's (Reference Habermas1989) sense of a forum, equally accessible to all community members, in which ‘groups of private individuals gather to discuss matters of common political concern… on the basis of reason rather than the relative status of the interactants' (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal, Woolard, Gal and Woolard2001:5). To be a comunero is to have—in theory—an equal stake in the determination of community policies regardless of personal characteristics such as gender, seniority, and kin-group affiliation, and to have the right and responsibility, according to Article 7 of Yokiri's bylaws, to intervenir con voz y voto ‘intervene with voice and vote’ (Comunidad Nativa de Yoquiri 1990) in community decisions.Footnote ²

But of course, public spheres are always ideological and idealized rather than empirical constructs (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal, Woolard, Gal and Woolard2001:6), and in practice they can have the paradoxical effect of reproducing and institutionalizing relations of inequality (Fraser Reference Fraser1990). Indeed, personal characteristics can never be fully purified from the public self, and despite the ideological construction of the asamblea in terms of universal participation, not every Yokiriño has equal access to political participation. Men speak more frequently than women and occupy most of the positions of community leadership; the oldest community members who do not speak Spanish well are also at a disadvantage in the arena of public discourse, and young members are either not welcome to voice their opinions or do not feel comfortable asserting themselves among their elders. Additionally, some people who descend from Andean settlers are occasionally challenged as illegitimate participants within the context of the Amazonian comunidad nativa. As a result, despite the great amount of discursive work that goes into realizing the universalist ideology of the public, in practice the comuneros do not all have equal presence in the asamblea.

Asamblea discourse itself is a central mechanism for constituting what Warner (Reference Warner and Calhoun1992:377) calls the ‘public subjectivity’ of the comunero. Because the asamblea is, at its essence, a framework for engagements between nonkin community members, the very act of attending the event both presupposes and entails (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003) the existence of community-level social organization in Yokiri. In other words, the political subject of the comunero is interpellated through participation in the event itself (Warner Reference Warner2005:77–78): consciousness of community belonging is enacted as private individuals make the long trek from their widely dispersed homes to deliberate collective concerns in the public space, as comuneros. For this reason, the often intense and acrimonious conflicts that take place in Yokiri's asamblea are not evidence of the failure of the community's public sphere, but of its success. Members of other comunidades nativas with little tradition of public participation simply do not attend such events.

The regimentation of the asamblea around the ideology of the public can be seen in the physical arrangement of the space of the salón comunal itself: the comuneros sit on low wooden-plank benches around the periphery of the room, where everyone has equal access to the floor, rather than in rows of pew-like benches facing a central podium as in other communities. People generally sit wherever they can find a space and make little attempt to segregate themselves by kin group. The egalitarian structure of the public forum also manifests in gestures toward gender equality: as the comuneros take their seats, the elected leaders move about the room loosely enforcing a policy of alternating male-female seating order. This is a deliberate departure from most other contexts in Yokiri in which men and women tend to gather in gender-segregated groups, and from meetings in other comunidades nativas in which men and women tend to sit apart from one another (see, for instance, Baksh Reference Baksh1984:417–18 and Beier Reference Beier2010:384)—though, as mentioned above, the gendered disparity in participation remains significant. The elected dirigentes ‘elected leaders’, who usually don the green or tan municipal employee vests that serve as highly visible signs of power, authority, and access to influential outsiders, sit behind a large wooden table on one side of the room. Significantly, the salón comunal doubles as a classroom for the school—one of the primary institutions through which the community interacts with the world beyond its borders—and the walls are decorated with multiplication tables, portraits of Peruvian heroes, a large hand-written poster displaying the lyrics of the Peruvian himno nacional ‘national anthem’, and other signifiers of modernity and national belonging.

SPANISH AS THE LANGUAGE OF PUBLIC LIFE

The predominant language of the asamblea, and of Yokiri's public life in general, is Spanish. A representative example of public Spanish discourse in (1) comes from a speech in 2012 in which the presidente attempted to recruit his fellow comuneros to attend a meeting in the nearby settlement of Huillcapampa, so that they could entreat the municipal government to move forward with plans to build a new health post on their side of the Yavero river. As in most instances of public discourse, the presidente uses the ‘official talk’ discourse genre (described below) and invokes the principles of democratic participation as well as the ideology of community-level commitment.

1. (1)

   

While such public Spanish discourse is very common, the use of Matsigenka and Quechua in these contexts is rare and is usually seen as inappropriate. This division of linguistic practices partakes of the same ideological principle of private/public differentiation that organizes other domains of social practice in Yokiri: only Spanish is fit for community-level discourse, while Matsigenka and Quechua are generally reserved for private discourse among kin (though, as mentioned earlier, Quechua is also associated with commercial and social interactions with neighboring Andean settlers and coffee merchants). Two ideological features of Spanish qualify it as suitable for public discourse in Yokiri: first, since its arrival in the region is understood to be relatively recentFootnote ³ and it is thus not associated with any subset of the community as an ethnically-marked ‘mother tongue’, it is seen as impartial and consistent with the participatory ideology of the Habermasian public. Second, the use of Spanish (and the ‘official talk’ discourse genre in particular) creates indexical associations to public political institutions across the region and beyond, and thereby asserts the type of authority exercised in those institutions. These two ideological dimensions of Spanish as a language of public discourse are discussed in turn.

Unlike Matsigenka and Quechua, which are associated with either side of a deep historical conflict between indigenous Matsigenka people and Andean settlers (the history, of course, is far more complex than this dichotomy suggests—these are local ideological formulations rather than empirically delimitable ‘groups’), Spanish is understood to be a new feature of the linguistic landscape and, consequently, unconnected to claims of historically rooted ethnic affiliation. While in the Andes Spanish is associated with centuries of violence and oppression (e.g. Mannheim Reference Mannheim, Boone and Cummins1998), Yokiriños have a longer and more intimate historical experience of domination by Quechua speakers. It is this (relative) freedom from partial and exclusionary associations that makes Spanish fit for public discourse in a community that conceives of itself as multi-ethnic: because Spanish is noone's, it can be everyone's. This is an important element of the ideological construct of the public, in which rational and transparent debate must be conducted in a neutral and universally accessible language lest private and partial interests jeopardize its integrity. Such ideologies of language are common, for instance, among some English-speaking voters in California in the 1980s who feared that Spanish-English bilingual ballots would introduce divisive partiality into what is meant to be an open and transparent democratic process (Woolard Reference Woolard1989). Similarly, national standardization movements often seek to institutionalize a public language that is seen as ethnically unmarked or ‘unnative’ (Errington Reference Errington and Kroskrity2000:206), and thus ostensibly disinterested and free from private, partial, ethnic, or regional commitments—that is, these languages can serve the purposes of national integration insofar as they belong to ‘everyone-because-noone-in-particular’ (Gal Reference Gal, Gal and Woolard2001:33; see also Warner Reference Warner1990).

Yokiri's Spanish-only culture of public speech is different from that of the neighboring Andean settler communities, where everyone speaks and understands Quechua, and where some of the older residents do not speak much Spanish. In these communities, Quechua and Spanish are acceptable in public speech because they both serve the function of (near-)universal accessibility and because neither language is associated with a particular ethnically marked subset of the community. For this reason, speeches given in Quechua and Spanish in the nearby Andean settlement of Estrella during the visit of the municipal authorities in 2012 were considered perfectly acceptable—for instance, in (2) a man code-switched between Spanish and Quechua discourse in a plea for a road (Quechua discourse is underlined).

1. (2)

   

But while this use of Quechua public speech was acceptable and unremarkable in neighboring Andean settler communities, in Yokiri it would have been considered a provocative transgression of the community's public discursive space, regardless of the fact that most Yokiriños understand Quechua. Such incidents are not unknown in Yokiri, however: tensions mounted in one asamblea when a comunero with close ties to the rural agrarian society and economy asserted his superior knowledge of agriculture by embedding a brief Quechua statement about cash cropping in a larger exhortative speech in Spanish. This was offensive for two reasons: first, not all of the comuneros understand Quechua well, so it violated the public accessibility requirement. Second, the man's use of Quechua laid bare an uncomfortable truth about Yokiri: while Quechua is widely spoken among the comuneros, it is also associated with an invasive economic and social system that Yokiriños regard with great ambivalence. And insofar as the comunidad nativa system was established to protect indigenous Amazonians from the encroachment of Andean settlers, the presence of Quechua in Yokiri—and particularly in the asamblea, the heart of the community's political identity—is a reminder of the painful recent history of Andean colonization. By contrast, the use of Matsigenka also violates the asamblea's principle of universal participation, since some Yokiriños—particularly those from the highlands of Paucartambo, the coffee plantations of the Yavero Valley, and the nearby Dominican mission—do not understand Matsigenka as well as the others. Thus, even though the community is ideologically and legally constructed around the ethnic category of ‘Matsigenka’, competence in the Matsigenka language is too thinly distributed for it to serve the Habermasian function of universally accessible public discourse in the asamblea. The transgression of this boundary, however, can also serve a potent strategic function: if the use of Quechua in the public space of the asamblea represents a challenge to Yokiri's legitimacy as an indigenous Amazonian community, the use of Matsigenka can assert Matsigenka ethnicity as a necessary criterion of belonging (and thus implicitly challenge the legitimacy of comuneros who count Andean settlers among their parents and grandparents). These complexities in Yokiri's ideologies of public discourse are the product of the community's particular history, and are therefore different from those of both the neighboring Andean settlements and other Matsigenka communities across the region (such as the one discussed below).

In addition to its ideological construction as a neutral, nonpartisan language, Spanish—in particular the register of ‘official Spanish’ that is closely connected to the discourse genre of ‘official talk’—also serves the functions of public asamblea discourse through its association with such discursive contexts outside of Yokiri. Meetings across the country, from the neighboring Andean settler communities to the floor of the Peruvian Congress, are conducted in the genre of official talk, and Yokiriños entextualize it in order to invoke and assert the mode of authority exercised in such contexts (Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Bauman1992). This effect is heightened by the community leaders' municipal employee vests and the countless other signifiers of officialdom and Peruvian-ness draping the schoolroom walls, which serve to minimize the indexical distance (Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Bauman1992) between the asamblea and the widely recognized ‘official public meeting’ event-type (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2005). The institutionalization of Spanish as the language of democratic debate and bureaucratic procedure is taken further by its codification in the community's bylaws, according to which ‘every act must be recorded in Spanish in an authorized notebook, [and] the president, the secretary of the communal assembly, and no fewer than five other people must sign the acts' (Comunidad Nativa de Yoquiri 1990:6, translation mine, emphasis added)—a textual regime that, in Hill's words, ‘index[es] rationality over emotional commitment’ (2001:91). In these ways, the use of the official Spanish register and the invocation of the official talk genre help establish the community public by creating interdiscursive links between Yokiri's asamblea and other such institutions across Peru.

Official talk is a particularly monologic discourse genre, normally performed while standing, in which a single speaker holds the floor for a period that can range from less than a minute to more than twenty minutes. Speakers usually begin their speech with an opening formula in which they acknowledge their fellow comuneros, and in some cases the presidente and other members of the directors' council, as addressees. When prominent noncommunity members visit Yokiri, speakers often explicitly recognize them as well. A typical example of such an opening formula, given in (3), comes from a 2011 asamblea in which a woman rose to give a report on her recent trip to the education ministry (such opening formulas can also be seen in transcripts (7), (8), and (11) below). Notably, this speaker is the presidente's mother, but she refers to her son here as Señor jefe de la comunidad ‘Mr. president of the community’, a common strategy for downplaying private kin associations (discussed below).

1. (3) Ante todos, compañeros, comuneros y comuneras, Señor jefe de la comunidad, tengan muy buenos días.

   ‘Before all of you, my friends, [male and female] community members, Mr. president of the community, good morning.’

The speeches are normally brief and succinct, and are addressed to the asamblea as a group rather than to specific individuals (what Warner (Reference Warner and Calhoun1992:378) calls ‘impersonal reference’, a central feature of public discourse). Most speeches end with a statement of conclusion or thanks, as in eso sería todo, compañeros ‘that is all, my friends’ in (1) above, and in one woman's closing of a 2011 speech in (4) below (other examples can be found at the end of transcripts (7) and (11)). Some of these speeches are followed by light applause.

1. (4) Esa sería mi palabra, muchas gracias a todos.

   ‘That's my word [i.e. message], thank you very much to everyone.’

With few exceptions, official talk in Yokiri is conducted in Spanish, with virtually no code-switching in Matsigenka or Quechua (Yokiri is unlike other Matsigenka communities in this respect, as I discuss below). The ‘official Spanish’ register is immediately recognizable by people across the region and includes features and constructions not normally used in other interactional contexts, such as the indirect first person construction mi persona ‘my person’, for example, éste es un regalo de mi persona para la comunidad ‘this is a gift from me (lit. ‘from my person’) for the community’. Public speeches also often feature the address term compañeros (as can be seen in transcripts (1), (2), (3), (7), and (8)), which can be glossed as ‘my friends’ or ‘my companions’, and which invokes a sense of egalitarian solidarity with other comuneros. Speakers also maintain their audience's attention by punctuating their speech with brief interrogative constructions, which add a sense of dialogism into otherwise overwhelmingly monologic stretches of discourse. These consist of questions that the speaker poses and then immediately answers (as in (5), excerpted from transcript (7) below), or simply ¿no? ‘no?’ or ¿no es así? ‘isn't that right?’ (as in both (5) and (6), excerpted from transcript (8) below).

1. (5) Tal vez no lo hemos hecho hasta hoy, ¿no? ¿Por qué? Por los motivos de que siempre hemos estado pues en dificultades…

   ‘Perhaps we haven't done it until today, no? Why? Because we have always had difficulties…’

2. (6) Como me estoy escuchando todo cómo se llama este los que están presentes-¿no?- ya creo que ya [ha puesto] un torete, ¿no?

   ‘Since I've been listening to everyone present- no?- I think someone [pledged] a bull, no?’

As discussed above, the use such features of Spanish official talk positions the asamblea in the context of other public forums across Peru. It is therefore worth pointing out the most salient local model of the genre, which is produced by the municipal officials and functionaries that visit Yokiri periodically, and who are the immediate exemplars of the sort of democratic political modernity enacted in asambleas. For instance, in 2012 a local regidor ‘councilman’ stood and gave a long speech during the laying of the first stone for Yokiri's new municipally funded salón comunal (excerpted in (7)), and deployed many of the features described above (monologic participant structure, opening and closing formulas, frequent use of the address term compañeros, and brief interrogative constructions that introduce a sense of dialogism) in the service of modern political themes such as infrastructure development and engagement between the community and the local government.

1. (7)

   

Such instances of Spanish official talk by influential and politically modern outsiders represent important prototypes for public speech in Yokiri.

PERFORMING SACRIFICIO AND POLICING THE PRIVATE/PUBLIC BOUNDARY

As a practical matter, the primary social function of the asamblea is to coordinate community action and mediate relationships among members of different kin groups (e.g. the planning of faenas, the organization of community celebrations, decisions about the community's stance toward outsiders, the distribution of public goods, etc.). Nearly all such concerns are organized around enforcing each family's commitment to the collectivity (i.e. the fulfillment of their duties as comuneros) and ensuring that each family benefits equally from community membership.

The asamblea, then, can be seen as an extended litigation of the boundary between the private (kin) and the public (community) domains, and in particular as a context for enacting and monitoring the form of morality expressed by the virtue of sacrificio described above. Indeed, the performance of sacrificio, in which comuneros recount the hardships they have endured on behalf of the community, is a major discursive theme in the asamblea. An example of such a performance is a speech delivered by a woman who had been appointed as the community's radio operator because of the proximity of her home to the antenna, and who listens to the transmissions and takes messages every morning and evening. In 2011 she stood before the asamblea and described the great burden this public responsibility put on her—but, crucially, that she had borne this sacrificio without complaint or expectation of anything in return. This sort of unhesitating generosity is understood as a virtuous act within the moral context of community social organization, and such proclamations are frequently deployed (as in this case) to insinuate an opposing kin group's dereliction in their own communal responsibilities. Dirigentes also frequently recount their sacrificios in the idiom of sufrimiento ‘suffering’—for instance, in the presidente's statement during an asamblea, yo he sufrido mucho por esta comunidad ‘I have suffered greatly for this community’. These performances of sacrificio and sufrimiento invoke the moral ideologies of public action and serve an important role in building commitment to the collectivity.

The most spectacular performance of sacrificio I witnessed in Yokiri was during the planning of the festivities for the community's patron saint, Santa Rosa of Lima. The comuneros contribute material supplies for such events, and the two major kin groups of Yokiri use them as an opportunity to out-do each other with lavish acts of public sacrifice. In this asamblea, in which a few municipal officials were present, members of each household stood and publicly stated what they would contribute to the next year's celebrations. Hernán, a prominent member of one of the two main kin groups, keyed the genre of official talk by beginning with an opening formula as discussed above, and by using features such as the honorific second person forms. In (8) he pledged to donate a bull to be slaughtered for the next year's celebration, and used his act of selflessness to accuse the opposing kin group, as well as the municipal official, of stinginess.

1. (8)

   

The contribution of a bull, which can cost more than 1,000 soles (around $350 dollars at the time), is a major act in Yokiri. The speaker's dramatic display of sacrificio, and his defiant and confrontational tone, positioned him and his kin group as a dominant force in the community and as an exemplar of virtue in the moral context of the community public.

NO TENGO NI MAMÁ NI PAPÁ: THE SUPPRESSION OF KIN ALLEGIANCES

If the moral space of the asamblea is organized around the subordination of private interests to those of the community, the expression of kin allegiances in that context can be hazardous. For this reason, another major theme in the asamblea is performing the separateness of family and community commitments. However, one of the fundamental structural tensions within the tiny community of Yokiri is that the presidente and the other dirigentes—the people responsible for enforcing the prioritization of community action over kin-based allegiances—are themselves members of kin groups with their own interests and agendas. The leaders are keenly aware of the danger that this poses to their legitimacy, and they make great efforts to avoid the appearance of impropriety by foregrounding the separateness of their public and private commitments. This is accomplished through innumerable acts of semiotic differentiation, including the use of Spanish official talk to assert the kin-neutral nature of the asamblea and the discursive disavowal of kin commitments. For example, while in most contexts Yokiriños refer to their kinsmen almost exclusively with kin terms, in the asamblea they use the same honorific constructions that they use for nonkin (such as example (3) above, in which a woman addressed to her son, the president of the community, as Señor jefe de la comunidad ‘Mr. president of the community’). On another occasion (see (9)), the presidente listed the names of several community members, and only used the honorific title Señor ‘Mr.’ for his own father, Aníbal.

1. (9) …cuarto, Julián; quinto, Santiago; como sexto tenemos al Señor Aníbal; séptimo Mario…

   ‘…fourth, Julián; fifth, Santiago; as the sixth we have Mr. Aníbal; seventh, Mario…’

These practices of semiotic differentiation entail a public populated by comuneros rather than kinsmen, and reassure members of the other kin groups that the elected officials can be trusted to act in the interest of the collectivity rather than their families.

An example of the delicate negotiation of kin and community commitments was a conflict between Yokiri's two major kin groups that developed in 2012. The foreman of a municipal construction crew working in Yokiri needed a cook for his workers, and prominent women from each of the two major kin groups declared their interest in being hired. It fell to the asamblea and the presidente to choose which of the women would get the prestigious and remunerative job; however, one of the nominees was the presidente's kin, which presented a clear conflict of interest. This dispute went unresolved for several days, slowly building into a wider conflict over other perceived violations of private/public boundary, until it finally came to a head in a fistfight (almost unheard of in Matsigenka communities) between the husbands of the two women. This rare outburst of violence precipitated an unusually frank public discussion about the management of private and public commitments. During the meeting the presidente made a long and emotional plea on behalf of community organización, and after delivering a withering (and studiously equal-handed) reproof to both parties, he reaffirmed the boundary between private and public spheres by promising to leave his own kin-level commitments out of community matters. In his words: en la asamblea, no tengo ni mamá ni papá ‘in the asamblea, I have neither a mother nor a father’—that is, in the public space of the community forum, there are no kinsmen, only comuneros.

YOKIRI'S PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The role of public discourse in Yokiri's enactment of community-level social organization becomes particularly clear when it is compared with corresponding practices in other comunidades nativas of the Alto Urubamba. The example that follows comes from a larger and more remote community that has just begun to interact regularly with outsiders over the last several years. Here, the public/private semiotic principle has not been firmly established as a framework for sorting the domains of community and family commitments, for dividing spaces and sociolinguistic practices, and for enforcing the new type of morality—characterized by sacrificio and the suppression of kin allegiances—associated with the public political subject of the comunero.

For the community's 2011 anniversary, the dirigentes planned an ambitious multi-day celebration featuring a soccer tournament, speeches, drinking, feasting, and dancing. Municipal officials and other local dignitaries were invited, and the comuneros were expected to bring masato ‘manioc beer’ for the guests and carry on the merriment for as long as they could last. The celebrations appeared to be successful during the first afternoon, but when the party turned indoors for speeches, dancing, and the distribution of soccer jerseys, the crowd began to thin. The remaining comuneros sat with their kin and talked among themselves in Matsigenka instead of listening to the speeches, and the dirigentes had to shout over the din to make themselves heard. Eventually, once the jerseys had been distributed, the remaining comuneros began to file out of the salón comunal and walk home. This was embarrassing for the dirigentes, and the presidente in particular, because it suggested that the community lacked organización and effective leadership. As the comuneros rose to leave, a panicked leader shouted the plaintive appeal in (10a–b) (Spanish in plain text, Matsigenka underlined).

1. 1. (10)a. Señores comuneros por favor, gara piaigai, tera ontsonkatempa, por favor…

      ‘Fellow community members please, don't leave, it's not over [yet], please…’

   2. b. Suplico a cada uno de ustedes, quedan invitados para poder iniciar este  aniversario que concierne con nuestro [X] años de vida institucional.

      ‘I beg each of you, you are invited so that we can begin this anniversary for our [X] years of institutional life.’

This plea for participation illustrates the fragile nature of the community, as well as some of the discursive strategies that leaders deploy in its defense. For instance, the speaker explicitly invoked the moral domain of the community public by addressing the attendees as comuneros (10a) and by referring repeatedly to the institutional structure that unites them. He also framed his discourse as public by deploying Spanish official talk, as indicated by the opening formula señores comuneros, por favor… ‘fellow community members, please…’ (10a). Recognizing that his addressees were likely to be unmoved by these entreaties to community participation, however, he switched to Matsigenka to make a personal and intimate appeal outside of the frame of public discourse: gara piaigai, tera ontsonkatempa ‘don't leave, it's not over [yet]’ (10a). In this utterance, code-switching served as a contextualization cue (Gumperz Reference Gumperz1982) signaling the alteration between two ‘voices’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Bakhtin1981), each connected to distinct ideologies and moral regimes (Hill Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995); through Spanish, he inhabited the position of the official leader whose authority lies in a powerful but foreign system of public value, while through Matsigenka, he stepped outside of this position to speak as a kinsman, friend, and neighbor who, along with his audience, also regards this system from the outside.

Such discursive practices are common in this community, and many dirigentes code-switch between Spanish and Matsigenka to assert both modes of authority. For instance, during the same evening a few current and former dirigentes delivered speeches to the remaining comuneros. They were frustrated and embarrassed by what they saw as the failure of the event, and some used their speeches to admonish their fellow comuneros and exhort them to take community involvement more seriously. To make this point, a former leader recounted the difficulties of the land titling process to illustrate the sacrificio and sufrimiento that he had endured on behalf of the community (see (11)). As in (10a–b) above, this speech is characterized by frequent Spanish-Matsigenka code-switching as the speaker moves between the two modes of social authority (Spanish in plain type, Matsigenka underlined).

1. (11)

   

In this emotional speech, the former dirigente blamed the assembled community members for the disappointing anniversary celebration (e.g. sentence 14, viroegita kañoigankitsi, comuneros ‘you are the guilty ones, comuneros’), a failure that he interpreted in terms of a disrespect for the community as an institution and a general unwillingness to meet the moral obligations of the comunero. The speaker relates this message through the careful management of voice and authority, in particular through his code-switching practices. First, he invokes the public authority of the community by framing his remarks as a performance of public official talk, as in the opening (sentence 1) and closing (sentence 21) formulas described above. He also uses Spanish to highlight concepts linked to the comunidad nativa social structure, for instance es una celebración conmemorativo [sic] ‘it's a commemorative celebration’ (sentence 18) and hemos tenido título ‘we got the title’ (sentence 19). The speech also makes frequent references to sufrimiento and sacrificio (e.g. tenika patsipereigero viro pero sí naroegi natsipereaventaigakero ‘you haven't suffered, but we [exclusive] have suffered…’, sentence 15) that invoke the morality of the community public.

As above, the speaker frequently switches between Matsigenka and Spanish to maintain a foot in both domains of authority. For instance, in some cases he frames his utterances as official talk through the use of Spanish discourse markers, and then continues his utterance in Matsigenka to appeal to his audience in a more personal manner. For instance, in (12) (from sentence 4) he established his utterance as official talk with a loud Spanish de repente ‘perhaps’, followed by Matsigenka discourse.

1. (12) De repente viroegi yoga ikyari kimoiganagitsi te pineaigena.

   ‘Perhaps you young ones don't know who I am.’

Similarly, in (13) (from sentence 9) the speaker keyed the frame of official talk by shouting the Spanish discourse marker sin embargo ‘regardless, nevertheless’ over the din before making a personal and emotional appeal to his audience in Matsigenka.

1. (13) Sin embargo, noneavetaro maika ontirika pikisaigaka onti kisaigankicha yonta  tera impokaige ahorita.

   ‘Regardless, from my perspective it seems that you're angry, and the ones who  are angry didn't come now.’

A similar discursive strategy is the pairing of a Spanish utterance that reconfirms the speaker's position of official authority with a Matsigenka utterance that aligns the speaker with his audience. For instance, in both (14a–b) (sentences 2–3) and (15) (sentence 19) the speaker assumes the official voice to introduce the subject of land titling, and then uses Matsigenka to reflect upon the importance of that subject from the perspective of his kinsmen and fellow comuneros in the audience.

1. 1. (14)a. En el año [X] sale el titulo de propiedad de [community name].

      ‘In the year [X] we got the property title for the community of [community name].’

   2. b. Ovashi otimanunganira aka.

      ‘That's why it's here.’

2. (15) Hemos tenido título, game otimi título, tya gaigakero timaigakera?

   ‘We got the title, and if there weren't a title, where would we find to live?’

This discursive strategy allows the leader to assert the legitimacy of the comunidad nativa's fragile community structure while also aligning himself with an audience that is not yet fully committed to it. In a sense, he must come as close as possible to speaking both languages at once if he is to maintain a foot in each domain of authority. In Yokiri, community-level social organization is now taken for granted and the distinction between private and public social, moral, and discursive spaces has been carefully delineated—for this reason, code-switching is rare there. But in this community, public code-switching practices are tied to the incipient nature of the private/public boundary and the still contested nature of collective commitment.