This book explores the production of inter-indigenous difference through women’s language practices, principally revolving around four figures of indigenous Andean femininity in the high altiplano region of Puno, Peru, where Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish are all commonly spoken. Narayanan opens the book with a reflection on the gendered nature of lengua materna ‘mother tongue’ and returns to this question in the conclusion by contrasting this with idioma ‘language’. While the mother tongue is understood to be used in practice, its boundaries are not necessarily well-defined, and primarily located in maternal kinship relations. ‘Language’, by contrast, functions as a tool of colonial and state formations, requires a degree of expertise that is typically held by men in positions of authority, and is purist and rigidly separated from other languages. As reflected in the title, it is the mother tongue that is the focus of this book, though purist and institutional framings of the languages are also considered.
The author brings together two lines of literature. First, the book considers contact between and among indigenous languages, which has been of interest in both the literature on linguistic anthropology and the literature on language contact. The second line is the topic of indigenous women and indigenous femininities in the Andes, which has been of enduring interest to scholars (and especially anthropologists) in the region. As has been previously established in this literature, women carry cultural identity in the Andes and are often seen as responsible for maintaining language and culture.
The central theoretical intervention revolves around linguistic anthropological theoretical frameworks, most prominently scale and figures of personhood. I enjoyed this book because there was a good balance of data, discussion, and theory and because the writing was strong. I thought that the theoretical device of scalarity could have been better explained and examined rather than just asserted, as it seemed to peep in and out of the broader discussion. By contrast, the idea of sub-figures of personhood is more interesting and provocative than the author seems to give it credit for. While figures of personhood have been extensively invoked in the linguistic anthropological literature, the idea of alternatives, life stages, or performance-linked figures has not been explored as Narayanan does in this book. I hope this intervention will be taken up and further discussed in the future.
The figures of personhood explored into this book may be divided into two categories of lived experience (brides and wives; market women) and two categories of performance (Mama Uqllu, the mythical mother of highland indigenous people; indigenous beauty queens). In addition, there is a chapter sandwiched among the others that is not about figures of personhood per se but rather about media (radio and newspapers) and the institutions that regiment the production of indigenous difference. While the latter chapter includes the participation and production of women in media, it is as individuals rather than as types.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the lived experiences of brides and wives (chapter 1) and market women (chapter 2). In chapter 1, one of the most interesting discussions in the book shows how norms of indigenous language socialization have shifted; while women continue to be the carriers of culture and language, the author shows through interviews and ethnography that in the past, the bride/wife would assimilate to their patrilocal family, ultimately identifying as ‘only’ Aymara or Quechua according to their husband’s family’s identification. This process entailed a good deal of ‘suffering’ that comes through in these narratives. Conversely, young women raising families today, many of whom have migrated to urban areas, socialize their children to their family’s mother tongue due to decreased ties with the husband’s family; the urban area gives them more freedom in language choice by weakening patrilocal ties.
In chapter 2 Narayanan shows how market women use language flexibly, ‘crossing’ between Quechua and Aymara and using different languages (including Spanish) strategically. While it is almost a necessity to be able to use short phrases at least in all three languages, a refusal to engage in a dispreferred language can also be a way to shut down an interaction. These varieties of Quechua and Aymara are the syncretic oral varieties with significant influence from Spanish, which are looked down upon by the mavens of purist language practices but which form a lively and rich speech community. At the same time, syncretic varieties of Spanish often serve as a lingua franca.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on performances of indigenous femininity through the ritual arrival of Inka founding mother Mama Uqllu and founding father Manqu Qhapaq across the waters of Lake Titicaca, and through tracing the fortunes of indigenous beauty queens whose language use along with their authentic local connections are closely scrutinized. In chapter 4, we learn about the performance of Mama Uqllu, traditionally an Aymara speaker, and Manqu Qhapaq, traditionally a Quechua speaker, during the festivities initiating the planting season of the high altiplano at the beginning of November. Narayanan discusses the constant reinvention of tradition and the ways in which the ceremony is seen as an opportunity to promote Puno as a tourist destination at a national level. Unfortunately, in recent years, as part of this effort, a Lima-based actor cast as Manqu Qhapaq was given a great deal of directorial control and cast prominent Limeña actresses in the role of Mama Uqllu. Tragically, rather than being an idealized indigenous woman of the region—strong, confident, fertile, perhaps a little mean—recent Lima-based actresses have been found lacking not only for their physical characteristics but also for their linguistic deficiencies, producing incomprehensible Aymarized gibberish.
Chapter 5 illustrates the balancing act for young women involved in local indigenous beauty pageants, in which they are meant to be authentically local but at the same time emblems of cultural purity. While excessive linguistic purity is seen as a mark of non-authentic local identity, the contestants can also be criticized for excessively syncretic Quechua or Aymara that includes common loanwords from Spanish. Likewise, the content of the beauty queens’ speeches is scrutinized by judges to ensure that it conforms properly to ideals of local indigenous pride and confidence. Unfortunately, the author wasn’t able to get a lot of direct access to the judges and the beauty queens themselves, but she manages to pack in quite a lot of data from observations of the pageants and responses from audiences and from interviews with the main organizer.
Chapter 3 is unlike the other chapters in that it focuses on the institutionalization of Quechua and Aymara through structures such as public signage, radio programming, bilingual education, and official bodies such as the ministry of Aymara language and culture. While this may seem like a bit of a grab bag of topics, the chapter does a lot of lifting in terms of showing how linguistic purism is a precursor to the sharp distinctions between Quechua and Aymara languages and ethnicities. In all of these contexts, Quechua and Aymara are performed and produced as separate entities that are mediated through Spanish. Even when radio program producers attempt to include both Quechua and Aymara in some of their programming it is felt that the effort is not a success because of a lack of an audience for both Quechua and Aymara (as opposed to each language separately), and the project is ultimately abandoned.
Gender is evoked rather than theorized or critiqued throughout the book; this is where I believe the ‘figures of personhood’ device could have benefited from a more specific framing towards gender, given that the book does indeed demonstrate the many figures can be enacted or applied to indigenous women; indeed, the chapters 1–2 vs. 4–5 split almost perfectly sets up the enacted vs. imposed dichotomy. There is so much that is evocative here, and the centrality of gender identities to the production of indigenous difference comes through very clearly. Though men are not the focus of the book, there are discussions of the ways in which men often overshadow women in the public sphere; public spaces are dominated by men, who also hold a sense of expertise that is typically not shared by women (270–71), despite their role as ‘keepers of culture’. The hegemonic gaze of the national capital and megacity of Lima makes a cameo at a couple points in the book, notably in the conclusion through the gaze of fashion photographer Mario Testino, who produced photographs of indigenous Peruvian women in traditional Andean styles of dress. This serves to underline the ways in which outside observers tend to see indigenous women as fixed, unchanging bearers of culture, erasing differences and the dynamic historical and contemporary interactions and processes that are highlighted throughout this book.
This book is an important contribution to the literature for its rich interrogation of indigeneity, gender, history, and language, and for its interest in the private and public lives of Andean indigenous women. The core of the book examines how women experience Quechua and Aymara as languages and as symbols through interaction and practice. Here we may consider that the question of who counts as a speaker of an indigenous language and how these discourses are produced, negotiated, and disputed is well answered indeed.
