Swinehart’s ethnography moves across four sites where people work with, and through, Aymara language: two radio stations, the hip hop scene, and a civic ceremony in La Paz, Bolivia. These shifts across ‘Aymara production sites’ evoke the rhythms of life in El Alto, portrayed throughout Voice and Nation.
Through a semiotic approach, the book shows how ‘Aymara language producers’, as part of their work, reflect on grammar and words while actively shaping its use across different contexts. In that, Aymara language work becomes embedded in, and indexical of, broader political processes. This political context, captured through Swinehart’s fieldwork between 2006 and 2019, includes events tied to Bolivia’s political reconfiguration under Evo Morales.
In ‘Radio and song’, the organizing concepts Swinehart uses to divide the book circulate prestige norms about how Aymara should sound through the emergence of an ‘auditory community’. One of the important norms circulating across these sites is that Aymara should sound like rural Aymara life—iconic of both the ‘real’ and the ‘old’ Aymara.
Building on Asif Agha’s theory, these prestige norms are traced through registers: recognizable ways of speaking that index social roles. One key register, perhaps the one that most effectively demonstrates how language and politics intertwine, circulates across radio programming, on-air practices, and hip-hop concerts: the diffusion of a ‘dehispanicized’ Aymara, linked to the iconic rural Aymara life.
With ethnographic detail, Swinehart describes how the team at Radio San Gabriel works on grammar, lexicon, and pronunciation, replacing Spanish loanwords with ‘authentic’ Aymara alternatives. Here, the production of a ‘dehispanicized’ Aymara involves linguistic purification, using both new technologies and, in some cases, older ones such as colonial-era dictionaries.
A homologous process takes place at Radio Pachak’amaq, a more militant station. Swinehart describes how its team plans and performs, on-air, the akulli ritual (the sharing and chewing of coca leaves). Akulli involves conversation, turn-taking, and speaking with respect. Swinehart argues that this aural experience disseminates a semiotic model linking Aymara civic behaviour, linguistic decolonization, and rural identity.
In the world of song, Aymara language is used with semiotic creativity. Playing with the double indexicality of Tupac—the Andean rebel leader and global rap star—El Alto rappers code-switch and blend Aymara with Spanish and other languages. In a rap song titled Mama Koka, Akulli is reclaimed once again, but this time in French: Coca ce n’est pas cocaína. At concerts, Aymara has ‘sonic effects’ with the audience’s identity, even if many don’t understand it.
In the translation of the Bolivian national anthem, the deixis nosotros—the national ‘we’—is replaced with archaic terms like Qullasuyu. This word choice reflects a state attempt to index pre-colonial Andean formations within the plurinational movement. Its performance during a civic ceremony in Jesús de Machaca, commemorating Aymara martyrs killed by the Bolivian state, illustrates both the advances and the limits of this movement.
This is a valuable book for scholars and graduate students in linguistic anthropology, Indigenous languages, semiotic language work, and Latin American Indigenous movements.
