Abstract

The talk explores the mutual resonances of environmental, linguistic, and cultural change. How do ways of speaking and thinking shape the impact of changes such as glacial recession, agrarian reform, and nature conservation? I begin with an overview of spatial language and cognition in Ancash Quechua, drawing on experimental, grammatical, and interactional studies offering convergent evidence that everyday conversation relies on a constant awareness of and orientation to the surrounding physical environment. By juxtaposing these findings with a historical and ethnographic account of environmental engagement in the Cordillera Blanca, I demonstrate several ways in which the particularities of Ancash Quechua speakers’ verbal, cognitive and corporeal senses of their surroundings resonate with environmental changes. Such resonances can amplify the violence that extractive and extraterritorial forms of power do to territorially grounded ways of thinking, speaking, and acting. For example, the limits that nature preserves like the Huascaran National Park put on access to important places can end up eroding the ground for communication in local ways of speaking and thinking, and ultimately help drive a shift from local to hegemonic languages. In conclusion, these resonances have important consequences for the sustainability of environmental, linguistic, and cultural practices and knowledge. 

About the speaker

Joshua Shapero, assistant professor, department of Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology, The University of New Mexico

Free of charge - All are welcome