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Public discourse and community formation in a trilingual Matsigenka-Quechua-Spanish frontier community of Southern Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2015

Nicholas Q. Emlen
Nicholas Q. Emlen*
Affiliation:
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Postbus 9515, NL-2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlandsn.q.emlen@hum.leidenuniv.nl
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Abstract

Until recently, the members of a community on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru have tended to limit their social ties to members of their own families. But the residents have begun to forge a ‘community’ through a semiotic distinction between private and public spaces, social practices, and domains of morality. Particular discursive phenomena in the asamblea ‘community meeting’ are deployed to create and maintain the community as a domain of action distinct from kin commitments, and participation in the asamblea offers a context in which to assume a novel political and moral subjectivity. Thus, the social organizational construct of the community is emergent in public interactions. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of public discourse in another comunidad nativa ‘indigenous community’ that has not embraced the notion of ‘community’, and demonstrates how code-switching allows leaders there to invoke both the private and public modes of social authority. (Amazonia, Andes, Matsigenka, Spanish, Quechua)*

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Articles
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Language in Society , Volume 44 , Issue 5 , November 2015 , pp. 679 - 703
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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