Locating the Wayusa Upina

This article takes place in and around the small town of Archidona (population 5,487), close to the provincial capital of Tena (population 23,307) in Napo, Ecuador.Footnote ² Tena has been the center of indigenous organizing in the region. However, Archidona has grown in importance as increased government funding has enabled new social programs, including the development of various community media and arts initiatives focusing on cultural revival and sustainable development. The regional variety of Quichua often called “Tena Quichua” (Orr and Wrisley Reference Orr1981) is still widely utilized among adults and elders in daily life. However, children and young people in the area face increasing pressure to learn both Spanish and the written standard Unified Kichwa, which are the main languages of bilingual education, government institutions, and much media. Grounded in the norms of highland Quichua dialects, Unified Kichwa often erases the linguistic particularities of lowland Quichua, which has been shaped by intimate interaction with the territory, flora, and fauna of the rainforest and, very likely, by contact with speakers of other Amazonian languages. Since roughly the 1960s, the arrival of major roads, oil and mineral extraction, missionization, formal schooling, and new highland settlers have profoundly reshaped life for many, leading away from forest-based, migratory agriculture and hunting on traditional lands toward nucleated settlements and urban wage labor. In turn, the introduction of Unified Kichwa and bilingual education to help counter the shift toward Spanish has instead created confusion and debate among speakers of regional varieties of Quichua. Today, however, an increasingly elderly generation remembers with deep nostalgia the way life was “before,” while young cultural activists utilize such memories as the basis for enregistering “our own” language and culture in media.

Much of the current discord around language standardization emerges from the complexity of regional language patterns and the intense connection many people feel to their local varieties. The origin of the languages spoken in the Amazonian provinces of Napo, Orellana, Sucumbíos, and Pastaza has been the subject of intense, ongoing debate (Hartmann Reference Hartmann1979; Stark Reference Stark1985; Cerrón-Palomino Reference Cerrón-Palomino1987; Muysken Reference Muysken2009, Reference Muysken2011). At a basic level, the existence of these languages confounds the story that most people know about Quechua, popularly thought of as the language of the Inkas (Mannheim Reference Mannheim1991) and ideologically centered on the Andean highlands. The varieties of Quichua spoken in the lowlands are closely related to highland varieties spoken in present-day Ecuador. However, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical differences are pervasive between the regions, and many in Napo perceive the Quichua spoken in the highlands to be a separate variety. Ecuadorian Quichua belongs to the Quechuan language family, varieties of which are spoken by several million people, with a geographic range that encompasses much of western South American, stretching from southern Colombia to northern Argentina. Although generally referred to simply as Quechua, the language family is diverse, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility among different varieties (Muysken Reference Muysken2000; Heggarty and Beresford-Jones Reference Heggarty2010; Emlen and Adelaar Reference Emlen2017). The language family as a whole is not immediately endangered, but smaller, regional varieties such as those spoken in Napo are threatened both by a shift toward Spanish and by the use of standardized Unified Kichwa in bilingual education programs (see King Reference King2001; Wroblewski Reference Wroblewski2012; Haboud and Limerick Reference Haboud2017; Limerick Reference Limerick2017).

In Napo, one of the primary ways that people use and relate to language on a daily basis is through reference to their regional territories.Footnote ³ However, few people describe themselves or their language as “Quichua,” instead preferring the ethnonym runa ‘being/person’. One of the primary valences of this is ‘human being’, understood to include Napo Quichua and culturally and linguistically related groups, in contrast to auca ‘outsider’ (including some neighboring indigenous groups), mishu ‘mestizo’, and rancia ‘white European/gringo’. To be a Napu runa or an Archi runa is to be culturally Quichua from the Napo river area or from Archidona, respectively. These regional designations are also linked to local varieties of runa shimi ‘human language’. On a daily basis, speakers make very fine distinctions between their different varieties, with some phonological, morphological, and lexical features varying between neighboring communities, as well as between Archidona and Tena. Yet, many of these variations are still poorly described, so that features often taken for granted as diagnostic of different dialects can actually vary quite widely, in ways that are not well documented or analyzed.Footnote ⁴ In this article, I use “Upper Napo Quichua” to discuss both the language and cultural group implicated by the linked designation of Napu runa, Napu shimi used by the majority of my interlocutors, in reference to the varieties spoken in and around Tena and Archidona and through the upper watershed of the Napo River.

The data discussed here are drawn from two years of research in Napo Province on the effects of indigenous media on daily practices, with a particular focus on radio. Between 2015 and 2017, I worked closely with the radio program Mushuk Ñampi, often serving as a guest announcer, as well as with the mayor’s office in the Municipality of Archidona, which funds the program. I attended planning sessions for many of the cultural events they sponsor and received behind the scenes access to beauty pageants and cultural exhibitions in the region, as the hosts of Mushuk Ñampi were frequent MCs at these events. I also carried out regular observations with three other Quichua-language radio programs in Tena. To investigate how cultural performances are produced, I worked closely with the Association of Kichwa Midwives of Upper Napo (Asociación de Mujeres Parteras Kichwas de Alto Napo, or AMUPAKIN). AMUPAKIN gathers local healers and midwives to provide traditional health services, as well as training to a new generation. During my fieldwork they numbered eleven members, the majority of whom are elder Quichua-dominant women, alongside a fluctuating group of children and grandchildren who participate in the organization. In addition to its focus on traditional health, AMUPAKIN is developing as a community tourism organization and participates regularly in cultural exhibitions. Finally, I conducted research on uptake of radio programs and other forms of community media in the rural community of Chawpi Shungu in the multigenerational household of Serafina Grefa.Footnote ⁵ Serafina is a well-known healer and near-monolingual Quichua speaker in her late sixties whom I met through my work with AMUPAKIN, of which she is a long-time member. Serafina regularly participates in cultural performances with others from AMUPAKIN and has appeared on Mushuk Ñampi. I thus bring a complex corpus of interviews, observational, and participatory data together in this study of an enmeshed population of producers and consumers of Quichua radio programs in Napo. This article narrows in on the wayusa upina as a central organizing thread to this multisited research into the use of media for cultural revival.

Quichua speakers in Napo Province have been engaged in linked projects of political sovereignty and cultural revival since at least the 1980s, when many activists began to take part in national pan-indigenous organizing (Macdonald Reference Macdonald1979; Becker Reference Becker2010; Whitten and Whitten Reference Whitten2011). Unification of Ecuador’s multiple varieties of Quichua into the written standard Unified Kichwa has been a significant achievement for indigenous intellectuals, for whom it is one of the central strategies for language revival. In 1988 activists and educators established a national system of intercultural bilingual education (educación intercultural bilingüe, EIB). By 2008, Quichua (as Kichwa) and Shuar were included in the constitution as official languages of intercultural communication (Becker Reference Becker2010; Wroblewski Reference Wroblewski2012; Limerick Reference Limerick2017). For these activists, educators, and a growing class of bilingual Quichua speakers living in urban areas, unification through language standardization has lent ideological strength to the language

However, the written standard levels a range of dialectal diversity. It incorporates many neologisms intended to replace Spanish loanwords and standardizes phonology and morphology through a “deep orthography,” in which numerous regional allophonic and phonological variations are attached to a single grapheme (Limerick Reference Limerick2017). One of the most salient features of language standardization is the replacement of Spanish orthographic qu with k, leading to the new official designation in Ecuador of Kichwa. Despite its significance ideologically and politically, ethnographic research suggests that language standardization has led to numerous contradictions in practice. In Ecuador, bilingual education using Unified Kichwa has led many young students to see their home varieties as “incorrect” in contrast to the norms of the standard (King Reference King2001; Uzendoski Reference Uzendoski2009; Wroblewski Reference Wroblewski2012; Grzech Reference Grzech2017).

I frequently encountered confusion emerging from the use of Unified Kichwa at school and the deep connection many elders feel to their local varieties. The following exchange, which took place between a Spanish-dominant teenager named Anderson; his Quichua-dominant grandmother María Antonia Shiguango, founder of the cultural collective AMUPAKIN; and Roy, another bilingual volunteer at AMUPAKIN, illustrates these difficulties:

For an increasingly vocal population in Napo their language is threatened not just by Spanish, but also by “another” Quichua,Footnote ⁶ an emerging spoken register based on the written standard of Unified Kichwa, with an ideological center in the sierra ‘highlands’. Wroblewski (Reference Wroblewski2012, Reference Wroblewski2014) describes two camps in Tena during the early stages of this debate, when efforts to instill Unified Kichwa as a national standard were reaching their height: those that are pro-Unified Kichwa, who tend to be bilingual and well educated, live in urban areas and spend much of their life speaking Spanish (Reference Wroblewski2014). On the other side, he identifies “dialect-defenders” (Reference Wroblewski2012), many of whom also live in urban areas, but who are “dedicated to reviving an essentialized version of ethnic identity” (Reference Wroblewski2014, 67). Limerick (Reference Limerick2017) also details the conflicts that have emerged within the history of the Unified Kichwa literacy and language standardization movement, showing that encounters with alphabets remain emotionally fraught for many. Both Wroblewski and Limerick provide much needed accounts of the political, ideological, and emotional complexities of institutional revival movements, especially among urban audiences. The present account, however, turns to a primarily rural audience, who comprise a large portion of the group identified as dialect-defenders. It focuses on their use of media to revive local linguistic forms, often called ñukanchi kikin shimi (our own language) alongside the practices of contemporary rural lifeways. These practices are identified as contiguous with ruku kawsay (the lifeways of the elders), which echo through contemporary runa kawsay (the lifeways of the Upper Napo Quichua).

Standardization and Its Discontents

Wroblewski (Reference Wroblewski2014) argues that Tena’s annual Ñusta Wayusa Warmi indigenous beauty pageant have been key sites for EIB educators and political activists to transmit a new spoken register of Unified Kichwa. In these pageants, highly marked elements of indigenous material culture such as “traditional” dress and products derived from forest fauna and flora are prominently displayed on bodies and on stage. As Wroblewski describes, during speaking portions of the Ñusta Wayusa Warmi pageant, “essentialized Napo Kichwa culture is further bundled with relatively new symbols of contemporary indigenous activism and political ideology, namely through the prescribed use of standardized Unified Kichwa” (Reference Wroblewski2014, 74). Wroblewski identifies this speech as an “intercultural code,” incorporating “marked phonological and lexical elements of both local Kichwa dialect and Unified Kichwa” (Reference Wroblewski2014, 74). He further proposes that this register of Quichua (Kichwa) is undergoing a process of iconization (now rhematization; see Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine2000; Gal Reference Gal2013), in which the bilingual indigenous princess has become an icon of the intercultural code. I would add that such pageants also constitute an intercultural chronotope projected through a multimodal register formulation, in which highly marked material and nondiscursive signs of the ancestral past are aligned with a new social figure, the modern, intellectual indigenous princess, who, presumably, will carry Napo Quichua culture and language into the future.

However, just a few years after Wroblewski’s fieldwork, I found a great deal of opposition to the enregisterment of Unified Kichwa in intercultural media. Spanish-speaking owners and managers of radio stations in Tena are aware of the debates surrounding the use of regional or standardized varieties. In interviews, many emphasized that their Quichua-speaking audiences want kichwa de aquí ‘local Quichua’. The hosts of Quichua-language programs broadcast from Tena are similarly aligned with regional varieties of Quichua, though many acknowledged that they walk a difficult line between appeasing members of their audience most comfortable with regional forms of speech and those aligned with linguistic purity and language standardization.Footnote ⁷

In Napo Province, Quichua-language radio shows are a well-established feature in a local mediascape that is still dominated by Spanish-language programming. Article 36 of Ecuador’s Communications Law enacted in 2013 requires that 5 percent of daily programming “express and reflect the cosmovision, culture, tradition, knowledge, and wisdom of Indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, and Montubio communities and nationalities.”Footnote ⁸ At stations in Tena, this requirement is often met with Quichua-language music and programming. During my fieldwork, four stations based in Tena (Radio Ideal, Voz de Napo, Radio Arcoíris, and Radio Olímpica) regularly broadcast mixed-format talk-radio and music programs in lowland Quichua. Other local stations played automated mixes dominated by lowland Quichua music in the predawn hours, when most station owners imagine their Quichua audiences to be at home and attentive to the radio.

However, listeners in Archidona and Tena also pick up the signal from the Radio Jatari, a Quichua-language, community-licensed radio station broadcast from Arajuno in neighboring Pastaza Province.Footnote ⁹ In contrast to Napo radio programs, the hosts of Radio Jatari consistently utilize a broadcast register incorporating standardized forms in their programming. Such speech often elicited commentary in the households in which I studied uptake of radio shows. For instance, one morning, upon hearing the Radio Jatari announcer say “aswakunata upyachinchi” (we serve manioc beer to drink), my host Serafina Grefa repeated the phrase “‘aswakunata upyachinchi’ nin” (he says, “we serve manioc beer to drink”). When I queried her on its meaning, she emphasized that in her variety it is said differently:

Serafina’s commentary points to a number of perceived differences between local speech and that of the host on Radio Jatari. Most salient seems to be pronunciation of aswa, the drink known in Spanish as chicha, a fermented manioc brew that may range from mildly to strongly intoxicating and that is a staple product of many households. In Archidona, syncope of diphthongs is a common phonological process, yielding the form asa, which contrasts with aswa, bivalent with both Unified Kichwa and some local varieties of Quichua.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, in everyday spaces of media reception, the sounds of the standardized broadcast register remain marked for listeners.Footnote ¹¹

The radio program Mushuk Ñampi first intervened in this complex linguistic and media ecology in the summer of 2015. The program is funded by the Municipality of Archidona, under the direction of the mayor Jaime Shiguango, a Quichua-speaker in his mid fifties from the community of Porotoyacu, who first trained internationally in agricultural management and later become a homegrown politician. During his tenure as mayor, Shiguango has instituted a number of popular social programs, under the banner “Mushuk Ñampi/Un Nuevo Rumbo” (A new path). With this program, Shiguango sees himself staking out a new path for the residents of Archidona, with major programs focused on economic and social development, especially through community tourism and other forms of “sustainable development” (desarrollo sostenible). One of the most important facets of this campaign is the radio program Mushuk Ñampi. Shiguango’s radio program is explicitly directed at a rural audience he sees as ignored by most broadcast media and erased by linguistic unification. However, it is also an important medium for advertising the cultural programs and social projects under way in Archidona, and the programs are thus also directed toward national and international audiences as a way to simultaneously counter deep-seated discrimination against indigenous Ecuadorians and foment tourism.

After almost a year of fieldwork with Mushuk Ñampi, I interviewed Mayor Shiguango about his platform of “Mushuk Ñampi” and its connection to the radio program of the same name. I was surprised that he did not immediately mention language. Instead, he told me, “the goal of the radio above all is to transmit and strengthen [prevalecer] culture.” He continued, listing a number of the areas which are the explicit subject of Mushuk Ñampi’s programming, particularly during their monthly multimodal wayusa upina broadcasts:

Shiguango conceives of the radio program as a central means of entering into communities and revalorizing knowledge and skills that are still present in various modalities, linking material objects to social figures. This was a point that emerged when I asked about discourse in Spanish that surrounds the program, which focuses on “revalorizing” [revalorizar] rather than “saving” [rescatar] culture. Shiguango continued, again pointing to his conception of “culture” as grounded in existing material practices and rural lifeways:

Shiguango, then, asserts a chronotope in which Quichua culture is something that still exists, conserved in rural communities, particularly in the figures of knowledgeable elders. And notably, as he considers this chronotope, material practices and objects are key signs of continuity across time and space.

Yet, Shiguango also projected a chronotope of endangerment when I asked about his stance on the use of Unified Kichwa on the radio program. In response, Shiguango explained that linguistic unification “has made us lose our own cultural identity, our own language” and worried that “lo nuestro” (what is ours) was being lost because of it. Like many of the dialect-defenders interviewed by Wroblewski (Reference Wroblewski2012), Shiguango first identified the Unified neologism for “thank you” yupaychani ‘I am grateful’ as one of the greatest threats to local linguistic practices, even when those practices utilize Spanish-derived forms, such as pagarachu ‘may you be paid’, derived from Spanish que Dios le pague:

As Shiguango suggests here, many of his actions establish a middle position toward Unified Kichwa. Although he is ultimately against linguistic unification, he demonstrates respect for it institutionally. For instance, his signature platform, “Mushuk Ñampi” (A new path), is spelled in all marketing materials according the conventions of Unified Kichwa. However, his choice of the word for path is surprisingly complex. In the Ecuadorian lowlands, and in Shiguango’s own interview, the most common pronunciation for path is [ŋambi]. Although the Unified form is ñan, Shiguango utilizes an officially recognized lexical variant from the lowlands (Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador 2009), in which ñan is fused with a nonproductive locative marker pi, which, when spoken, undergoes voicing following a vowel. Thus, while this form would read as “on a new path” for speakers of many other Quechuan varieties, for speakers of Upper Napo Quichua, this form simply means “a new path.”Footnote ¹³

The most important aspect of Shiguango’s interview, however, is how he discursively links material objects to social figures and contexts of use in a new regime of value. His interview suggests an alternative model to revival, which contrasts with the well-established focus on language unification. Instead, he links multiple modalities of culture while focusing on the ways that such practices should be transmitted through interactions with named social figures (fathers, mothers, grandparents). In Napo, as in other contexts, revival practices rooted in literacy and language standardization are frequently at odds with how many people conceive of the transmission of language and culture. Research across the region has repeatedly shown that Amazonian Quichua personhood lies for many people in a habitus developed through repeated embodied, mimetic instruction, as well as the ingestion of different substances that shape the body in particular ways (Guzmán Gallegos Reference Guzmán Gallegos1997; Mezzenzana Reference Mezzenzana2017; Reddekop and Swanson Reference Reddekop2017). However, many of the activities and nondiscursive signs marshaled in the register of Upper Napo Quichua cultural performance compress the ways in which cultural practices have traditionally been transmitted. In the pageants described by Wroblewski, practices like preparing and drinking guayusa tea are briefly acted out on stage. In the highly dramatized world of the indigenous beauty pageant, these signs, which entextualize routine activities and daily practices, have become icons of traditional culture. In turn, for many audience members, these signs are interpretable as icons of essentialized lowland Quichua cultural practice. This process is known as rhematization (Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine2000; Gal Reference Gal2013), in which signs that may have once been indexical or symbolic are interpreted as expressing naturalized qualities of resemblance.

In the remainder of this article, however, I suggest an alternative approach to the bundling of multimodal signs in the public register of cultural performance, which is rooted in an indexical reading of their significance. For many producers, as well as members of the audience, many of these signs are not just essentialized icons. They are interpreted as indices, contiguous with practices from their contemporary homes, as well as with the ancestral past, enabling nomic calibration (Dick Reference Dick2010) across chronotopes. The multivalency of these signs is illustrative of the semiotic process of rhematization, as well as of dicentization, in which “a likeness or a conventional relation is interpreted as actually constituting a relation of physical or dynamical connection” (Ball Reference Ball2014, 152) and which helps to account for the ways that the same sign can entail multiple meanings, depending on the audience. In the final section, I develop this argument by exploring how Mushuk Ñampi’s multimodal chronotope of the traditional wayusa upina recalibrates such signs, linking them through repeated instantiations with the voices of rural audience members, particularly elders. First, however, I detail the practice of wayusa upina as it is carried out today in rural households in Chawpi Shungu, as well as in descriptions from the ethnographic record and in radio media, to develop a sense of the practices and discourses that are refashioned in revival media, and why they are significant for the goals of the radio program Mushuk Ñampi.

Endangered Chronotopes

Evaluations of cultural change have a long history in anthropological discussions of speakers of lowland Quichua in the Ecuadorian Amazon.Footnote ¹⁴ Authors have repeatedly noted that the transition from subsistence to market economics and a recent intensive inclusion in a broader Spanish-speaking settler society have engendered change at multiple scales.

The predawn routines of the wayusa upina are often treated as a paradigmatic example of cultural shift, both by scholars and by Quichua-speaking community members and media producers who worry that its loss is indicative of a cascading series of changes in language and lifeways. Blanca Muratorio illustrates an ongoing concern with the loss of the wayusa upina based on interviews conducted between 1982 and 1983 with Rucuyaya (grandfather) Alonso. She describes how “in the old days” families rose between three and four to drink guayusa and prepare for their daily chores; while “sitting around the fire, they could recall ancient myths, relate interesting experiences, and discuss the night’s dreams” (Reference Muratorio1991, 7). However, according to Muratorio, “the conditions that made it possible no longer exist in the Tena-Archidona area” (8). Other ethnographers have also described the guayusa-drinking hours’ historical connection to particular kinds of talk, including storytelling, dream analysis, and music (Macdonald Reference Macdonald1979; Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy Reference Uzendoski2012), noting that these practices are in decline. Muratorio specifically identifies Quichua-language radio programs broadcast by Catholic and Protestant missionary stations as significant sources of competition for the speech of the guayusa-drinking hours (Reference Muratorio1991, 8). Indeed, in many homes, the radio is often the most frequent accompaniment to the guayusa-drinking hours, as solitary elders and adults rise before dawn, while children and young people sleep later. Nevertheless, reports of the guayusa-drinking hours’ demise are somewhat exaggerated.

In homes around Napo, many Quichua-speaking residents of rural communities and urban neighborhoods continue to awaken before dawn and drink guayusa—prepared on both stovetops and fires—accompanied by the soundscape of Napo Quichua radio, which has typically included recorded music, morning prayers from the Catholic station, and bilingual talk shows. Listeners often comment to each other and themselves on the talk and songs, and if the family has gathered for the day, adults may also discuss their current “interesting happenings,” while they drink guayusa, weave shigra bags or fishing nets, and prepare food, sometimes with children sitting by quietly. Yet, in Chawpi Shungu, I rarely heard people discuss their dreams in the morning. Nor did they make music nor tell many stories—at least not the mythic narratives that I had expected from numerous published collections of lowland Quichua oral tradition. Serafina has repeatedly told me that she does not remember such stories, though she heard them during the wayusa upina in her childhood when her mother and other relatives would narrate distant and recent history and discuss their lives. However, Serafina, the youngest child in her family, had lost many of her relatives early in her life, and in her husband’s home she found herself without a community of speakers with whom to practice and hone her knowledge of such narratives.

The hosts and producers of the radio program Mushuk Ñampi, however, are attempting to reinvigorate the intimate familial spaces in which elders once transmitted narratives and other modalities of traditional cultural practice. By recording stories and interviews with members of the rural communities that dot the mountainous landscape around Archidona, the program seeks to bring these voices to the airwaves. Stories of the recent past, which detail the material practices of elders’ childhoods, are one of the most common genres in this archive. In such narratives, speakers frequently link the guayusa hour to a particular way of being in the world, which children are abandoning. In their reported memories, it is through conversation among knowledgeable adults, as well as through routines linked to swidden agriculture and the hunting of wild game, that the storytellers developed the embodied habitus of Upper Napo Quichua personhood. These stories project a chronotope in which the wayusa upina was one of the most important sites for the transmission of different modalities of cultural practice, shared through the food and drinks consumed in the morning; the use of “strong” (shinzhi) substances like hot peppers, ginger, and stinging nettles to discipline children’s bodies and spirits; and the production of bags, baskets, and hunting instruments; as well as the narratives people told.

My host in Chawpi Shungu, Serafina Grefa, was interviewed for this archive by Mushuk Ñampi’s cohost Rita Tunay during a visit to the community.Footnote ¹⁵ In a ten-minute narrative interview, which is representative of the themes of others from the archive, Serafina describes a childhood shaped by the routines of the early morning hours, which were linked to the practices of subsistence agriculture, illustrated in this brief excerpt:

Serafina immediately brings listeners into the chronotope of ruku uras, describing the wayusa upina within a contrastive time—and later space—which is peopled by her elders and peers who learned the proper ways of being in the world—getting up early, serving and drinking guayusa, working hard. And she also tells us that it is a practice conserved among elders. Other stories in the archive contain similar claims: as one man described, “I’m there telling stories, but children don’t get up. Just us elders get up. We get up, prepare guayusa, drink [it], drink aswa, and telling stories together we’re there, until the day breaks, then, we go to work.” Serafina and others like her set up a number of contrasts between the present and the past in their narratives and interviews for the radio program, which highlight perceived differences in social personhood between youths and elders, as well as in social practice.

As Serafina continues to describe the way that the wayusa upina articulated with other aspects of her daily life, Rita starts to ask if something is true, and Serafina responds emphatically, cutting her off. In doing so, she illustrates an important point about the wayusa upina—that its practice was enabled by traditional residence patterns. She describes her childhood home as a large, multifamily household in which adults and children slept side by side on bamboo platforms, allowing the family to rise together:

Serafina’s interview contains an implicit contrast between her home in the past and today. What she does not explicitly mention is that the style of home she describes is no longer consistently built around Napo. The contemporary period is often characterized as a time of llaktachina ‘settling’ (literally, “to make a village”) in which families who had subsisted on migratory hunting and swidden agriculture across large territories settled down in order to make land claims and to raise cattle. Construction styles have changed dramatically through this period, and homes have become increasingly nucleated. Today, in Serafina’s household, as well as in the homes of her children and other neighbors, individual family units have their own bedrooms and maintain a separate room or building to cook in. In homes in Chawpi Shungu, then, many grandparents and parents rise to drink guayusa and prepare for their days, while in separate rooms, their children sleep later into the morning, rising around 5:00 or 6:00. Today, Serafina is the first to rise and sit by the fire until she is joined by her youngest daughter-in-law or one of her daughters who still lives at home. However, in Serafina’s childhood young girls and daughters-in-law were sent to prepare the guayusa. And in her story, Serafina voices them, using the particular rhythms and pronunciations of the runa shimi of Archidona, as they call out into the darkness “waysa, waysa” (guayusa, guayusa).

It is not just elders who reflect on the guayusa drinking hours with nostalgia. Rita Tunay, a bilingual cohost of Mushuk Ñampi in her early twenties, also identifies the wayusa upina as the time when she developed her own skills in Quichua. “When I was about to start kindergarten,” Rita explained in an interview, “my mother used to punish me for speaking Quichua. She told me, ‘you have to speak Spanish’” (mishu shimi; literally, “the language of the mestizos”). Rita’s mother understands limited Spanish and thus hoped that Spanish dominance would open new opportunities for Rita. But Rita also often spent time with her grandparents, who had moved into town, and they cared for her while her parents were living in their rural home and working on their agricultural lands a few hours away. In their home, they would wake her at 4:00 a.m. to feed her and get her ready for the bus to school, seated by the fire. Rita thus continued to speak Quichua with her grandmother. In Rita’s estimation, it is the children who spend time with their grandparents who have the greatest ability in Quichua. But now, she said, while parents are at work, children spend time at day care or school, rather than in their grandparents’ homes. However, in Rita’s memories of her childhood, as for many others, the wayusa upina was also one of the most important times that elders had to transmit their knowledge and their stories.

Although the naming of the practice of the wayusa upina suggests that it is an act centered on the drinking of guayusa, it is actually made up of a range of socially intimate behaviors and practices located in the familial hearth and home. For many, it has been important site to transmit knowledge about a daily life that is connected to forms of forest-based subsistence, as well as Quichua-language narrative and daily conversation. Yet, many people also experience it as slipping further away from daily relevance, as the generations of people for whom it was a central practice age and die. It is thus with a very deep sadness that elder speakers sometimes reflect on the end of ruku kawsay ‘ancestral lifeways’. It is a loss that implies not just an abstract loss of cultural and linguistic practices, but the loss of people. As Wroblewski has argued, both academic discourse and community members’ “fatalistic attitudes about the future of Amazonian Kichwa distinctiveness” lead to a situation in which “[Amazonian Kichwa] culture and language, unlike those of local white and mestizo populations, are perceived to be under constant threat of dissolution” (Reference Wroblewski2014, 68). Many members of Upper Napo Quichua communities thus find themselves within a chronotope of endangerment, projected from both internal and external sources, in which their very personhood is in question.

However, as Shiguango’s interview discussed above suggests, Mushuk Ñampi’s radio programs also attempt to counter this chronotope of endangerment. By refashioning contemporary and remembered elements of the wayusa upina on the air, retooling them and expanding them, they assert their continued presence through a politics of visibility (Hartikainen Reference Hartikainen2017), in which media presence is a means to give voice (Fisher Reference Fisher2016) to marginalized groups. Each morning, Mushuk Ñampi’s cohosts exhort their listeners to accompany them in reviving themselves by drinking guayusa. They also often play community-sourced recordings of elder’s personal testimonies about the guayusa hour, which emphasize the ways the wayusa upina and its associated activities were once carried out. The hosts thus portray the guayusa hours as contemporary, engaged in by current listeners, but simultaneously ancestral, grounded in its full realization in ñawpa timpu ‘the time before’, the past. As in Serafina’s narrative, ancestral practices—and voices—move forward through time with those who remember them and maintain them in their own lives. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mushuk Ñampi’s monthly multimodal productions of the wayusa upina, in which the narrative descriptions of the ancestral wayusa upina come to life on the air. In these programs, the producers and participants recalibrate the semiotic grounds of cultural performance, creating indexical connections from the present to the past, and reenregistering discursive and nondiscursive signs of Upper Napo Quichua culture in a multimodal ancestral chronotope.

So That “We Don’t Forget Our Ancestral Lifeways”

On monthly, live-broadcast radio programs, Rita Tunay and James Yumbo, the two young cohosts of the program Mushuk Ñampi and a rotating cast of community participants and cultural performers work to bring the ancestral home to life. Mushuk Ñampi has staged wayusa upina shows in the courtyard of the municipal building, but most are broadcast from rural villages and small towns around the township of Archidona. These events have become very popular, and political leaders often request that one be held in their communities. While the show might be organized somewhat differently depending on the available participants—some communities have professionalized community tourism groups, skilled in cultural presentations, while in other cases elders, community leaders, and their younger family members might be assembled ad hoc to perform—these events are widely attended. Audiences, which included residents of all ages from the community, as well as mestizo and indigenous municipal employees, frequently gather before the 4:00 a.m. start of the program, remaining to watch for more than two hours as friends and family animate routines and practices often described in narratives. Copresent audiences often take part, drinking wayusa and aswa served by performers, and participating in demonstrations, often blurring the line between production and reception.

These performances can thus vary a great deal in their details, but they also follow a fairly set formula, which Rita Tunay has developed. Rita’s program is interdiscursive, drawing on interviews she has conducted with elder speakers, as well as her own childhood experiences, and her past participation in cultural performance as a ñusta contestant. And in these productions, signs that often serve as icons of Upper Napo Quichua culture are recalibrated as indices, connected to named social figures—elders (rukuguna), grandmothers (ruku mamaguna), grandfathers (ruku yayaguna)—who most often speak with the cadence of Upper Napo Quichua.

The shows usually begin with a group of sleeping figures being awoken by an enregistered sound—a flute, the hooting of an owl—and then a man’s voice calls out, telling his family to awaken, to brew and drink guayusa. At the production site, there is a swirl of activity, slumbering figures stir next to a fire, and women appear next to audience members with gourds full of wayusa and aswa, which are drunk and passed on to the next audience member. The audience listening at home, however, must rely on the blending of discursive and nondiscursive signs if they are to be indexically transported into the ancestral chronotope projected by the intermingling of speech and sound on the air.

The following transcript, which details the opening of a multimodal wayusa upina carried out on September 13, 2016, is representative of the discourse and themes of these programs, in which a range of social voices meet. Although Mayor Shiguango is ostensibly opposed to linguistic unification, the show includes a wide range of social actors—including bilingual educators—in the broadcast, allowing many fashions of speaking to emerge on the air. For reasons of space, I do not engage in a detailed analysis of the phonology and morphology of the transcript in Quichua. What is worth noting, however, is that in these programs, a range of social figures emerges—rural elders, intercultural educators, bilingual youth. Many of the participants in this exchange begin in a more standardized register and then slip into a register inflected by regional forms. Whereas many other sites of public cultural performance inscribe the use of Unified Kichwa, alongside many of the same nondiscursive and material signs, these performances contribute to a more heterogeneous register of ancestral performance, in which the voices of rural elders also emerge alongside voices that employ standardized forms.

Rita begins the production by explaining that many practices were carried out and taught to children in the past as part of the wayusa upina. She is especially concerned with the same material practices (bags, baskets) mentioned by Shiguango. She also plays with the chronotope of endangerment, reminding listeners that “we have forgotten” aspects of these practices, but there is hope, for in Santa Rita, they are about to learn, through conversation, about the way the wayusa upina is performed:

Rita then introduces the community president, Bolivar, and they turn to discussing material practices of the wayusa upina. As they do so, Rita and her participants attempt to realign the semiotic ground of many of the signs that have already been enregistered in culture performances. In the following excerpt they discuss a flute. Significantly, this is another one of the sonic signs of “essentialized” Quichua culture often used in ñusta pageants, in which “following the accelerating tempo of traditional flutes, stringed instruments, and recorded rainforest sounds, each contestant breaks into a number of choreographed dance performances” (Wroblewski Reference Wroblewski2014, 72). However, in Mushuk Ñampi’s wayusa upina, the traditional flute is recontextualized within a new regime of value, its material qualities identified, tied to the body of a living elder, projected backward into the past (ñawpa timpu]) from the present (kuna), and, Rita suggests, forward (ñawpakma) into the future:

And as the elder awakens, mothers and children stir beside a fire where they are cosleeping, as women later described as payauna ‘daughters’ move to serve guayusa to the audience.

As Agha has suggested, the process of enregisterment involves the calibration of multiple signs—linguistic and nonlinguistic—into a coherent semiotic whole, “capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics of incumbents of particular interactional roles and of relations among them” (Reference Agha2007a, 55). In these productions, speech, material practices, and patterns of interaction are coenregistered, in performances that are intended to be performative. Hosts of Mushuk Ñampi often describe the wayusa upina in Spanish as a “rito,” a ritual. Like other rituals, Mushuk Ñampi’s productions seek to produce a collective connection (Durkheim Reference Durkheim1995; Ball Reference Ball2014) to the ancestral past and its resonances in the present. Rita often repeats on the air that their wayusa upina exists so that “we don’t forget our ancestral lifeways.” These programs seek to counter both a chronotope of unified revitalization and a chronotope of endangerment by reconstituting the spacetime of ruku kawsay, ancestral culture. Temporally anchored in the ancestral past and spatially in the familial hearth, hosts and participants assert a chronotope of continuity, reminding audience members not to forget the social figure of elders and their lifeways. Through multimodal semiosis producers and participants seek to make indices out of icons—including narrative icons of past practices, as well as material icons such as gourd cups, infusions of guayusa, bamboo flutes, shigra bags, and ashanga baskets—that already circulate widely in Napo performance media, reestablishing connections to the techniques and voices of ancestral lifeways, or at least the way they are constituted in the present.