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BENJAMIN SMITH University of Chicago Language and the frontiers of the human: Aymara animal-oriented interjections and the mediation of mind ABSTRACT In this article, I offer an analysis of Peruvian Aymara speech directed toward sheep and alpacas, children, and marbles (specifically, the use of “animal-oriented interjections”). The use of these forms positions addressees as reduced (quasi) agents and thereby mediates Aymara ideologies about the scaled or graduated character of those enminded beings that regularly act as addressees. Ultimately, the analysis reveals an Aymara human–nonhuman frontier that requires attention to both the interactional encounters sustained across perceived ontological divides (divides understood to turn on species and ethnodevelopmental difference, etc.) and the (scaled) character of the ideologies that renders these divides “ontological.” [humans, animals, childhood, materiality, semiotics, mind, Andes] I n the Peruvian, Aymara-speaking village of Anatiri, 1 dusk is the time when people bring their animals back home after grazing. Herders— many of them children but also adults—drive their sheep, alpacas, and pigs from far-flung dormant fields or agriculturally unsuitable land and take them back to each family’s stone corral. As they return from distant places, these throngs of children, adults, and animals clog the paths and roads that lead back to the two strings of homes that form the residential nucleus of the village. This is one of the few moments in every- day life when the village air is full of sounds. Among the sounds are those of people talking to their animals. When a burro falters along the path, the herder yells out, “Urro urro!” along with a distinctive series of snorts. 2 When a hungry alpaca rushes toward a neigh- bor’s pile of potatoes, the herder yells, “Shhk shhk shhk!” 3 When a sheep, up to its own devices, beelines toward another herder’s group of sheep, its herder too yells, “Shhk shhk shhk!” When animals do not do what they are supposed to do, whether by acts, if you will, of omission (faltering along the path) or commission (running to potatoes), they become, briefly, the addressees of human speech. 4 The utterances spoken in these instances are composed of a kind of interjection—recently called an “animal-oriented interjection” (Enfield 2007:314)—that has been frequently cited in connection with animal ad- dressees. In his grammar of Takelma, for example, Edward Sapir cites a form used to “urge on deer to corral” (1922:279). Waldemar Bogoras, writ- ing on Chukchi, notes two forms used with reindeer: One is used “for driv- ing the herd,” and the other is used to call “broken reindeer” (1922:887). Although these kinds of forms have rarely received much sustained atten- tion, 5 they have been frequently enough observed to suggest that they con- stitute a durable locus of cultural and linguistic meaning. The use of these interjections creates a paradox. On the one hand, they treat animals as addressees of language, as agents within human projects, and as agents capable of regulating their behavior (e.g., stopping, going for- ward). On the other hand, they seek to articulate animals with respect to a AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 313–324, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01366.x
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Page 1: Language and the frontiers of the human: Aymara animal-oriented interjections and the mediation of mind

BENJAMIN SMITHUniversity of Chicago

Language and the frontiers of thehuman:Aymara animal-oriented interjections and the mediation ofmind

A B S T R A C TIn this article, I offer an analysis of PeruvianAymara speech directed toward sheep and alpacas,children, and marbles (specifically, the use of“animal-oriented interjections”). The use of theseforms positions addressees as reduced (quasi)agents and thereby mediates Aymara ideologiesabout the scaled or graduated character of thoseenminded beings that regularly act as addressees.Ultimately, the analysis reveals an Aymarahuman–nonhuman frontier that requires attentionto both the interactional encounters sustainedacross perceived ontological divides (dividesunderstood to turn on species andethnodevelopmental difference, etc.) and the(scaled) character of the ideologies that rendersthese divides “ontological.” [humans, animals,childhood, materiality, semiotics, mind, Andes]

In the Peruvian, Aymara-speaking village of Anatiri,1 dusk is the timewhen people bring their animals back home after grazing. Herders—many of them children but also adults—drive their sheep, alpacas,and pigs from far-flung dormant fields or agriculturally unsuitableland and take them back to each family’s stone corral. As they return

from distant places, these throngs of children, adults, and animals clog thepaths and roads that lead back to the two strings of homes that form theresidential nucleus of the village. This is one of the few moments in every-day life when the village air is full of sounds.

Among the sounds are those of people talking to their animals. When aburro falters along the path, the herder yells out, “Urro urro!” along with adistinctive series of snorts.2 When a hungry alpaca rushes toward a neigh-bor’s pile of potatoes, the herder yells, “Shhk shhk shhk!”3 When a sheep,up to its own devices, beelines toward another herder’s group of sheep, itsherder too yells, “Shhk shhk shhk!” When animals do not do what they aresupposed to do, whether by acts, if you will, of omission (faltering alongthe path) or commission (running to potatoes), they become, briefly, theaddressees of human speech.4

The utterances spoken in these instances are composed of a kindof interjection—recently called an “animal-oriented interjection” (Enfield2007:314)—that has been frequently cited in connection with animal ad-dressees. In his grammar of Takelma, for example, Edward Sapir cites aform used to “urge on deer to corral” (1922:279). Waldemar Bogoras, writ-ing on Chukchi, notes two forms used with reindeer: One is used “for driv-ing the herd,” and the other is used to call “broken reindeer” (1922:887).Although these kinds of forms have rarely received much sustained atten-tion,5 they have been frequently enough observed to suggest that they con-stitute a durable locus of cultural and linguistic meaning.

The use of these interjections creates a paradox. On the one hand, theytreat animals as addressees of language, as agents within human projects,and as agents capable of regulating their behavior (e.g., stopping, going for-ward). On the other hand, they seek to articulate animals with respect to a

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 313–324, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01366.x

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world of practice in relation to which they are not con-sidered to be fully fledged agents (e.g., a sheep does notknow that it must keep to its owner’s flock; an alpaca doesnot know whose potatoes are whose; neither sheep nor al-paca is punishable for its misdeeds). This is a paradox aboutagency: Although the animals are not held to be fully knowl-edgeable or responsible agents in a given context, they arenonetheless made to act within it. This is a purgatory ofagency. It is a quasi agency.

These moments are ones in which an actor’s(in)capacities are thought to be interactionally at stake.Sapir’s deer must be urged into the coral. Bogoras’s reindeermust be driven onward. Their perceived, if momen-tary, inabilities with respect to participation in humanprojects—hesitance to get into a corral, reluctance to moveonward—are specific to particular social practices andunderstandings of species difference. Moreover, it is themeaning and use of the animal-oriented interjection (“Goonward!”) that helps to create these personae of inability.6

Put more broadly, these are contexts in which ideologiesabout “mindedness”—that is, ideologies about charac-terological traits thought to underlie incapacity withinhuman projects—come to be mediated and sustained: Inthese cases, again, a deer’s “hesitance” and a reindeer’s“reluctance” qua features of “mind” become salient insocial interaction.

Animals are not the only addressees of animal-orientedinterjections in Aymara. Among Aymara speakers, oneinterjection—the one primarily used with alpacas andsheep—gets used with a fuller range of nonhuman (or notyet fully human) addressees: for example, a child about toburn his or her hand in a stove (spoken by a parent) andan orange teetering near the edge of a table of fruit (spo-ken by the fruit vendor). In such contexts, one encountersa complex of facts similar to the one found with animal ad-dressees: In the two cases cited above, both addressees getpositioned as being blind to the issue of real importance(in the first case, a burned hand) and, through such posi-tioning, evoke (and mediate) Aymara ideologies about theunsocialized character of children and the intractability ofmaterial (or motile) things. In these cases, again, it is thelinguistic mediation of personae of incapability (unsocial-izability, intractability) that is at stake.

The variability of possible addressees (child, animal,material) for these forms means that the study of Aymaraanimal-oriented interjections can speak to a range of ques-tions about the cultural organization of enminded beings.Up to this point, I have only presented examples of matureadults directing animal-oriented interjections to children,animals, and material things. Who, however, has the rightto use animal-oriented interjections, and with whom maythey be used (i.e., in technical terms, what are their stereo-typed participation frameworks)? Can children, for exam-ple, use them with addressees for whom the implication of

quasi agency would seem, on the face of it, inappropriate(e.g., their parents)? Do these frameworks take on the guiseof a “graduated” series in which each class of actor can bescaled according to whether its members can legitimatelydeploy these forms with other classes of actors (i.e., mayadults legitimately use these forms with children but notvice versa, etc.)? What might these relationships ultimatelyimply about an Aymara ideology of “higher” and “lower” en-minded beings?

This line of questioning bears a deep and ulti-mately transformative relationship to a classic anthropo-logical question. The well-known work of theorists such asEdmund Leach (1964), Mary Douglas (1972), Ralph Bulmer(1967), and S. J. Tambiah (1969) argues for the relatively sys-tematic, categorial, or conceptual character of local, cul-tural understandings of humans and animals. In his clas-sic work on northern Thailand, for example, Tambiah (1969)argues that there are three hierarchically organized series ofcultural domains (categories of humans, categories of placerelative to the central part of a house, and categories of an-imals) across which a number of similarities or homologieshold. The significance of Tambiah’s work in this context isthe way in which it—considered as an exemplary piece—takes up Thai understandings of humans and animals ashighly complex categorial constellations.

The exclusive focus of such classic work on the catego-rial or “symbolic” character of such understandings, how-ever, has led to the neglect of an important social fact thatI attempt to address in a satisfying way: that is, the way inwhich these kinds of categories are sustained and medi-ated through social practice with nonhuman actors them-selves (see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:554 for a similarcriticism). An account of Aymara animal-oriented interjec-tions is uniquely able to make this case: I begin my analy-sis with moments of encounter between humans and non-humans and make claims about the categorial character ofAymara understandings of humans and nonhumans (i.e.,their scalar or graduated character) only insofar as it is im-manent to those moments of encounter. In doing so, I sub-ject the ontological categories of human and nonhumanbeings to the complexities of their mediatedness in socialpractice: for example, their contingency (on language use,at least), inherent temporality (and, therefore, their histor-ical specificity), and, ultimately, even, their mutability (i.e.,their susceptibility to political intervention).

In this article, I give an extended account of how thepragmatic deployment of one Aymara animal-oriented in-terjection (the one used with alpacas and sheep) reveals andmediates a scale of enminded beings. Doing this requiresanalyses of the meaning and usage of the interjection itselfand its relation to Aymara ideologies of alpaca and sheeppersonae. I then give an account of how its meaning andusage help to make intelligible a wider field of nonhumanactors. Two social actors within this wider field are central to

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the analysis: the not-yet-fully-human (children, in relation-ship to adult social practices) and the slightly-more-than-material (marbles, as understood in boyhood game play).

The Aymara language and culture is an especiallyappropriate linguistic and cultural context in which totake up this project.7 Animal herding is a central part ofAymara economic life that has considerable further con-sequences for the Aymara social and religious imagination(see Arnold and Yapita 1998). Aymara adults hold strongfeelings of responsibility and affection toward their animals(see Dransart 2002). A number of (undescribed) animal-oriented interjections in the language are frequently usedin the herding context. My concern with the Aymara con-text is ultimately narrow, however. My central concern is atheoretical one about the linguistically mediated construc-tion of an Aymara human–nonhuman frontier.

Speaking to nonhumans

When one interrogates language use with nonhumans, oneis firmly on the terrain of questions about semiotically me-diated social interaction. This is the traditional domainof interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropol-ogy (see Silverstein 2004 and Agha 2007 for recent pro-grammatic accounts): The question is, how do interactionalparticipants, through the deployment of signs, invoke con-ceptualizations of themselves and of their discursive envi-ronment to mutually build up a socially recognizable eventof some sort (e.g., a greeting, an act of flirting, etc.)? Thequestion can be asked of nonhumans in interaction withhumans—how do nonhumans (inter)act in ways that getunderstood as signs? How do they interpret human signs?How do they act as discursive participants?

An example is in order: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and RebeccaTreiman (1982) describe how, in the United States, the reg-ister of “motherese” gets used with dogs (they call it “dog-gerel”). They note that speech to dogs has many of the samecharacteristics as motherese: the use of short sentences, theimitation of interlocutors’ sounds (of “dogs’ noises” [Hirsh-Pasek and Treiman 1982:233]), and the use of diminutives(e.g., “cutie”). Although they do not develop the analysis,they note that doggerel functions to promote “reciprocity”between dog and owner. It depends on a dog’s “social re-sponsiveness” (Hirsh-Pasek and Treiman 1982:236)—thatis, on its discursive participation. One might further ask,what kinds of dog signs get taken up as “responses”? Howdo dogs attend to doggerel? What kinds of socially recog-nizable forms of interaction are thereby produced (“play”or “roughhousing,” perhaps)?

Scholars across the human sciences have been increas-ingly attentive to the kinds of genuine “responsiveness” thatnonhumans (or the-less-than-fully-human) inhabit in rela-tion to human social activity. This turn is evident in litera-tures as diverse as those on infancy (Gottlieb 2004), multi-

modality (Goodwin 2000, 2006), religious language (Keane1997), animals (Haraway 2008), actor-network theory(Latour 1992), and the linguistic anthropological critique ofspeech act theory (Dubois 1993).8 One of these literatures isof special interest for the current project: the animal studiesliterature, in which one uniquely finds an emerging concernwith issues of semiotic mediation alongside a broader con-cern with the sociocultural and sociopolitical consequencesof the categories “human” and “nonhuman” (albeit with afocus on the “animal” more particularly).

A growing concern in this literature is with interac-tional encounters between humans and nonhumans. Mostprominently, Jacques Derrida writes about encounteringhis cat (not “the cat” or “the animal”) while he is in the nudeas she scurries in (and quickly out) of his bathroom. In thisinstance, Derrida’s (2008:13) cat is a subject who appears torespond to or genuinely address him in some way. DonnaHaraway pushes Derrida’s insight further: His cat’s addressis an invitation to “the risky project of what this cat on thismorning cared about, what these bodily postures and visualentanglements might mean and might invite” (2008:22). Toput it in interactional terms, Derrida’s cat here is a discur-sive participant whose act bears some meaningful relationto Derrida’s own.

Animal–human interaction (cat–human, in this case)drives or depends on, Haraway notes, “those develop-ing knowledges of both cat-cat and cat-human behavioralsemiotics” (2008:22). Although Haraway here intends to flagcertain kinds of biological knowledge, her insight can becouched in a more comparative or anthropological query:How do different folk understandings of animals, deployedin different kinds of human–animal social practices, pro-duce interactional sequences that are understood by partic-ipants to be relatively predictable? What is interactionallyat stake when—in Chicago—a cat crawls purringly into anowner’s lap? What is at stake when a cat—in the Andes—triumphantly pulls a dead mouse from a family’s pile ofbagged agricultural produce, to the family’s delight?

A central contribution of this literature is its concernwith the wider sociocultural significance of speech to non-humans. Giorgio Agamben, for example, argues that thecentral theme of Western culture is struggle between “hu-manity” and “animality”: He states that, “in our culture, thedecisive political conflict, which governs every other con-flict, is that between the animality and the humanity ofman” (2004:80). It is a conflict without end: “This overcom-ing [of animality] is not an event that is completed onceand for all, but an occurrence that is always under way”(Agamben 2004:79). Agamben’s analysis sketches out thelarger stakes of a concern with semiotic mediation: thatis, the sense in which a “boundary” (i.e., between human-ity and animality) and a politics of exclusion may be re-flected and constructed in and through interaction withnonhumans.9

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Derrida’s account offers a subtler take on the dis-tinction between humans and nonhumans, arguing that—however much the Western animal–human “boundary” canappear to be just that (i.e., a boundary)—it is surprisinglyunstable and multifaceted. It cannot easily capture, forexample, the multiplicity of relations between organic andinorganic matter, living and nonliving things; differencesbetween animal species; differences between humans,animals, aliens, and angels; and differences between indi-vidual animals. Derrida (2008:31) argues that, given thesemultiplicities, the “boundary” should best be conceived an-alytically as a multiple, shifting, and heterogeneous frontier.This formulation is one that leads directly to questions ofmediation: What “drives” the contingency and “shiftiness”of this frontier, its contingent realization in interaction?

Derrida and others offer ample warrant for a specif-ically semiotic and interactional (not to mention anthro-pological) approach to the relationship between humansand nonhumans (and the cultural renderings of such re-lationships). The following kinds of questions can now beprofitably asked. How do humans and nonhumans deploysigns to mutually build up, by degrees, coherent events ofsome sort? How do ideologies about human and nonhu-mans mediate such semiotic activity and get constructedin and through it? What does this semiotic activity implyabout the potential categoriality of these cultural render-ings of humans and nonhumans? In this article, I take upthe usage and sociocultural significance of just one kind ofsign, examining the deployment of animal-oriented inter-jections in Aymara and their mediation of a local, scalar un-derstanding of enminded entities or beings.

Aymara animal-oriented interjections

There are numerous animal-oriented interjections inAymara.10 Speakers use different types of speech when in-teracting with their pigs, alpacas and sheep, burros, bulls,and dogs. My primary focus is on the interjection (shhk)used with alpacas and sheep because it is the only animal-oriented interjection in Aymara that regularly gets usedwith nonanimal addressees. Although shhk, alpacas, andsheep are my primary foci, I also outline the meaning andset of understandings that surround the interjection thatgets used with burros (urro). Sketching out the meaning ofthese two interjections allows the reader to gain compara-tive leverage on the specificity of the linguistic and socialmeanings associated with shhk.

My approach in this section is a “semiotic-functional”one (Jakobson 1960; Silverstein 1976).11 In part followingKockelman 2003 on interjections, I map out three kinds offacts: (1) the pragmatic function of the forms (i.e., what getsaccomplished through the use of a form, e.g., a request, anorder); (2) the kinds of indexical objects presupposed in thecontext of utterance (e.g., a kind of animal moving in a par-

ticular way); and (3) the way that the usage of these formsallows speakers to position themselves toward—or, take astance toward (see Kiesling 2009; Kockelman 2004)—animaladdressees. Although this framework guides my argument,I do not highlight the sense in which I am engaging in a spe-cific kind of linguistic argumentation.

Both urro and shhk are used, pragmatically, to issueobligations to an addressee. They function conatively, inRoman Jakobson’s (1960) scheme. The obligation therebycreated is, in Michael Silverstein’s (1976) terminology, in-dexically created: It is brought into the speech event inand through the actual token of the interjection. With re-spect to the semantic function (or propositional content)of the directives, both interjections have to do with “move-ment”: Urro can be glossed as “go further” and shhk can beglossed as “stop.” This propositional content, although sim-ilar, differs in its specific “claim” about (or obligation withrespect to) movement: One interjection (urro) has to dowith its continuation and the other (shhk) has to do with itscessation.

Both urro and shhk presuppose, pragmatically, the in-dexical copresence—in the act of utterance—of an agent forwhom the directive becomes an obligation. The interjec-tion urro presupposes the copresence of at least one burro.It also presupposes a more specific spatial arrangement ofspeaker and burro: The directive “Go further!” assumes asituation in which the burro is in front of the speaker and isdirected to go away from the speaker. The interjection shhkpresupposes the copresence of at least one sheep, alpaca, orsome other nonanimal agent or thing understandable as anagent.12 Unlike the case with urro, however, the spatial ar-rangement of speaker and addressee is not constrained inany specific way.

Both interjections regularly presuppose certain factsabout their discursive (if not, strictly speaking, cotextual)environment: The interjections urro and shhk are regu-larly used as responses to an agent’s behavior (unsolicitedresponses, in the vocabulary Paul Kockelman draws fromthe tradition of conversation analysis). They presuppose, inother words, a behavior that is understood as an unvaluedact: A burro refuses to move; an alpaca runs off to eat froma neighbor’s pile of potatoes; a sheep threatens to scurrydown a steep ravine. In most of these instances, there is aclear sense that the addressee normally behaves in a waythat conforms to the requirements of some pragmatic con-text (in acts like walking out to the fields to feed or beingdriven into the stone corral); these interjections are used ininstances of violation.

The use of shhk presupposes a much more specific kindof discursive environment. It responds prospectively to anagent’s misbehavior: Again, a sheep is about to scurry downa ravine; an alpaca has not yet eaten a neighbor’s potatoes.These are “cliffhanger” moments, if you will.13 Whereas aspeaker of urro encounters an already unmoving burro, a

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speaker of shhk must have a flair for sensing suspense orcontingency. The latter does not catch an agent in the act ofmisbehavior but on the cusp of misbehavior. In this way, theuse of shhk requires a “modal” sensibility, understood in thelinguistic sense: In using shhk, speakers imagine an event (ahand burned, potatoes eaten) that might or may happen oralmost happens. And, they seek to prevent it.

This is, then, the full clustering of pragmatic and socialfacts at stake with the usage of animal-oriented interjec-tions:14 They create obligations with respect to movement,they do so for an indexically copresent animal or otheragent or agentlike thing, and they do so in (unsolicited) re-sponse to that agent’s misbehavior.15 More pithily, these areforms that, when used, catch their addressees red-handedor nearly red-handed for infractions or for courting dangersof which they are understood to have little or no awareness(i.e., they are, indeed, unsolicited responses) and attempt tochange or avoid that behavior by redirecting the potentiallyoffending (if innocent, unaware) agent’s movement.

One dimension of this clustering of semiotic facts is theway in which one’s addressee gets socially positioned. Morespecifically, the usage of these interjections regularly posi-tions speakers with respect to a class of agents (qua add-ressees) who, through the use of these forms, get figured asunaware of danger or of their violation of some pragmaticdemand. These addressees know not what they do, to use afamous line. They act in ignorance (or defiance!) of the fullersocial meaningfulness of their action. For a moment, theyappear only to behave rather than to act. Theirs is a status,then, that is a reduced form of acting. I refer to it as a statusof quasi agency.

The status of quasi agency is best considered as oneway in which, as Laura M. Ahearn describes the problem,language “may predispose people to conceptualize agencyand subjecthood in certain ways” (2001:120). The use ofanimal-oriented interjections is a technique for foisting anunderstanding of agency (or an understanding of its relativelack) on one’s addressee: In using animal-oriented interjec-tions, again, speakers implicitly evaluate an interlocutor’srelative lack of awareness or knowledge with respect to thedemands of some pragmatic context (it is a stance towardalterity, to invoke Christopher Ball’s [2004] formulation). Tocouch the insight in Alessandro Duranti’s (2001) theoreti-cal vocabulary, the use of these forms is one of the ways inwhich the “mitigation” of agency gets “encoded” in naturallanguages.

The discursive contexts in which actors assume thestatus of quasi agency are ones in which ideologies aboutthe incapacities of nonhuman actors are regularly evoked.Burros (asnu), for instance, are thought to be resistant tohuman projects and incapable of understanding animal-oriented interjections. They must be forced forward (withwords and whips). Alpacas and sheep are thought to befickle, unpredictable, and capable of understanding in-

terjections (with training and practice).16 They must bestopped before getting into trouble. In these cases, it isthe ideologically elaborated incapacity of the animal un-derstood as a feature of mind—a burro’s resistance and analpaca’s or a sheep’s inconstancy—that is regularly presup-posed in the use of the relevant interjection (fickle agentsmust be stopped [with shhk] and resistant ones must bestarted [with urro]).

The ease with which these forms invite and evoke ide-ologies of enminded incapacity is even more strongly sug-gested by the following kind of fact: The contexts in whichquasi agency is a salient participant status readily evoke ex-plicit ideologies about the kind of addressee toward whomthey are most appropriately directed. For instance, my con-sultants assured me that the use of such forms with elders,adults, or older children is insulting. They reduce these ad-dressees. They implicitly attribute to them the occasional“monstrosities” of the nonhuman already outlined—thefickleness of sheep and alpaca and the incomprehension ofthe burro—as well as qualities associated with children andmaterial things, as I discuss in the next section.

These facts make clear the sense in which these ideolo-gies imply an understanding of mindedness that is hierar-chical. Elders, adults, and older children are not the legiti-mate addressees of animal-oriented interjections.17 Burros,alpacas, and sheep are. Elders, adults, and children are thelegitimate speakers of animal-oriented interjections. Bur-ros, alpacas, and sheep are not. In other words, Aymaraunderstandings of enminded incapacity are scaled in thesense that certain classes of actor (i.e., humans) exercise thenonreciprocal privilege of positioning other classes of actor(domesticated animals, in this case) in terms of personaeof incapability. In these moments, a burro’s unwillingnessand a sheep’s inconstancy stand implicitly and negativelyin contrast to—that is, as “lower” than—their respectivehuman opposites: tractability in the face of human disci-pline (i.e., not-stubbornness) and commitment to humanprojects (i.e., not-fickleness).

This hierarchical understanding of enmindedness isthoroughly mediated by the usage of animal-oriented inter-jections. In other words, it is not always presupposable inhuman–animal interaction. For example, both burros andalpacas develop quite astonishing capacities to labor withinhuman projects.18 Sheep and alpacas will head back to thefamily’s corral with little direction from a herder. Burros un-complainingly haul loads of cargo. In most cases, the la-bor activities of a burro or an alpaca do not evoke a hierar-chical comparison to human enmindedness. Such “scaled”comparisons are, then, contingent on a number of factors:the use of animal-oriented interjections, the effectiveness oftheir usage, the interests of the speaker, and so on. Or, moresimply, they are mediated by the full complexity of the us-age of animal-oriented interjections understood as a socialpractice.

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In the remainder of this article, I focus exclusively onthe interjection used with alpacas and sheep (shhk). I do sofor two reasons. One is simply that, as I have noted, whereasthe interjection used with burros is only used with bur-ros, shhk gets used with a range of nonanimal agents andagentlike entities. The other reason is more complex: Thespecific meaningfulness of shhk—its association with un-predictability and cliffhanger moments—gets used to makesensible other forms of nonhuman or not fully human in-capacities (one can readily imagine, however, a nonhumanworld mostly “modeled on” burro stubbornness, reluctanceto engage in human projects, and semiotic inability). I beginwith two ethnographic anecdotes about children.

Children

My first anecdote involves a party I had put together for allof the families who participated in my study. After the adultsplayed several rounds of volleyball, we all—children andadults alike—settled into feasting on a meal of rice, chuno(freeze-dried potatoes), salad, and chicken. After eating, theadults and children separated out. The adult men formed acircle and drank in turns from one-liter bottles of beer. Theadult women drank as well. As is common in the Andes, thedrinking itself was a residually sacred event (see Abercrom-bie 1998): Each person poured out a small beer offering toSanta Tira (better known as the Pachamama in the Andeanliterature) before taking a swig. Two plastic cartons full ofbeer bottles—four of which had been pulled out—sat nearthe men.

There were three groups of playing children. One largegroup of mostly boys was now using the volleyball as a soc-cer ball. They generally just kicked the ball about and onlyoccasionally verged on a more formal, rule-driven versionof soccer. A second group included five girls who were chas-ing each other about in a game of tag, occasionally gawk-ing and laughing at adult antics. A third, small group ofmixed-gender children huddled near an adobe wall, playingwith the rocks that lined the wall. Other axes of differencebesides gender cross-cut these groups: Toddlers hoverednear their older siblings, oftentimes not directly participat-ing in the game or activity at hand; closely related siblingsor cousins tended to dominate the organization of the gameactivities.

These two events—drinking and playing—mostly justcoincided. Children played, and adults drank. Twice, how-ever, there was trouble. Once, two boys—Alberto andFrancisco—separated a bit from their playmates, kickingthe soccer ball toward the cartons of beer. They were staginga full-tilt charge to recover the ball, apparently not seeingthe cartons or perhaps not thinking them important. Simi-larly, a group of three girls who had gotten caught up in anespecially exuberant moment of tag veered at one point to-ward the four bottles of beer that been pulled out of the car-

ton. The response in each case was the same. Caught a bit bysurprise, Thomas yelled out, “Shhk shhk shhk!” as the twoboys nearly clipped the carton of beers, and Miguel yelledthe same thing at the running girls just a bit later.

My second anecdote has to do with three young broth-ers who were playing marbles one afternoon. They were faraway from their home, in a field where their family’s al-pacas and sheep were grazing. The two oldest siblings—Alberto and Francisco again—were actually playing thegame, whereas the youngest, a toddler, just watched. Thetwo older siblings—especially the oldest—would occasion-ally look up at their animals to make sure that nothing wasamiss. This was a typical scene in many ways: Herding isthe primary (but not exclusive) labor task for children inAnatiri; while herding, children have time for unsupervisedplay; and, marbles play (t’inka) was far and away the mostpopular game for boys during my time there. Alberto andFrancisco were experts at marbles.

The youngest brother—Marco—grew impatient. Heasked Alberto and Francisco to include him in their game(an impossibility from their point of view). He whined andwhined, finally turned puckish. Using the back of his foot,he tried to scrape the ground clean of the little holes duginto it to serve as targets (see Smith 2010 on the rules ofthe game). He charged his brothers, trying to bump intothem. All of this was normal enough, relatively harmlesseven to the game itself, and did not invite the attention ofhis older siblings (besides a chuckle). The scene echoed a fa-miliar pattern: Marco liked to try to tackle his brothers whenthey were least aware, and he typically provided a chorus of“Dirty pigs, dirty pigs” as his brothers cleaned up for schoolin the morning.

On this afternoon, Marco’s puckishness was about tobe a problem. When Marco ran over to one of Alberto’s mar-bles, both older boys started to pay attention. The marble,as it happened, was near the “venom hole.” Had it beenstruck into the hole, it would have gotten the power to killany marble it came into contact with (i.e., it would havebeen venomous). Marco leaned over and was about to strikethe marble with his foot, surely sending it away from thevenom hole. Seeing what was about to happen, Franciscoran over to push Marco to the ground. Alberto yelled out,“Shhk shhk shhk!” in a last-ditch effort to divert the tod-dler. Marco giggled, struck the marble, and was thrown tothe ground by Francisco.

In these cases, shhk has the same meaning that it doeswhen used with alpacas and sheep. It is used to stop ac-tion. The boys must be kept from running into the cartonsof beer. The girls must be kept from the open bottles. Marcomust be prevented from messing with his brothers’ marble.In terms of its discursive context, it occurs as a responseto the possibility of negatively evaluated outcomes. Beer—a commodity that is both residually sacred and always ex-pensive in this context—must not be profaned or wasted.

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A marbles game must not be interrupted. The response is,moreover, unsolicited in each case. The boys and girls eitherdo not see the beer or do not understand its importance.Marco’s sense of destructiveness just happens to coincidewith an important feature of the game.

As addressees of shhk, these children inhabit the sta-tus of quasi agents: The boys, the girls, and Marco must bemade to act according to fields of meaning that they do notacknowledge or fully understand. The boys and girls at myparty had to confront a world in which adult drinking andsociability held sway. Marco confronted (quite literally) aboyhood world in which marbles play held sway.

The usage of shhk in these contexts creates a veryspecific kind of interactional encounter between humanspeaker and not yet fully human addressee. The contextscited above are, for instance, ones of unpredictability: Willthe boys be made to stop running in time? Will they see thecartons of beer? Relative to interactionally ongoing worldsof practice and commitment (i.e., where drinking and itssociability matter and where marbles play matters), chil-dren are asked, on occasion, to not muck things up. As withan occasionally fickle sheep or alpaca, the question thenbecomes a cliffhanger—will they actually do as they havebeen told? More is at stake: Is it possible for the drinking ormarbles playing to go on despite those for whom the eventmeans nothing?

These interactional moments evoke and mediate arich, local ideology of childhood enmindedness. When thechildren nearly break the beer bottles, they get understoodas lisu,19 as does Marco when he sets the marbles gameinto turmoil. A lisu child is one who, according to Santago,“jani awktaykarus kaskiti” [does not pay attention to hisparents]. Lisu children disobey. They do as they please.Santiago affectionately describes his son Marco as follows:“Uka lisu janiw kasuskiti. Munanapampiki t’ixnaqaski.Kuns lurtapiskakiw kuns” [That lisu one doesn’t pay at-tention. He runs about doing only what he wants. Hejust does whatever]. Lisuness is a kind of cheeky, willfulanticonventionality.

The usage of animal-oriented interjections with chil-dren, then, implicitly reveals a persona—that is, childhoodlisuness—that is understood as part of a more encompass-ing, hierarchical ordering of enminded beings. It is, first,a form of mindedness understood (implicitly and by con-trast) as “higher” than that of alpacas and sheep: As I havedescribed, children exercise the nonreciprocated privilegeof positioning these animals in terms of a persona of inca-pability. Childhood lisuness stands in stark contrast, how-ever, to that of the kind of mindedness that is attributed(again, implicitly and by contrast) to adult humans: thatis, a level of knowledgeability and respectful complianceconsistent with more mature human social worlds (i.e.,not-lisuness).

Marbles

The scene, again, is an afternoon game of marbles betweentwo brothers. Jose had just recently started to play. He wasfive and a half years old. Before this time, he had mostly justwatched his brothers play marbles, or had played with themat games understood to be appropriate for younger chil-dren (e.g., playing with toy cars and figures), or had playedat home. Although he was not a preferred marbles partner,he would play when there happened to be an opportunity.In this case, he was playing with his older brother Roberto.Even though his play was noticeably less skilled, Jose hadnevertheless managed to keep up with Roberto. Both hadadvanced a marble into one hole and were trying to advancetheir marbles into the next one (out of a series of four).

Jose finally made a rather glaring strategic marbles mis-take, and he responded as he typically did. He had struck hismarble toward a hole with just a bit too much force. After ithad slipped off a plateaulike lip of earth, it careened downa slope that threatened to take it some distance from thehole. As his marble went downward, Jose charged forwardto run alongside it, yelling out a string of “shhks.” He ulti-mately got in front of his marble and knelt to the ground,dramatically bringing his face close to his still-rolling mar-ble: “Shhk!” He dodged his now-slowing marble to kneel infront of it again, again leaning his face toward it: “Shhk!” Hischorus of “shhks” had little effect: His marble ended up sev-eral feet from the hole it should have entered.

On another afternoon, Edmundo and Alberto wereplaying marbles. Unlike Jose, they were both practiced play-ers. At the time of the game, Edmundo was ten and a halfyears old and Alberto was about to turn ten. They hadeach played for five or so years. As relatively distant kin,they played together less frequently than they did with theiryounger brothers. But they were still very used to playingwith each other and even looked forward to playing to-gether, as it meant playing with someone of equal skill.Compared to their younger brothers, they were both muchmore likely to remember the rules of the game and to play inmaximally strategic ways. On this afternoon, they had eacheasily advanced a marble into the first hole.

Both Edmundo and Alberto started to have problemswith the second hole. It was located up a slight inclinethat sent marbles rolling back where they had come from.Alberto had tried two times to climb the slope and failed.Edmundo had failed his first time and was attempting a sec-ond time. This time, his marble came very close to the hole,went slightly past it (eliciting an “Oy” from Edmundo) andthen slowly curled back toward the hole. At this point, themarble could either have landed right in the hole or slidagain back down the incline. In an effort to keep his marblenear the hole, Edmundo yelled out, “Shhk shhk shhk shhk!”As it passed the hole, he let out a disappointed “Yeah.”

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In these examples, both Jose and Edmundo make theirmarble an addressee of an animal-oriented interjection.20

And they treat it the same way that a speaker might treatan alpaca, a sheep, or a child: When uttering shhk, they at-tempt to stop the object from moving. The analogy goeseven further. The boys attempt to keep a marble from do-ing something undesired or strategically harmful (for thespeaker). Both Jose and Edmundo attempt to keep theirmarble close to the targeted hole. In doing so, they positiontheir marbles as quasi agents: They articulate them with re-spect to a more encompassing field of meaning (i.e., thespeaker’s evaluation of marbles strategy in light of the rulesof the game of marbles as well as the current state of theongoing game).

The differences between the examples are revealing.Edmundo’s use of shhk is a “cliffhanger” moment. He usesit during (and only during) a moment of contingency. Hismarble might roll down the hill, or it might stick close tothe intended target (or even fall into the hole). Jose, how-ever, uses shhk after his marble has made up its mind,so to speak. It is already rolling downhill, doing its dam-age, yet Jose continues to speak to it. What is at stake withEdmundo’s example—rather than with Jose’s usage—is amoment of unpredictability in the face of compulsion andof potential misfortune.

The difference between Jose’s and Edmundo’s ex-amples is a developmental one (see Smith 2011). Jose’susage—at the age of five and a half—is an immature one.Edmundo’s—at the age of ten and a half—is a mature one.In the context of this argument, this developmental differ-ence counts as a unique form of evidence: Examples of ma-ture usage are the best kind of evidence for the wider cul-tural saliency of a marble qua agent.

When Edmundo uses shhk with his marble, he makesthe marble into a new kind of thing. It is no mere materialthing. Its moment of up-for-grabs movement makes it ap-pear agentlike. For a moment, it does not just move. It be-haves. It becomes something whose behavior appears reg-ulatable. This happens for just a moment: For a maturespeaker, at least, when a marble has already gone downhillor when it rattles in one’s pocket, it is not worth speaking to.It “goes back” to materiality.

These moments of marbles contingency are oftentimesinterpreted with respect to a local, ideological understand-ing of bad luck, or qhincha. For example, Edmundo—seeingthat his marble had just started to roll downward pastthe targeted hole—yells out, “Oy shhk shhk shhk qhin-cha!” In this instance, he attributes the marble’s continuingdownward movement to the intervention of bad luck (seeSmith 2010 on bad luck in Aymara marbles play). It is thiscliffhanger moment—will the marble roll past the hole? willit slide down the slope?—that evokes the possible presenceof qhincha in game play. When qhincha—that is, as GaryUrton puts it, “the principal cause of the emergence of

a state of imbalance and disequilibrium” (1997:147)—successfully intervenes in marbles play, a marble inevitablyveers from its intended path or landing spot.

As an addressee of mature uses of animal-oriented in-terjections, a marble, then, evokes and mediates an en-minded persona of sorts: bad luck, qhincha. It does so, how-ever, in a very specific way. A marble acts—on occasion—only as a “vehicle” or “animator” of bad luck or disequilib-rium. A useful contrast is with children and lisuness. Whenchildren act in ways that evoke the persona of cheeky will-fulness or lisuness, they inhabit a social orientation thatis thought to characterize children in the Aymara context.When a marble is treated as an agent of bad luck, however,it does not act of its own accord, if you will. It is a medium. Itis possessed. It takes on a persona that is not its own (evenif it takes on that persona rather regularly).

When marbles are positioned in this way, the realm ofanimals, agents, and entities subject to human disciplinebriefly expands to include things outside of—or, perhaps,“below”—the scaled hierarchy of enminded beings: in thiscase, a material (if motile) entity (ironically, this occurs ina moment when a marble shows itself to not be fully pli-able to that discipline!). When this encounter is more fully(and properly) understood as an encounter with a marblequa animator of bad luck, the extension of human disci-pline in this case appears even more remarkable: A boy inthese instances confronts an entity that is not just fully non-human; he confronts something that is antihuman. He con-fronts something that undoes human doings: bad luck.

Conclusion

My primary empirical task in this article has been to givean account of the usage and significance of animal-orientedinterjections in Aymara, with a special focus on the interjec-tion used with alpacas and sheep. Doing this has requiredme to develop an extensive theoretical machinery: The useof these forms positions their addressees as reduced agents(i.e., as quasi agents thought not to acknowledge the moreencompassing significance of their behavior), thereby evok-ing and mediating ideologies about the scaled or graduatedcharacter of the enminded beings and entities that serveas addressees (i.e., the “incapabilities” of animals, children,and material things when viewed from the perspective ofmature adults). The real payoff of this analysis is the follow-ing insight: Immanent to these language practices and theirencompassing ideological environment is an Aymara un-derstanding of a frontier between human and nonhumans.

What is the character of this human–nonhuman fron-tier? From one perspective, the analysis implies an under-standing of nonhumans that is categorial and scalar. Adultsuse shhk with children, alpacas and sheep, and material(at least, motile) things (and not vice versa, ideally). Chil-dren use shhk with alpacas and sheep and material things.

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Material things are not normally engaged as addressees.These asymmetrical, stereotyped participation frameworkssuggest that the personae associated with these actors arealso understood in hierarchical terms: Accordingly, the will-ful, cheeky antisociality of children, the fickleness and in-constancy of alpacas and sheep, and the entropy-inducingcharacter of bad luck, or qhincha, are thought to be rela-tively more removed from forms of mindedness understoodto be fully mature or disciplined.

The categorial account yields benefits for an analysis offully mature, disciplined Aymara sociability. In other words,as one sketches out the personae of the relatively morenonhuman, one sketches out, in a negative sense, under-standings about what it takes to act within a mature so-cial world. According to an Aymara cultural imaginary, oneshould not be qhinchalike (i.e., disorder inducing), a burro(stubborn), an alpaca or a sheep (fickle), or a lisu child (mis-chievous and egoistic). This is, then, what full Aymara so-ciability looks like in part: One should work to create order(be antientropic) and be tractable in the face of social regu-lation (not stubborn), reliably committed to some sociallyrecognized project or projects (not fickle), and respectfuland concerned about others (not mischievous and egois-tic). When incapacities are at stake, so also are capacities.

From another (“mediated”) perspective, however, myanalysis implies a frontier best conceived as a schema ofdifferentiation immanent to specific ideologically renderedlanguage practices. Consider the following facts again:Animals such as alpacas and burros are cast as quasi agentsonly in moments of labor “breakdown” (in terms of ideolo-gies of inconstancy and stubbornness, respectively); a childwho, in one moment, might be cast as a quasi agent relativeto some adult practice (understandable as lisu) can, in thenext, cast a younger child as a quasi agent relative to someother practice (e.g., marbles). One cannot, in other words,draw a neat border that enduringly divides some set of ac-tors over against other ones (mature humans vs. children,animals, and material entities like marbles).21 It is, rather, aschema of differentiation always contingently deployable incommunicative practice.

The mediated perspective also makes clear the sensein which a politics is at stake with the human–nonhumanfrontier. To be sure, the actors I consider here are not pow-erful in any easy sense (i.e., they do not amass wealth orstatus; they do not exploit). They are only indirectly a partof a human polis. It is precisely this marginality, however,that makes them interesting from a political point of view:Following Agamben (2004), it is their excludability that inpart makes possible a kind of sociability (tractability, com-mitment, respect) potentially generative of a human polity.Furthermore, to the extent that this exclusion depends onpractices like the usage of animal-oriented interjections,the analysis reveals the way in which human–nonhuman

distinctions are contingent on other kinds of social facts(e.g., their performance in communicative practice).

My attempt to trace the mediated character of anAymara human–nonhuman frontier shares some of thesame theoretical motivations as the efforts of those whoargue for a “multispecies ethnography.” S. Eben Kirkseyand Stefan Helmreich (2010), for example, advocate for anethnographic enterprise sensitive to the multiple linkagesbetween human social worlds and the worlds of other(nonhuman) organisms. They argue for the importanceof linkages in which a multiplicity of species (human andnonhuman) coproduce forms of sociability, species whothereby register as genuinely political agents. My approachin this article addresses nonhumans in a similar spirit: Itake them up as addressees of human speech who, in serv-ing as addressees, mediate a human–nonhuman frontierand, in doing so, help make possible a political life.

Ultimately, however, these perspectives—the catego-rial and the mediated—are two sides of the same coin. In amethodological sense, I have made claims about the grad-uated or scalar character of Aymara understandings of hu-mans and nonhumans (i.e., their categorial character) onlyto the extent that they are evoked (i.e., to the extent thatthey are mediated by) the usage of animal-oriented inter-jections. A larger, theoretical point looms behind this claim,however: The social life of cultural categories is inevitablyone of dialectical tension with the interests and contingen-cies at stake in their pragmatic deployment (Agha 2007;Silverstein 2004).

Central to these analyses is my concern with the specif-ically discursive mediation of a human–nonhuman fron-tier. With an anchor in a particular semiotic practice, Ihave been able to attend to the connections between an ar-ray of nonhuman addressees (alpacas and sheep, children,and marbles) that would be invisible to an analysis exclu-sively guided by a conceptual tool like “species” or someother, broader, biological category. Indeed, as one followsthe primary warp and woof (!) of language on these matters,one might very well end up asking the following question:How do ideologically rendered discursive practices figuratetheir participants (and referents) as (more or less or differ-ently) enminded kinds of beings, regardless of ontologicaltype?22

Notes

Acknowledgments. I gratefully acknowledge the support of aWenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and a Spencer Foun-dation Dissertation Fellowship. Don Kulick’s fall 2008 seminar on“Animals and the Species Divide” first introduced me to the greatethnographic interest of animals. His pedagogy motivated me towrite this article. I am also thankful for all of the friends and col-leagues who have given me feedback on drafts of this article: Jay

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Ingersoll, Julia Cassaniti, Lara Braff, Pinky Hota, Christine Nutter,Liz Nickrenz, and Amy Cooper. Special thanks are owed to DonaldDonham and the anonymous AE reviewers for their exceptionallyhelpful comments. Of course, all mistakes are my own.

1. Names of towns and persons throughout this article arepseudonyms.

2. This is pronounced as a high back vowel followed by an alve-olar flap and a slightly lowered back vowel. I spell this urro in partto emphasize the presumed Spanish origin of the lexical item (fromburro).

3. This is pronounced as a postalveolar unvoiced fricative fol-lowed by a typically unreleased and always unvoiced velar or alve-olar stop. More often than not, the unreleased stop is velar.

4. One might refer to this speech, following Eduardo Kohn(2007:14) as a “transspecies pidgin.” However, the type of linguis-tic unit at stake in this argument is regularly used with nonanimaladdressees. One might more broadly speak of a “transontologicalpidgin.”

5. One finds occasional mention of forms that would nowbe considered “animal-oriented interjections” in two types ofliterature: anthropologically minded descriptive grammars (e.g.,Bogoras 1911; Enfield 2007; Sapir 1911) and typological accountsof interjections (see Ameka 1992a, 1992b). Of special note are twoworks in which these forms are the primary concern of the author:Maurice E. F. Bloch’s (1998) short anthropological account of Mala-gasy speech to cows and James Bynon’s (1976) linguistic account ofdomestic animal calls in a Berber tribe.

6. I draw the term persona primarily from Asif Agha (2007; notethat he also uses the term characterological figure for similar theo-retical ends). More distally, the origin of this terminology has muchto do with the influence of a Bakhtinian understanding of voicingin discourse (see Bakhtin 1981).

7. When not referring to the Aymara language, I use the termAymara to refer to the tuber-growing, camelid-herding Aymara-speaking communities of the high Bolivian, Peruvian, and ChileanAndes. I use Aymara in this way for two reasons: First, my claims inthis article are largely sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropologicalones, and Aymara is the language of the community under inves-tigation; and, second, such use allows for claims that are neitherexcessively sweeping (pan-Andean) nor particular (communityspecific).

8. This trend represents a historical shift: Whereas, for example,Erving Goffman once noted that a pet is not a “full fledged recipi-ent” (1978:792) of its owner’s talk, a more contemporary approachasks, what kinds of recipienthood do animals actually inhabit (notto mention what kinds of response)?

9. Bloch’s (1998) brief article on Malagasy speech to cows offersthe best evidence for the sociopolitical complexities of the usage ofanimal-oriented interjections. Bloch asks why Malagasy peasants,in a sociolinguistic context in which Malagasy is the dominant lan-guage, use French when ordering their cows out for working the ricefields. His answer stems from an account of power in the colonialcontext: “Just as French is used for communication by the totallypowerful colonials or administrators to the totally powerless peas-ants, the totally powerful cattle owner addresses his totally pow-erless cattle in French using the analogous model of the colonialrelationship” (Bloch 1998:195). Speaking to cattle here uncovers ahierarchy-riven sociopolitical order.

10. I am speaking here of a variety of Aymara that extends fromthe city of Puno to the border of Peru and Bolivia. The speechforms of interest appear to vary considerably across Aymara di-alects (Briggs 1993). Writing of the northern Chilean context, Pene-lope Dransart (2002:65) cites two Aymara animal-oriented interjec-tions used with llamas (kispa: turn around, and piska: keep going).

Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita (1998:101) cite a number ofstereotyped utterances used with animals in the Aymara-speakingcontext of the department of Oruro in Bolivia.

11. My linguistic approach in this article is in part motivated byKohn’s (2007) claim that analyses of human–nonhuman relation-ships should develop semiotic approaches that do not exclusivelyattend to human-specific kinds of semiosis (e.g., the use of sym-bols). Accordingly, my analyses draw from a linguistic anthropolog-ical tradition deeply influenced by the Peircean attempt to theorizesigns in all of their semiotic modalities (regardless of the sign de-ployer’s perceived ontological status, i.e., “species”).

12. I would not be surprised if this interjection were also usedfor llamas. Victor Maqque (personal communication, August 2008),referring of Quechua-speaking communities to the east of Puno,claims that this form can also be used for llamas. In Anatiri, how-ever, only one family has a llama, and it is purported to be a llama–alpaca mix.

13. I am grateful to Liz Nickrenz for suggesting the cliffhangermetaphor.

14. A clue to the meaningfulness of animal-oriented inter-jections inheres in the forms themselves. They belong to thecategory “interjection” (see Bloomfield 1984). Although issues oflanguage form are not central to my argument here, the traditionalstatus of interjections within linguistic inquiry is worth noting.They have been, after all, something like black sheep in linguis-tic circles, considered to be at the border of the properly linguis-tic. Early accounts, for example, explicitly considered them to bethe natural expression of emotion itself (D’Atri 1995). Although in-terjections have been recuperated as objects of linguistic concern,their liminal status—if in just an ideological sense—suggests thekind of politics at stake. A slogan helps: Marginal language is formarginal addressees.

15. One reviewer of this article helpfully suggests that these in-terjections might primarily serve to communicate the speaker’s af-fective stance of disappointment or anger toward an addressee’smisbehavior (and only secondarily implicate that the addresseeshould change his or her behavior). My claim is the reverse: thatis, that the primary meaningfulness of these forms lies in their at-tempt to create an obligation with respect to movement for anaddressee (a discursive act that regularly implicates an affectivestance). Besides the evidence I have cited here, I would point to thesimilarity between my analysis and the analyses of similar forms inother languages (see N. 5) as supporting this second perspective. Iwould also note that the affective account has difficulty explaininghow these forms implicate specific directions about movement.

16. The need for training, practice, and other forms of socializa-tion is an interesting and relatively undeveloped theme within theAndean literature. Writing of llamas, Dransart notes that they are“trained to act as a unit and stay together” (2002:65). This trainingincludes how to make them understand the two animal-orientedinterjections mentioned in N. 10. Arnold and Yapita (1998:101)also note that animals must be taught to understand human com-mands. They describe the socialization process whereby male lla-mas are initiated into the task of carrying cargo over long distances(Arnold and Yapita 1998:406–411).

17. I am talking throughout this section about the stereotypedparticipation frameworks associated with this form. This is notto say, of course, that these stereotyped frameworks cannot be“troped on” (Agha 2007:27) for other interactional effects. Olderboys, for example, when walking behind a group of girls on a roador path, would occasionally (and laughingly) yell out “Shhk shhk!”as though herding the girls.

18. Arnold and Yapita’s (1998) account of Aymara songs sung, inpart, to celebrate animals gives powerful evidence of the respect

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herders have for their animals’ labor capacities. The songs are nolonger performed in Anatiri.

19. This word presumably comes from the Spanish word liso.20. Justin L. Barrett and Amanda Hankes Johnson (2003) give an

account of how English speakers address marbles, albeit in an ex-perimental context. The use of “desire language” in the English casestands in contrast to the Aymara patterns.

21. This is not to say, however, that there are no actors for whomthe usage of these forms is understood to be more or less appropri-ate, as I note throughout.

22. I make reference here to the Silverstein’s (1987) classic workon the conceptual domain that underlies the grammatical proper-ties of noun phrases. The hierarchical character of this conceptualdomain bears some resemblance to the hierarchy of enminded be-ings sketched out in the current project.

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Benjamin SmithCenter for Latin American StudiesUniversity of Chicago5736 S. Woodlawn AvenueChicago, IL 60637

[email protected]

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