Copyright by Simeon Isaac Floyd 2010
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Copyright by Simeon Isaac Floyd 2010 THE DISSERTATION COMMITTEE FOR SIMEON ISAAC FLOYD CERTIFIES THAT THIS IS THE APPROVED VERSION OF THE FOLLOWING DISSERTATION : Discourse Forms and Social Categorization in Cha’palaa Committee: Joel Sherzer, Co -Supervisor Patience Epps, Co -Supervisor Charles R. Hale Jemima Pierre Nora Englan d Discourse Forms and Social Categorization in Cha’palaa by SIMEON ISAAC FLOYD , B.A.; M.A. DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN MAY 2010 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the members of the Chachi community of Tsejpi for hosting me during my research, as well as to the Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian people of Zapallo Grande, Santa María, Jeyambi, Tyaipi and Cafetál for working with me. Special thanks to María Pastora Añapa and Pedro Lorenzo San Nicolás and their family and Milton Palacios for opening their homes to me. Thanks to Johnny Pianchiche for his skilled transcription assistance. Thanks to the UT faculty and others who mentored me over the years. Ginny Burnett encouraged me to apply for my first independent research support while I was an undergraduate. Marleen Haboud gave me important advice over my first years of fieldwork in Ecuador. My analysis of Cha’palaa had a great advantage thanks to Connie Dickinson who shared her knowledge of Barbacoan languages with me. My advisors Joel Sherzer and Pattie Epps, my committee members and other Anthropology and Linguistics faculty at UT deserve thanks for providing me with a supportive environment. The research and write-up for this dissertation received invaluable support from the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Program, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Science Foundation and the University of Texas. I have benefited greatly from conversations (both serious and silly) with my cohort of students in Linguistic Anthropology including María Luz Garcia, Kayla Price, Terra Edwards, Emiliana Cruz, Chiho Sunakawa and Danny Law – and too many more great fellow anthropology and linguistics students to mention here. I am grateful for Courtney Morris’ great editing work. Tánia Dávila provided vital transcription assistance at the last minute. Michael and April Floyd supported me through the beginning of my studies and encouraged me the whole way. Thanks to all my family and friends in Austin, Quito and elsewhere for providing a universe outside of grad school. I could not have done it without Rosa Elena Donoso who has been my companion throughout, from fieldwork on the Río Cayapas to late nights in front of the computer in Austin and everywhere in between. Watching over me was the Vírgen de San Juan de los Lagos. Errors are the fault of the author. iv Discourse Forms and Social Categorization in Cha’palaa Simeon Isaac Floyd, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisors: Joel Sherzer and Patience Epps This dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afro- descendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in v social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 1.1 A conversation with Yambu .................................................................. 1 1.2 Social categories in oral history............................................................. 9 1.3 Using racial language .......................................................................... 14 1.4 Linguistic resources for racial discourse .............................................. 20 Summary .................................................................................................. 26 1.5 Race and ethnicity in northwest Ecuador ............................................. 28 1.6 Racial and ethnic language in academic accounts ................................ 33 1.7 Linguistic analogies and linguistic analysis ......................................... 46 1.8 Points of articulation ........................................................................... 51 Presentation .............................................................................................. 57 Chapter 2: Grammatical and social collectivity .................................................. 61 2.1 Social relations into the afterlife .......................................................... 61 2.2 Collectivity and the animacy hierarchy ............................................... 64 Summary .................................................................................................. 81 2.3 Collectivity in predicates..................................................................... 81 Summary .................................................................................................. 94 Chapter 3: Ethnonyms and group reference ....................................................... 95 3.1 Ethnonyms in history: Chachilla and uyala.......................................... 95 3.2 The autonym and indigeneity .............................................................107 3.3 Ethnonyms, oral history and whiteness...............................................114 3.4 Blackness and history encoded on ethnonyms ....................................120 3.5 Other exonyms and inter-indigenous differentiation ...........................134 Summary .................................................................................................149 Chapter 4: Collective Pronouns, social categories and discourse structure ........151 4.1 Ethnonyms and pronouns in us/them alignment .................................151 4.2 Racial language and the interview context ..........................................163 vii 4.3 From person to place ..........................................................................171 4.4 The Cha’palaa pronominal system .....................................................175 4.5 Social knowledge and participation structure .....................................181 Summary .................................................................................................189 Chapter 5: Social categorization across modalities ............................................191 5.1 Gestural resources for social categorization ........................................191 5.2 Gesture and the historico-racial schema .............................................195 5.3 Reflexive gestures and social categorizing discourse ..........................203 Summary .................................................................................................219 Chapter 6: Dialogic dimensions of race relations ..............................................220 6.1 Cha’palaa and Spanish in multilingual social space ............................220 6.2 Economies of exchange .....................................................................234 6.3 Interracial marriage and “collisions of blood” ....................................246 6.4 Racializing the supernatural ...............................................................282 Summary .................................................................................................294 Chapter 7: Race and racial conflict in interaction ..............................................296 7.1 Complications of demarcating boundaries ..........................................296