No abstract

In Peru, Andean indigeneity is often discursively gendered as female. Such a connection between indigeneity and femaleness is invoked in a range of discourses that marginalize the status of Indigenous individuals, and different forms of Indigenous heritage in the country. Yet does this imply that all variations of Indigenous femininity are evaluated and ideologized the same way? This article complicates the semiotic logics and frameworks by which Indigenous female figures have been evaluated and analyzed across different historical moments and ethnographic contexts in Peru. I use the concept of “scale” (Blommaert 2007; Gal and Irvine 2019) to highlight the conflicting and competing ideologized stances and modes of evaluation that compare Indigenous identities, female bodies, and linguistic practices in relation to each other. Through this analysis, I will show that the evaluation of Indigenous female identities is enmeshed in a matrix of competing ideologized scalar regimes, highlighting the need to think about the construction and evaluation of racial and gendered types as shifting across multiple semiotic fields and different ideologized paradigms of evaluation.

Contact refers to the moment of encounter between different populations, and the social, cultural, and linguistic negotiations that ensue. It refers back to a specific time and place when difference and “otherness” is constructed. As a feminist keyword, "contact" can help us critically interrogate various axes of difference, and the conditions that enabled their emergence. Through the meeting of different populations and groups, it demands attention to issues of power and its role in shaping and enacting “othered” identities. It entails both larger, macro‐historical events, and smaller moments of face‐to‐face, intersubjective interactions. Fundamentally, contact is about social change and the potential for it. Social change is interactionally emergent from the contestations that occur between individuals and groups in contact with each other. But the potential for change via contact can also help us see alternative possibilities, allowing us to push against existing typologies, universals, and binaries so that we can better capture the dynamic fluidity of social identities and group boundaries

Traditional, Indigenous houses in Puno, Peru, were built using adobe bricks, stone, and wood. Today, young Indigenous couples are building houses that utilize modern materials such as concrete, brick, and steel. In this paper, I analyze the effects that changing materialities of house construction practices have on the durability and breadth of kin-relationships in Puno . I argue that these changes are possible due to the kind of personhood that houses occupy within kin networks in the Puno and the Andes. Furthermore, I show how access to new materials allows younger families to build houses more quickly than their parents did, shortening the time to develop stronger kin relationships that were once afforded by building with traditional materials. These new materials affect the house's ability to make and maintain kinship in the future where the quality of kin relationships is directly influenced by the material qualia of the house.

This article considers how language contact is gendered through an analysis of how inter-Indigenous Quechua–Aymara boundary maintenance practices and ideologies are feminised in the Peruvian altiplano. The analysis focuses on the semiotic regimentation of Indigenous ethnolinguistic boundaries, concentrating on the role of four Indigenous female figures: the Indigenous wife; the Indigenous female market vendor; the reimagined mythic Indigenous founding mother; and the Indigenous beauty pageant contestant. An ethnographically grounded, scalar analysis of Quechua–Aymara contact in the region shows how each of the female figures is ideologically linked to a specific aspect of inter-Indigenous language contact and boundary maintenance. Furthermore, the discussion shows the interconnectedness of these female figures and their associated ideologised practices and discourses, which lead to the feminisation of inter-Indigenous language contact in the region.