BENJAMIN SMITH University of Chicago

Language and the frontiers of the human:

Aymara animal-oriented interjections and the mediation of mind
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I offer an analysis of Peruvian Aymara speech directed toward sheep and alpacas, children, and marbles (specically, 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 humannonhuman 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]

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 adultsdrive their sheep, alpacas, and pigs from far-ung dormant elds or agriculturally unsuitable land and take them back to each familys 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 everyday 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 neighbors pile of potatoes, the herder yells, Shhk shhk shhk!3 When a sheep, up to its own devices, beelines toward another herders 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, briey, the addressees of human speech.4 The utterances spoken in these instances are composed of a kind of interjectionrecently called an animal-oriented interjection (Eneld 2007:314)that has been frequently cited in connection with animal addressees. In his grammar of Takelma, for example, Edward Sapir cites a form used to urge on deer to corral (1922:279). Waldemar Bogoras, writing on Chukchi, notes two forms used with reindeer: One is used for driving the herd, and the other is used to call broken reindeer (1922:887). Although these kinds of forms have rarely received much sustained attention,5 they have been frequently enough observed to suggest that they constitute 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 forward). On the other hand, they seek to articulate animals with respect to a

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 313324, 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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world of practice in relation to which they are not considered to be fully edged agents (e.g., a sheep does not know that it must keep to its owners ock; an alpaca does not know whose potatoes are whose; neither sheep nor alpaca is punishable for its misdeeds). This is a paradox about agency: Although the animals are not held to be fully knowledgeable or responsible agents in a given context, they are nonetheless made to act within it. This is a purgatory of agency. It is a quasi agency. These moments are ones in which an actors (in)capacities are thought to be interactionally at stake. Sapirs deer must be urged into the coral. Bogorass reindeer must be driven onward. Their perceived, if momentary, inabilities with respect to participation in human projectshesitance to get into a corral, reluctance to move onwardare specic to particular social practices and understandings of species difference. Moreover, it is the meaning and use of the animal-oriented interjection (Go onward!) that helps to create these personae of inability.6 Put more broadly, these are contexts in which ideologies about mindednessthat is, ideologies about characterological traits thought to underlie incapacity within human projectscome to be mediated and sustained: In these cases, again, a deers hesitance and a reindeers reluctance qua features of mind become salient in social interaction. Animals are not the only addressees of animal-oriented interjections in Aymara. Among Aymara speakers, one interjectionthe one primarily used with alpacas and sheepgets used with a fuller range of nonhuman (or not yet fully human) addressees: for example, a child about to burn his or her hand in a stove (spoken by a parent) and an orange teetering near the edge of a table of fruit (spoken by the fruit vendor). In such contexts, one encounters a complex of facts similar to the one found with animal addressees: In the two cases cited above, both addressees get positioned as being blind to the issue of real importance (in the rst case, a burned hand) and, through such positioning, evoke (and mediate) Aymara ideologies about the unsocialized character of children and the intractability of material (or motile) things. In these cases, again, it is the linguistic mediation of personae of incapability (unsocializability, intractability) that is at stake. The variability of possible addressees (child, animal, material) for these forms means that the study of Aymara animal-oriented interjections can speak to a range of questions about the cultural organization of enminded beings. Up to this point, I have only presented examples of mature adults directing animal-oriented interjections to children, animals, and material things. Who, however, has the right to use animal-oriented interjections, and with whom may they be used (i.e., in technical terms, what are their stereotyped participation frameworks)? Can children, for example, 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 guise of a graduated series in which each class of actor can be scaled according to whether its members can legitimately deploy these forms with other classes of actors (i.e., may adults legitimately use these forms with children but not vice versa, etc.)? What might these relationships ultimately imply about an Aymara ideology of higher and lower enminded beings? This line of questioning bears a deep and ultimately transformative relationship to a classic anthropological question. The well-known work of theorists such as Edmund Leach (1964), Mary Douglas (1972), Ralph Bulmer (1967), and S. J. Tambiah (1969) argues for the relatively systematic, categorial, or conceptual character of local, cultural understandings of humans and animals. In his classic work on northern Thailand, for example, Tambiah (1969) argues that there are three hierarchically organized series of cultural domains (categories of humans, categories of place relative to the central part of a house, and categories of animals) across which a number of similarities or homologies hold. The signicance of Tambiahs work in this context is the way in which itconsidered as an exemplary piece takes up Thai understandings of humans and animals as highly complex categorial constellations. The exclusive focus of such classic work on the categorial or symbolic character of such understandings, however, has led to the neglect of an important social fact that I attempt to address in a satisfying way: that is, the way in which these kinds of categories are sustained and mediated through social practice with nonhuman actors themselves (see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:554 for a similar criticism). An account of Aymara animal-oriented interjections is uniquely able to make this case: I begin my analysis with moments of encounter between humans and nonhumans and make claims about the categorial character of Aymara understandings of humans and nonhumans (i.e., their scalar or graduated character) only insofar as it is immanent to those moments of encounter. In doing so, I subject the ontological categories of human and nonhuman beings to the complexities of their mediatedness in social practice: for example, their contingency (on language use, at least), inherent temporality (and, therefore, their historical specicity), and, ultimately, even, their mutability (i.e., their susceptibility to political intervention). In this article, I give an extended account of how the pragmatic deployment of one Aymara animal-oriented interjection (the one used with alpacas and sheep) reveals and mediates a scale of enminded beings. Doing this requires analyses of the meaning and usage of the interjection itself and its relation to Aymara ideologies of alpaca and sheep personae. I then give an account of how its meaning and usage help to make intelligible a wider eld of nonhuman actors. Two social actors within this wider eld are central to

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the analysis: the not-yet-fully-human (children, in relationship to adult social practices) and the slightly-more-thanmaterial (marbles, as understood in boyhood game play). The Aymara language and culture is an especially appropriate linguistic and cultural context in which to take up this project.7 Animal herding is a central part of Aymara economic life that has considerable further consequences for the Aymara social and religious imagination (see Arnold and Yapita 1998). Aymara adults hold strong feelings of responsibility and affection toward their animals (see Dransart 2002). A number of (undescribed) animaloriented interjections in the language are frequently used in the herding context. My concern with the Aymara context is ultimately narrow, however. My central concern is a theoretical one about the linguistically mediated construction of an Aymara humannonhuman frontier.

Speaking to nonhumans
When one interrogates language use with nonhumans, one is rmly on the terrain of questions about semiotically mediated social interaction. This is the traditional domain of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (see Silverstein 2004 and Agha 2007 for recent programmatic accounts): The question is, how do interactional participants, through the deployment of signs, invoke conceptualizations of themselves and of their discursive environment to mutually build up a socially recognizable event of some sort (e.g., a greeting, an act of irting, etc.)? The question can be asked of nonhumans in interaction with humanshow do nonhumans (inter)act in ways that get understood as signs? How do they interpret human signs? How do they act as discursive participants? An example is in order: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Rebecca Treiman (1982) describe how, in the United States, the register of motherese gets used with dogs (they call it doggerel). They note that speech to dogs has many of the same characteristics as motherese: the use of short sentences, the imitation of interlocutors sounds (of dogs noises [HirshPasek 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 dogs social responsiveness (Hirsh-Pasek and Treiman 1982:236)that is, on its discursive participation. One might further ask, what kinds of dog signs get taken up as responses? How do dogs attend to doggerel? What kinds of socially recognizable forms of interaction are thereby produced (play or roughhousing, perhaps)? Scholars across the human sciences have been increasingly attentive to the kinds of genuine responsiveness that nonhumans (or the-less-than-fully-human) inhabit in relation to human social activity. This turn is evident in literatures as diverse as those on infancy (Gottlieb 2004), multi-

modality (Goodwin 2000, 2006), religious language (Keane 1997), animals (Haraway 2008), actor-network theory (Latour 1992), and the linguistic anthropological critique of speech act theory (Dubois 1993).8 One of these literatures is of special interest for the current project: the animal studies literature, in which one uniquely nds an emerging concern with issues of semiotic mediation alongside a broader concern with the sociocultural and sociopolitical consequences of the categories human and nonhuman (albeit with a focus on the animal more particularly). A growing concern in this literature is with interactional encounters between humans and nonhumans. Most prominently, Jacques Derrida writes about encountering his cat (not the cat or the animal) while he is in the nude as she scurries in (and quickly out) of his bathroom. In this instance, Derridas (2008:13) cat is a subject who appears to respond to or genuinely address him in some way. Donna Haraway pushes Derridas insight further: His cats address is an invitation to the risky project of what this cat on this morning cared about, what these bodily postures and visual entanglements might mean and might invite (2008:22). To put it in interactional terms, Derridas cat here is a discursive participant whose act bears some meaningful relation to Derridas own. Animalhuman interaction (cathuman, in this case) drives or depends on, Haraway notes, those developing knowledges of both cat-cat and cat-human behavioral semiotics (2008:22). Although Haraway here intends to ag certain kinds of biological knowledge, her insight can be couched in a more comparative or anthropological query: How do different folk understandings of animals, deployed in different kinds of humananimal social practices, produce interactional sequences that are understood by participants to be relatively predictable? What is interactionally at stake whenin Chicagoa cat crawls purringly into an owners lap? What is at stake when a catin the Andes triumphantly pulls a dead mouse from a familys pile of bagged agricultural produce, to the familys delight? A central contribution of this literature is its concern with the wider sociocultural signicance of speech to nonhumans. Giorgio Agamben, for example, argues that the central theme of Western culture is struggle between humanity and animality: He states that, in our culture, the decisive political conict, which governs every other conict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man (2004:80). It is a conict without end: This overcoming [of animality] is not an event that is completed once and for all, but an occurrence that is always under way (Agamben 2004:79). Agambens analysis sketches out the larger stakes of a concern with semiotic mediation: that is, the sense in which a boundary (i.e., between humanity and animality) and a politics of exclusion may be reected and constructed in and through interaction with nonhumans.9

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Derridas account offers a subtler take on the distinction between humans and nonhumans, arguing that however much the Western animalhuman boundary can appear to be just that (i.e., a boundary)it is surprisingly unstable and multifaceted. It cannot easily capture, for example, the multiplicity of relations between organic and inorganic matter, living and nonliving things; differences between animal species; differences between humans, animals, aliens, and angels; and differences between individual animals. Derrida (2008:31) argues that, given these multiplicities, the boundary should best be conceived analytically as a multiple, shifting, and heterogeneous frontier. This formulation is one that leads directly to questions of mediation: What drives the contingency and shiftiness of this frontier, its contingent realization in interaction? Derrida and others offer ample warrant for a specifically semiotic and interactional (not to mention anthropological) approach to the relationship between humans and nonhumans (and the cultural renderings of such relationships). The following kinds of questions can now be protably asked. How do humans and nonhumans deploy signs to mutually build up, by degrees, coherent events of some sort? How do ideologies about human and nonhumans mediate such semiotic activity and get constructed in and through it? What does this semiotic activity imply about the potential categoriality of these cultural renderings of humans and nonhumans? In this article, I take up the usage and sociocultural signicance of just one kind of sign, examining the deployment of animal-oriented interjections in Aymara and their mediation of a local, scalar understanding of enminded entities or beings.

Aymara animal-oriented interjections

There are numerous animal-oriented interjections in Aymara.10 Speakers use different types of speech when interacting 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 animaloriented interjection in Aymara that regularly gets used with nonanimal addressees. Although shhk, alpacas, and sheep are my primary foci, I also outline the meaning and set of understandings that surround the interjection that gets used with burros (urro). Sketching out the meaning of these two interjections allows the reader to gain comparative leverage on the specicity of the linguistic and social meanings associated with shhk. My approach in this section is a semiotic-functional one (Jakobson 1960; Silverstein 1976).11 In part following Kockelman 2003 on interjections, I map out three kinds of facts: (1) the pragmatic function of the forms (i.e., what gets accomplished through the use of a form, e.g., a request, an order); (2) the kinds of indexical objects presupposed in the context of utterance (e.g., a kind of animal moving in a par-

ticular way); and (3) the way that the usage of these forms allows speakers to position themselves towardor, take a stance toward (see Kiesling 2009; Kockelman 2004)animal addressees. Although this framework guides my argument, I do not highlight the sense in which I am engaging in a specic kind of linguistic argumentation. Both urro and shhk are used, pragmatically, to issue obligations to an addressee. They function conatively, in Roman Jakobsons (1960) scheme. The obligation thereby created is, in Michael Silversteins (1976) terminology, indexically created: It is brought into the speech event in and through the actual token of the interjection. With respect to the semantic function (or propositional content) of the directives, both interjections have to do with movement: Urro can be glossed as go further and shhk can be glossed as stop. This propositional content, although similar, differs in its specic claim about (or obligation with respect to) movement: One interjection (urro) has to do with its continuation and the other (shhk) has to do with its cessation. Both urro and shhk presuppose, pragmatically, the indexical copresencein the act of utteranceof an agent for whom the directive becomes an obligation. The interjection urro presupposes the copresence of at least one burro. It also presupposes a more specic spatial arrangement of speaker and burro: The directive Go further! assumes a situation in which the burro is in front of the speaker and is directed to go away from the speaker. The interjection shhk presupposes the copresence of at least one sheep, alpaca, or some other nonanimal agent or thing understandable as an agent.12 Unlike the case with urro, however, the spatial arrangement of speaker and addressee is not constrained in any specic way. Both interjections regularly presuppose certain facts about their discursive (if not, strictly speaking, cotextual) environment: The interjections urro and shhk are regularly used as responses to an agents behavior (unsolicited responses, in the vocabulary Paul Kockelman draws from the tradition of conversation analysis). They presuppose, in other words, a behavior that is understood as an unvalued act: A burro refuses to move; an alpaca runs off to eat from a neighbors pile of potatoes; a sheep threatens to scurry down a steep ravine. In most of these instances, there is a clear sense that the addressee normally behaves in a way that conforms to the requirements of some pragmatic context (in acts like walking out to the elds to feed or being driven into the stone corral); these interjections are used in instances of violation. The use of shhk presupposes a much more specic kind of discursive environment. It responds prospectively to an agents misbehavior: Again, a sheep is about to scurry down a ravine; an alpaca has not yet eaten a neighbors potatoes. These are cliffhanger moments, if you will.13 Whereas a speaker of urro encounters an already unmoving burro, a

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speaker of shhk must have a air for sensing suspense or contingency. The latter does not catch an agent in the act of misbehavior but on the cusp of misbehavior. In this way, the use of shhk requires a modal sensibility, understood in the linguistic sense: In using shhk, speakers imagine an event (a hand burned, potatoes eaten) that might or may happen or almost happens. And, they seek to prevent it. This is, then, the full clustering of pragmatic and social facts at stake with the usage of animal-oriented interjections:14 They create obligations with respect to movement, they do so for an indexically copresent animal or other agent or agentlike thing, and they do so in (unsolicited) response to that agents misbehavior.15 More pithily, these are forms that, when used, catch their addressees red-handed or nearly red-handed for infractions or for courting dangers of which they are understood to have little or no awareness (i.e., they are, indeed, unsolicited responses) and attempt to change or avoid that behavior by redirecting the potentially offending (if innocent, unaware) agents movement. One dimension of this clustering of semiotic facts is the way in which ones addressee gets socially positioned. More specically, the usage of these interjections regularly positions speakers with respect to a class of agents (qua addressees) who, through the use of these forms, get gured as unaware of danger or of their violation of some pragmatic demand. These addressees know not what they do, to use a famous line. They act in ignorance (or deance!) of the fuller social meaningfulness of their action. For a moment, they appear 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 status of quasi agency. The status of quasi agency is best considered as one way in which, as Laura M. Ahearn describes the problem, language may predispose people to conceptualize agency and subjecthood in certain ways (2001:120). The use of animal-oriented interjections is a technique for foisting an understanding of agency (or an understanding of its relative lack) on ones addressee: In using animal-oriented interjections, again, speakers implicitly evaluate an interlocutors relative lack of awareness or knowledge with respect to the demands of some pragmatic context (it is a stance toward alterity, to invoke Christopher Balls [2004] formulation). To couch the insight in Alessandro Durantis (2001) theoretical vocabulary, the use of these forms is one of the ways in which the mitigation of agency gets encoded in natural languages. The discursive contexts in which actors assume the status of quasi agency are ones in which ideologies about the incapacities of nonhuman actors are regularly evoked. Burros (asnu), for instance, are thought to be resistant to human projects and incapable of understanding animaloriented interjections. They must be forced forward (with words and whips). Alpacas and sheep are thought to be ckle, unpredictable, and capable of understanding in-

terjections (with training and practice).16 They must be stopped before getting into trouble. In these cases, it is the ideologically elaborated incapacity of the animal understood as a feature of minda burros resistance and an alpacas or a sheeps inconstancythat is regularly presupposed in the use of the relevant interjection (ckle agents must be stopped [with shhk] and resistant ones must be started [with urro]). The ease with which these forms invite and evoke ideologies of enminded incapacity is even more strongly suggested by the following kind of fact: The contexts in which quasi agency is a salient participant status readily evoke explicit ideologies about the kind of addressee toward whom they are most appropriately directed. For instance, my consultants assured me that the use of such forms with elders, adults, or older children is insulting. They reduce these addressees. They implicitly attribute to them the occasional monstrosities of the nonhuman already outlinedthe ckleness of sheep and alpaca and the incomprehension of the burroas well as qualities associated with children and material things, as I discuss in the next section. These facts make clear the sense in which these ideologies imply an understanding of mindedness that is hierarchical. Elders, adults, and older children are not the legitimate addressees of animal-oriented interjections.17 Burros, alpacas, and sheep are. Elders, adults, and children are the legitimate speakers of animal-oriented interjections. Burros, alpacas, and sheep are not. In other words, Aymara understandings of enminded incapacity are scaled in the sense that certain classes of actor (i.e., humans) exercise the nonreciprocal privilege of positioning other classes of actor (domesticated animals, in this case) in terms of personae of incapability. In these moments, a burros unwillingness and a sheeps inconstancy stand implicitly and negatively in contrast tothat is, as lower thantheir respective human opposites: tractability in the face of human discipline (i.e., not-stubbornness) and commitment to human projects (i.e., not-ckleness). This hierarchical understanding of enmindedness is thoroughly mediated by the usage of animal-oriented interjections. In other words, it is not always presupposable in humananimal interaction. For example, both burros and alpacas develop quite astonishing capacities to labor within human projects.18 Sheep and alpacas will head back to the familys corral with little direction from a herder. Burros uncomplainingly haul loads of cargo. In most cases, the labor activities of a burro or an alpaca do not evoke a hierarchical comparison to human enmindedness. Such scaled comparisons are, then, contingent on a number of factors: the use of animal-oriented interjections, the effectiveness of their usage, the interests of the speaker, and so on. Or, more simply, they are mediated by the full complexity of the usage of animal-oriented interjections understood as a social practice.

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In the remainder of this article, I focus exclusively on the interjection used with alpacas and sheep (shhk). I do so for two reasons. One is simply that, as I have noted, whereas the interjection used with burros is only used with burros, shhk gets used with a range of nonanimal agents and agentlike entities. The other reason is more complex: The specic meaningfulness of shhkits association with unpredictability and cliffhanger momentsgets used to make sensible other forms of nonhuman or not fully human incapacities (one can readily imagine, however, a nonhuman world mostly modeled on burro stubbornness, reluctance to engage in human projects, and semiotic inability). I begin with two ethnographic anecdotes about children.

Children
My rst anecdote involves a party I had put together for all of the families who participated in my study. After the adults played several rounds of volleyball, we allchildren and adults alikesettled into feasting on a meal of rice, chuno (freeze-dried potatoes), salad, and chicken. After eating, the adults and children separated out. The adult men formed a circle and drank in turns from one-liter bottles of beer. The adult women drank as well. As is common in the Andes, the drinking itself was a residually sacred event (see Abercrombie 1998): Each person poured out a small beer offering to Santa Tira (better known as the Pachamama in the Andean literature) before taking a swig. Two plastic cartons full of beer bottlesfour of which had been pulled outsat near the men. There were three groups of playing children. One large group of mostly boys was now using the volleyball as a soccer ball. They generally just kicked the ball about and only occasionally verged on a more formal, rule-driven version of soccer. A second group included ve girls who were chasing each other about in a game of tag, occasionally gawking and laughing at adult antics. A third, small group of mixed-gender children huddled near an adobe wall, playing with the rocks that lined the wall. Other axes of difference besides gender cross-cut these groups: Toddlers hovered near their older siblings, oftentimes not directly participating in the game or activity at hand; closely related siblings or cousins tended to dominate the organization of the game activities. These two eventsdrinking and playingmostly just coincided. Children played, and adults drank. Twice, however, there was trouble. Once, two boysAlberto and Franciscoseparated a bit from their playmates, kicking the soccer ball toward the cartons of beer. They were staging a full-tilt charge to recover the ball, apparently not seeing the cartons or perhaps not thinking them important. Similarly, a group of three girls who had gotten caught up in an especially exuberant moment of tag veered at one point toward the four bottles of beer that been pulled out of the car-

ton. The response in each case was the same. Caught a bit by surprise, Thomas yelled out, Shhk shhk shhk! as the two boys nearly clipped the carton of beers, and Miguel yelled the same thing at the running girls just a bit later. My second anecdote has to do with three young brothers who were playing marbles one afternoon. They were far away from their home, in a eld where their familys alpacas and sheep were grazing. The two oldest siblings Alberto and Francisco againwere actually playing the game, whereas the youngest, a toddler, just watched. The two older siblingsespecially the oldestwould occasionally look up at their animals to make sure that nothing was amiss. This was a typical scene in many ways: Herding is the primary (but not exclusive) labor task for children in Anatiri; while herding, children have time for unsupervised play; and, marbles play (tinka) was far and away the most popular game for boys during my time there. Alberto and Francisco were experts at marbles. The youngest brotherMarcogrew impatient. He asked Alberto and Francisco to include him in their game (an impossibility from their point of view). He whined and whined, nally turned puckish. Using the back of his foot, he tried to scrape the ground clean of the little holes dug into it to serve as targets (see Smith 2010 on the rules of the game). He charged his brothers, trying to bump into them. All of this was normal enough, relatively harmless even to the game itself, and did not invite the attention of his older siblings (besides a chuckle). The scene echoed a familiar pattern: Marco liked to try to tackle his brothers when they were least aware, and he typically provided a chorus of Dirty pigs, dirty pigs as his brothers cleaned up for school in the morning. On this afternoon, Marcos puckishness was about to be a problem. When Marco ran over to one of Albertos marbles, both older boys started to pay attention. The marble, as it happened, was near the venom hole. Had it been struck into the hole, it would have gotten the power to kill any marble it came into contact with (i.e., it would have been venomous). Marco leaned over and was about to strike the marble with his foot, surely sending it away from the venom hole. Seeing what was about to happen, Francisco ran over to push Marco to the ground. Alberto yelled out, Shhk shhk shhk! in a last-ditch effort to divert the toddler. Marco giggled, struck the marble, and was thrown to the ground by Francisco. In these cases, shhk has the same meaning that it does when used with alpacas and sheep. It is used to stop action. The boys must be kept from running into the cartons of beer. The girls must be kept from the open bottles. Marco must be prevented from messing with his brothers marble. In terms of its discursive context, it occurs as a response to the possibility of negatively evaluated outcomes. Beer a commodity that is both residually sacred and always expensive in this contextmust 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 either do not see the beer or do not understand its importance. Marcos sense of destructiveness just happens to coincide with an important feature of the game. As addressees of shhk, these children inhabit the status of quasi agents: The boys, the girls, and Marco must be made to act according to elds of meaning that they do not acknowledge or fully understand. The boys and girls at my party had to confront a world in which adult drinking and sociability held sway. Marco confronted (quite literally) a boyhood world in which marbles play held sway. The usage of shhk in these contexts creates a very specic kind of interactional encounter between human speaker and not yet fully human addressee. The contexts cited above are, for instance, ones of unpredictability: Will the boys be made to stop running in time? Will they see the cartons of beer? Relative to interactionally ongoing worlds of practice and commitment (i.e., where drinking and its sociability matter and where marbles play matters), children are asked, on occasion, to not muck things up. As with an occasionally ckle sheep or alpaca, the question then becomes a cliffhangerwill they actually do as they have been told? More is at stake: Is it possible for the drinking or marbles playing to go on despite those for whom the event means nothing? These interactional moments evoke and mediate a rich, local ideology of childhood enmindedness. When the children nearly break the beer bottles, they get understood as lisu,19 as does Marco when he sets the marbles game into turmoil. A lisu child is one who, according to Santago, jani awktaykarus kaskiti [does not pay attention to his parents]. Lisu children disobey. They do as they please. Santiago affectionately describes his son Marco as follows: Uka lisu janiw kasuskiti. Munanapampiki tixnaqaski. Kuns lurtapiskakiw kuns [That lisu one doesnt pay attention. He runs about doing only what he wants. He just does whatever]. Lisuness is a kind of cheeky, willful anticonventionality. The usage of animal-oriented interjections with children, then, implicitly reveals a personathat is, childhood lisunessthat is understood as part of a more encompassing, hierarchical ordering of enminded beings. It is, rst, a form of mindedness understood (implicitly and by contrast) as higher than that of alpacas and sheep: As I have described, children exercise the nonreciprocated privilege of positioning these animals in terms of a persona of incapability. Childhood lisuness stands in stark contrast, however, to that of the kind of mindedness that is attributed (again, implicitly and by contrast) to adult humans: that is, a level of knowledgeability and respectful compliance consistent with more mature human social worlds (i.e., not-lisuness).

Marbles
The scene, again, is an afternoon game of marbles between two brothers. Jos e had just recently started to play. He was ve and a half years old. Before this time, he had mostly just watched his brothers play marbles, or had played with them at games understood to be appropriate for younger children (e.g., playing with toy cars and gures), or had played at 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, Jos e had nevertheless managed to keep up with Roberto. Both had advanced a marble into one hole and were trying to advance their marbles into the next one (out of a series of four). Jos e nally made a rather glaring strategic marbles mistake, and he responded as he typically did. He had struck his marble toward a hole with just a bit too much force. After it had slipped off a plateaulike lip of earth, it careened down a slope that threatened to take it some distance from the hole. As his marble went downward, Jos e charged forward to run alongside it, yelling out a string of shhks. He ultimately got in front of his marble and knelt to the ground, dramatically bringing his face close to his still-rolling marble: Shhk! He dodged his now-slowing marble to kneel in front of it again, again leaning his face toward it: Shhk! His chorus of shhks had little effect: His marble ended up several feet from the hole it should have entered. On another afternoon, Edmundo and Alberto were playing marbles. Unlike Jos e, they were both practiced players. At the time of the game, Edmundo was ten and a half years old and Alberto was about to turn ten. They had each played for ve or so years. As relatively distant kin, they played together less frequently than they did with their younger brothers. But they were still very used to playing with each other and even looked forward to playing together, as it meant playing with someone of equal skill. Compared to their younger brothers, they were both much more likely to remember the rules of the game and to play in maximally strategic ways. On this afternoon, they had each easily advanced a marble into the rst hole. Both Edmundo and Alberto started to have problems with the second hole. It was located up a slight incline that sent marbles rolling back where they had come from. Alberto had tried two times to climb the slope and failed. Edmundo had failed his rst time and was attempting a second time. This time, his marble came very close to the hole, went slightly past it (eliciting an Oy from Edmundo) and then slowly curled back toward the hole. At this point, the marble could either have landed right in the hole or slid again back down the incline. In an effort to keep his marble near 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 Jos e and Edmundo make their marble an addressee of an animal-oriented interjection.20 And they treat it the same way that a speaker might treat an alpaca, a sheep, or a child: When uttering shhk, they attempt to stop the object from moving. The analogy goes even further. The boys attempt to keep a marble from doing something undesired or strategically harmful (for the speaker). Both Jos e and Edmundo attempt to keep their marble close to the targeted hole. In doing so, they position their marbles as quasi agents: They articulate them with respect to a more encompassing eld of meaning (i.e., the speakers evaluation of marbles strategy in light of the rules of the game of marbles as well as the current state of the ongoing game). The differences between the examples are revealing. Edmundos use of shhk is a cliffhanger moment. He uses it during (and only during) a moment of contingency. His marble might roll down the hill, or it might stick close to the intended target (or even fall into the hole). Jos e, however, uses shhk after his marble has made up its mind, so to speak. It is already rolling downhill, doing its damage, yet Jos e continues to speak to it. What is at stake with Edmundos examplerather than with Jos es usageis a moment of unpredictability in the face of compulsion and of potential misfortune. The difference between Jos es and Edmundos examples is a developmental one (see Smith 2011). Jos es usageat the age of ve and a halfis an immature one. Edmundosat the age of ten and a halfis a mature one. In the context of this argument, this developmental difference counts as a unique form of evidence: Examples of mature usage are the best kind of evidence for the wider cultural saliency of a marble qua agent. When Edmundo uses shhk with his marble, he makes the marble into a new kind of thing. It is no mere material thing. Its moment of up-for-grabs movement makes it appear agentlike. For a moment, it does not just move. It behaves. It becomes something whose behavior appears regulatable. This happens for just a moment: For a mature speaker, at least, when a marble has already gone downhill or when it rattles in ones pocket, it is not worth speaking to. It goes back to materiality. These moments of marbles contingency are oftentimes interpreted with respect to a local, ideological understanding of bad luck, or qhincha. For example, Edmundoseeing that his marble had just started to roll downward past the targeted holeyells out, Oy shhk shhk shhk qhincha! In this instance, he attributes the marbles continuing downward movement to the intervention of bad luck (see Smith 2010 on bad luck in Aymara marbles play). It is this cliffhanger momentwill the marble roll past the hole? will it slide down the slope?that evokes the possible presence of qhincha in game play. When qhinchathat is, as Gary Urton puts it, the principal cause of the emergence of

a state of imbalance and disequilibrium (1997:147) successfully intervenes in marbles play, a marble inevitably veers from its intended path or landing spot. As an addressee of mature uses of animal-oriented interjections, a marble, then, evokes and mediates an enminded persona of sorts: bad luck, qhincha. It does so, however, in a very specic way. A marble actson occasion only as a vehicle or animator of bad luck or disequilibrium. A useful contrast is with children and lisuness. When children act in ways that evoke the persona of cheeky willfulness or lisuness, they inhabit a social orientation that is 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. It is possessed. It takes on a persona that is not its own (even if it takes on that persona rather regularly). When marbles are positioned in this way, the realm of animals, agents, and entities subject to human discipline briey expands to include things outside ofor, perhaps, belowthe scaled hierarchy of enminded beings: in this case, a material (if motile) entity (ironically, this occurs in a moment when a marble shows itself to not be fully pliable to that discipline!). When this encounter is more fully (and properly) understood as an encounter with a marble qua animator of bad luck, the extension of human discipline in this case appears even more remarkable: A boy in these instances confronts an entity that is not just fully nonhuman; he confronts something that is antihuman. He confronts something that undoes human doings: bad luck.

Conclusion
My primary empirical task in this article has been to give an account of the usage and signicance of animal-oriented interjections in Aymara, with a special focus on the interjection used with alpacas and sheep. Doing this has required me to develop an extensive theoretical machinery: The use of these forms positions their addressees as reduced agents (i.e., as quasi agents thought not to acknowledge the more encompassing signicance of their behavior), thereby evoking and mediating ideologies about the scaled or graduated character of the enminded beings and entities that serve as addressees (i.e., the incapabilities of animals, children, and material things when viewed from the perspective of mature adults). The real payoff of this analysis is the following insight: Immanent to these language practices and their encompassing ideological environment is an Aymara understanding of a frontier between human and nonhumans. What is the character of this humannonhuman frontier? From one perspective, the analysis implies an understanding of nonhumans that is categorial and scalar. Adults use shhk with children, alpacas and sheep, and material (at least, motile) things (and not vice versa, ideally). Children 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 frameworks suggest that the personae associated with these actors are also understood in hierarchical terms: Accordingly, the willful, cheeky antisociality of children, the ckleness and inconstancy of alpacas and sheep, and the entropy-inducing character of bad luck, or qhincha, are thought to be relatively more removed from forms of mindedness understood to be fully mature or disciplined. The categorial account yields benets for an analysis of fully mature, disciplined Aymara sociability. In other words, as one sketches out the personae of the relatively more nonhuman, one sketches out, in a negative sense, understandings about what it takes to act within a mature social world. According to an Aymara cultural imaginary, one should not be qhinchalike (i.e., disorder inducing), a burro (stubborn), an alpaca or a sheep (ckle), or a lisu child (mischievous and egoistic). This is, then, what full Aymara sociability looks like in part: One should work to create order (be antientropic) and be tractable in the face of social regulation (not stubborn), reliably committed to some socially recognized project or projects (not ckle), and respectful and concerned about others (not mischievous and egoistic). When incapacities are at stake, so also are capacities. From another (mediated) perspective, however, my analysis implies a frontier best conceived as a schema of differentiation immanent to specic ideologically rendered language practices. Consider the following facts again: Animals such as alpacas and burros are cast as quasi agents only in moments of labor breakdown (in terms of ideologies of inconstancy and stubbornness, respectively); a child who, in one moment, might be cast as a quasi agent relative to some adult practice (understandable as lisu) can, in the next, cast a younger child as a quasi agent relative to some other practice (e.g., marbles). One cannot, in other words, draw a neat border that enduringly divides some set of actors over against other ones (mature humans vs. children, animals, and material entities like marbles).21 It is, rather, a schema of differentiation always contingently deployable in communicative practice. The mediated perspective also makes clear the sense in which a politics is at stake with the humannonhuman frontier. To be sure, the actors I consider here are not powerful in any easy sense (i.e., they do not amass wealth or status; they do not exploit). They are only indirectly a part of 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 in part makes possible a kind of sociability (tractability, commitment, respect) potentially generative of a human polity. Furthermore, to the extent that this exclusion depends on practices like the usage of animal-oriented interjections, the analysis reveals the way in which humannonhuman

distinctions are contingent on other kinds of social facts (e.g., their performance in communicative practice). My attempt to trace the mediated character of an Aymara humannonhuman frontier shares some of the same theoretical motivations as the efforts of those who argue for a multispecies ethnography. S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010), for example, advocate for an ethnographic enterprise sensitive to the multiple linkages between human social worlds and the worlds of other (nonhuman) organisms. They argue for the importance of linkages in which a multiplicity of species (human and nonhuman) coproduce forms of sociability, species who thereby register as genuinely political agents. My approach in this article addresses nonhumans in a similar spirit: I take them up as addressees of human speech who, in serving as addressees, mediate a humannonhuman frontier and, in doing so, help make possible a political life. Ultimately, however, these perspectivesthe categorial and the mediatedare two sides of the same coin. In a methodological sense, I have made claims about the graduated or scalar character of Aymara understandings of humans and nonhumans (i.e., their categorial character) only to the extent that they are evoked (i.e., to the extent that they are mediated by) the usage of animal-oriented interjections. A larger, theoretical point looms behind this claim, however: The social life of cultural categories is inevitably one of dialectical tension with the interests and contingencies at stake in their pragmatic deployment (Agha 2007; Silverstein 2004). Central to these analyses is my concern with the specifically discursive mediation of a humannonhuman frontier. With an anchor in a particular semiotic practice, I have been able to attend to the connections between an array of nonhuman addressees (alpacas and sheep, children, and marbles) that would be invisible to an analysis exclusively guided by a conceptual tool like species or some other, broader, biological category. Indeed, as one follows the 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 gurate their participants (and referents) as (more or less or differently) enminded kinds of beings, regardless of ontological type?22

Notes
Acknowledgments. I gratefully acknowledge the support of a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Don Kulicks fall 2008 seminar on Animals and the Species Divide rst introduced me to the great ethnographic interest of animals. His pedagogy motivated me to write this article. I am also thankful for all of the friends and colleagues 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 Donald Donham and the anonymous AE reviewers for their exceptionally helpful comments. Of course, all mistakes are my own. 1. Names of towns and persons throughout this article are pseudonyms. 2. This is pronounced as a high back vowel followed by an alveolar ap and a slightly lowered back vowel. I spell this urro in part to emphasize the presumed Spanish origin of the lexical item (from burro). 3. This is pronounced as a postalveolar unvoiced fricative followed by a typically unreleased and always unvoiced velar or alveolar 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 linguistic unit at stake in this argument is regularly used with nonanimal addressees. One might more broadly speak of a transontological pidgin. 5. One nds occasional mention of forms that would now be considered animal-oriented interjections in two types of literature: anthropologically minded descriptive grammars (e.g., Bogoras 1911; Eneld 2007; Sapir 1911) and typological accounts of interjections (see Ameka 1992a, 1992b). Of special note are two works in which these forms are the primary concern of the author: Maurice E. F. Blochs (1998) short anthropological account of Malagasy speech to cows and James Bynons (1976) linguistic account of domestic animal calls in a Berber tribe. 6. I draw the term persona primarily from Asif Agha (2007; note that he also uses the term characterological gure for similar theoretical ends). More distally, the origin of this terminology has much to do with the inuence of a Bakhtinian understanding of voicing in discourse (see Bakhtin 1981). 7. When not referring to the Aymara language, I use the term Aymara to refer to the tuber-growing, camelid-herding Aymaraspeaking communities of the high Bolivian, Peruvian, and Chilean Andes. I use Aymara in this way for two reasons: First, my claims in this article are largely sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropological ones, and Aymara is the language of the community under investigation; and, second, such use allows for claims that are neither excessively sweeping (pan-Andean) nor particular (community specic). 8. This trend represents a historical shift: Whereas, for example, Erving Goffman once noted that a pet is not a full edged recipient (1978:792) of its owners talk, a more contemporary approach asks, what kinds of recipienthood do animals actually inhabit (not to mention what kinds of response)? 9. Blochs (1998) brief article on Malagasy speech to cows offers the best evidence for the sociopolitical complexities of the usage of animal-oriented interjections. Bloch asks why Malagasy peasants, in a sociolinguistic context in which Malagasy is the dominant language, use French when ordering their cows out for working the rice elds. His answer stems from an account of power in the colonial context: Just as French is used for communication by the totally powerful colonials or administrators to the totally powerless peasants, the totally powerful cattle owner addresses his totally powerless cattle in French using the analogous model of the colonial relationship (Bloch 1998:195). Speaking to cattle here uncovers a hierarchy-riven sociopolitical order. 10. I am speaking here of a variety of Aymara that extends from the city of Puno to the border of Peru and Bolivia. The speech forms of interest appear to vary considerably across Aymara dialects (Briggs 1993). Writing of the northern Chilean context, Penelope Dransart (2002:65) cites two Aymara animal-oriented interjections used with llamas (kispa: turn around, and piska: keep going).

Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita (1998:101) cite a number of stereotyped utterances used with animals in the Aymara-speaking context of the department of Oruro in Bolivia. 11. My linguistic approach in this article is in part motivated by Kohns (2007) claim that analyses of humannonhuman relationships should develop semiotic approaches that do not exclusively attend to human-specic kinds of semiosis (e.g., the use of symbols). Accordingly, my analyses draw from a linguistic anthropological tradition deeply inuenced by the Peircean attempt to theorize signs in all of their semiotic modalities (regardless of the sign deployers perceived ontological status, i.e., species). 12. I would not be surprised if this interjection were also used for 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, however, 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 cliffhanger metaphor. 14. A clue to the meaningfulness of animal-oriented interjections inheres in the forms themselves. They belong to the category interjection (see Bloomeld 1984). Although issues of language form are not central to my argument here, the traditional status of interjections within linguistic inquiry is worth noting. They have been, after all, something like black sheep in linguistic circles, considered to be at the border of the properly linguistic. Early accounts, for example, explicitly considered them to be the natural expression of emotion itself (DAtri 1995). Although interjections have been recuperated as objects of linguistic concern, their liminal statusif in just an ideological sensesuggests the kind of politics at stake. A slogan helps: Marginal language is for marginal addressees. 15. One reviewer of this article helpfully suggests that these interjections might primarily serve to communicate the speakers affective stance of disappointment or anger toward an addressees misbehavior (and only secondarily implicate that the addressee should change his or her behavior). My claim is the reverse: that is, that the primary meaningfulness of these forms lies in their attempt to create an obligation with respect to movement for an addressee (a discursive act that regularly implicates an affective stance). Besides the evidence I have cited here, I would point to the similarity between my analysis and the analyses of similar forms in other languages (see N. 5) as supporting this second perspective. I would also note that the affective account has difculty explaining how these forms implicate specic directions about movement. 16. The need for training, practice, and other forms of socialization is an interesting and relatively undeveloped theme within the Andean literature. Writing of llamas, Dransart notes that they are trained to act as a unit and stay together (2002:65). This training includes how to make them understand the two animal-oriented interjections mentioned in N. 10. Arnold and Yapita (1998:101) also note that animals must be taught to understand human commands. They describe the socialization process whereby male llamas are initiated into the task of carrying cargo over long distances (Arnold and Yapita 1998:406411). 17. I am talking throughout this section about the stereotyped participation frameworks associated with this form. This is not to say, of course, that these stereotyped frameworks cannot be troped on (Agha 2007:27) for other interactional effects. Older boys, for example, when walking behind a group of girls on a road or path, would occasionally (and laughingly) yell out Shhk shhk! as though herding the girls. 18. Arnold and Yapitas (1998) account of Aymara songs sung, in part, to celebrate animals gives powerful evidence of the respect

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herders have for their animals labor capacities. The songs are no longer 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 experimental context. The use of desire language in the English case stands in contrast to the Aymara patterns. 21. This is not to say, however, that there are no actors for whom the usage of these forms is understood to be more or less appropriate, as I note throughout. 22. I make reference here to the Silversteins (1987) classic work on the conceptual domain that underlies the grammatical properties of noun phrases. The hierarchical character of this conceptual domain bears some resemblance to the hierarchy of enminded beings sketched out in the current project.

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