A Difficult Language: Aymara Media, Linguistic Labor, and Urban Indigeneity in Bolivia

Join us as we welcome Karl Swinehart. Ph.D. (Associate Professor of Anthropology, UCLA) to campus! 

Aymara is a difficult language in more ways than one. The language’s difficulty is sometimes embraced by Aymaras themselves. Its cultivation affords forms of expertise and authority for language professionals and diverse Aymara cultural interventions foreground its difference from Spanish and other European languages. Bolivian Aymaras’ insistence on keeping the language in the public sphere poses difficulties to a colonial status-quo and to those who would rather not accommodate, much less learn, this or any other Indigenous language. Drawing on analyses of Bolivian media and research among Bolivian Aymara-language educators and media professionals, this talk examines these dynamics and their impact, both on the Aymara language itself and on the unequal terrain of Bolivia’s plurinational, multilingual society.