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 (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
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
I
when people bring their animals back home after grazing. Herders
many of them children but also adultsdrive their sheep, alpacas,
and pigs from far-flung dormant fields 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 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-
bors 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, briefly, the
addressees of human speech.4
The utterances spoken in these instances are composed of a kind
of interjectionrecently 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. 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
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012
world of practice in relation to which they are not con-
sidered to be fully fledged agents (e.g., a sheep does not
know that it must keep to its owners flock; an alpaca does
not know whose potatoes are whose; neither sheep nor al-
paca is punishable for its misdeeds). This is a paradox about
agency: Although the animals are not held to be fully knowl-
edgeable 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 momen-
tary, inabilities with respect to participation in human
projectshesitance to get into a corral, reluctance to move
onwardare specific 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 charac-
terological 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 (spo-
ken by the fruit vendor). In such contexts, one encounters
a complex of facts similar to the one found with animal ad-
dressees: In the two cases cited above, both addressees get
positioned 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 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 (unsocial-
izability, 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 ques-
tions 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 stereo-
typed participation frameworks)? Can children, for exam-
ple, use them with addressees for whom the implication of
314
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 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 as
Edmund 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 of
cultural domains (categories of humans, categories of place
relative to the central part of a house, and categories of an-
imals) across which a number of similarities or homologies
hold. The significance 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 catego-
rial or symbolic character of such understandings, how-
ever, 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 medi-
ated through social practice with nonhuman actors them-
selves (see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:554 for a similar
criticism). 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 of
Aymara 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 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 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 the
pragmatic deployment of one Aymara animal-oriented in-
terjection (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 field of nonhuman
actors. Two social actors within this wider field are central to
 Language and the frontiers of the human
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 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 con-
sequences 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) animal-
oriented interjections in the language are frequently used
in the herding context. My concern with the Aymara con-
text is ultimately narrow, however. My central concern is a
theoretical one about the linguistically mediated construc-
tion of an Aymara humannonhuman frontier.
Speaking to nonhumans
When one interrogates language use with nonhumans, one
is firmly on the terrain of questions about semiotically me-
diated social interaction. This is the traditional domain
of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropol-
ogy (see Silverstein 2004 and Agha 2007 for recent pro-
grammatic accounts): The question is, how do interactional
participants, through the deployment of signs, invoke con-
ceptualizations of themselves and of their discursive envi-
ronment to mutually build up a socially recognizable event
of some sort (e.g., a greeting, an act of flirting, 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 reg-
ister of motherese gets used with dogs (they call it dog-
gerel). 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 [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 dogs social re-
sponsiveness (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 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 that
nonhumans (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-
 American Ethnologist
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 finds an emerging concern
with issues of semiotic mediation alongside a broader con-
cern 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 interac-
tional 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 discur-
sive participant whose act bears some meaningful relation
to Derridas own.
Animalhuman interaction (cathuman, in this case)
drives or depends on, Haraway notes, those develop-
ing knowledges of both cat-cat and cat-human behavioral
semiotics (2008:22). Although Haraway here intends to flag
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, pro-
duce interactional sequences that are understood by partic-
ipants 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 significance of speech to non-
humans. Giorgio Agamben, for example, argues that the
central theme of Western culture is struggle between hu-
manity and animality: He states that, in our culture, the
decisive political conflict, which governs every other con-
flict, is that between the animality and the humanity of
man (2004:80). It is a conflict without end: This overcom-
ing [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 human-
ity and animality) and a politics of exclusion may be re-
flected and constructed in and through interaction with
nonhumans.9
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American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012
Derridas account offers a subtler take on the dis-
tinction 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 indi-
vidual animals. Derrida (2008:31) argues that, given these
multiplicities, the boundary should best be conceived an-
alytically 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 specif-
ically semiotic and interactional (not to mention anthro-
pological) approach to the relationship between humans
and nonhumans (and the cultural renderings of such re-
lationships). The following kinds of questions can now be
profitably 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 nonhu-
mans mediate such semiotic activity and get constructed
in and through it? What does this semiotic activity imply
about the potential categoriality of these cultural render-
ings of humans and nonhumans? In this article, I take up
the usage and sociocultural significance of just one kind of
sign, 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 in
Aymara.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 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 compara-
tive leverage on the specificity 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-
316
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 spe-
cific 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, in-
dexically created: It is brought into the speech event in
and 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 be
glossed as stop. This propositional content, although sim-
ilar, differs in its specific 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 in-
dexical copresencein the act of utteranceof an agent for
whom 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 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 ar-
rangement of speaker and addressee is not constrained in
any specific way.
Both interjections regularly presuppose certain facts
about their discursive (if not, strictly speaking, cotextual)
environment: The interjections urro and shhk are regu-
larly 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 con-
text (in acts like walking out to the fields 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 specific 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
 Language and the frontiers of the human
speaker of shhk must have a flair 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 interjec-
tions: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) re-
sponse 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
specifically, 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 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 defiance!) 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 interjec-
tions, 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) theoreti-
cal 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 animal-
oriented interjections. They must be forced forward (with
words and whips). Alpacas and sheep are thought to be
fickle, unpredictable, and capable of understanding in-
 American Ethnologist
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 un-
derstood as a feature of minda burros resistance and an
alpacas or a sheeps inconstancythat is regularly presup-
posed in the use of the relevant interjection (fickle agents
must be stopped [with shhk] and resistant ones must be
started [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 which
quasi agency is a salient participant status readily evoke ex-
plicit ideologies about the kind of addressee toward whom
they 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 outlinedthe
fickleness 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 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 the
legitimate speakers of animal-oriented interjections. Bur-
ros, 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 disci-
pline (i.e., not-stubbornness) and commitment to human
projects (i.e., not-fickleness).
This hierarchical understanding of enmindedness is
thoroughly mediated by the usage of animal-oriented inter-
jections. 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 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 of
their usage, the interests of the speaker, and so on. Or, more
simply, they are mediated by the full complexity of the us-
age of animal-oriented interjections understood as a social
practice.
317
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012
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 bur-
ros, shhk gets used with a range of nonanimal agents and
agentlike entities. The other reason is more complex: The
specific meaningfulness of shhkits association with un-
predictability and cliffhanger momentsgets used to make
sensible other forms of nonhuman or not fully human in-
capacities (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 first 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 Abercrom-
bie 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 soc-
cer 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 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 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 participat-
ing 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, how-
ever, 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. Simi-
larly, a group of three girls who had gotten caught up in an
especially exuberant moment of tag veered at one point to-
ward the four bottles of beer that been pulled out of the car-
318
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 broth-
ers who were playing marbles one afternoon. They were far
away from their home, in a field where their familys al-
pacas 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 occasion-
ally 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, finally 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 fa-
miliar 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 mar-
bles, 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 tod-
dler. 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 ac-
tion. 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 ex-
pensive in this contextmust not be profaned or wasted.
 Language and the frontiers of the human
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 sta-
tus of quasi agents: The boys, the girls, and Marco must be
made to act according to fields 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
specific 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), chil-
dren are asked, on occasion, to not muck things up. As with
an occasionally fickle 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 at-
tention. 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 chil-
dren, then, implicitly reveals a personathat is, childhood
lisunessthat 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 have
described, children exercise the nonreciprocated privilege
of 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: that
is, a level of knowledgeability and respectful compliance
consistent with more mature human social worlds (i.e.,
not-lisuness).
 American Ethnologist
Marbles
The scene, again, is an afternoon game of marbles between
two brothers. Jose had just recently started to play. He was
five 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 chil-
dren (e.g., playing with toy cars and figures), 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, Jose 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).
Jose finally made a rather glaring strategic marbles mis-
take, 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, Jose charged forward
to 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 in
front of it again, again leaning his face toward it: Shhk! His
chorus 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 were
playing marbles. Unlike Jose, they were both practiced play-
ers. 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 five 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 to-
gether, 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 first 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 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) 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.
319
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012
In these examples, both Jose 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 at-
tempt to stop the object from moving. The analogy goes
even further. The boys attempt to keep a marble from do-
ing something undesired or strategically harmful (for the
speaker). Both Jose 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 re-
spect to a more encompassing field 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). 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 with
Edmundos examplerather than with Joses usageis a
moment of unpredictability in the face of compulsion and
of potential misfortune.
The difference between Joses and Edmundos ex-
amples is a developmental one (see Smith 2011). Joses
usageat the age of five 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 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 makes
the marble into a new kind of thing. It is no mere material
thing. 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 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 understand-
ing 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 qhin-
cha! 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
320
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 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 actson occasion
only as a vehicle or animator of bad luck or disequilib-
rium. A useful contrast is with children and lisuness. When
children act in ways that evoke the persona of cheeky will-
fulness 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
briefly 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 pli-
able 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 disci-
pline in this case appears even more remarkable: A boy in
these 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 give
an account of the usage and significance of animal-oriented
interjections in Aymara, with a special focus on the interjec-
tion 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 significance of their behavior), thereby evok-
ing 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 follow-
ing insight: Immanent to these language practices and their
encompassing ideological environment is an Aymara un-
derstanding of a frontier between human and nonhumans.
What is the character of this humannonhuman fron-
tier? From one perspective, the analysis implies an under-
standing 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). Chil-
dren use shhk with alpacas and sheep and material things.
 Language and the frontiers of the human
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 will-
ful, cheeky antisociality of children, the fickleness and in-
constancy of alpacas and sheep, and the entropy-inducing
character of bad luck, or qhincha, are thought to be rela-
tively more removed from forms of mindedness understood
to be fully mature or disciplined.
The categorial account yields benefits 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, under-
standings about what it takes to act within a mature so-
cial world. According to an Aymara cultural imaginary, one
should 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 socially
recognized project or projects (not fickle), and respectful
and concerned about others (not mischievous and egois-
tic). 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 specific 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 ideolo-
gies 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 ac-
tors 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 pow-
erful 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, com-
mitment, 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
 American Ethnologist
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 serv-
ing as addressees, mediate a humannonhuman frontier
and, in doing so, help make possible a political life.
Ultimately, however, these perspectivesthe catego-
rial and the mediatedare two sides of the same coin. In a
methodological 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) only
to the extent that they are evoked (i.e., to the extent that
they 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 inevitably
one 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 humannonhuman fron-
tier. With an anchor in a particular semiotic practice, I
have 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 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 figurate
their participants (and referents) as (more or less or differ-
ently) 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 Foun-
dation Dissertation Fellowship. Don Kulicks fall 2008 seminar on
Animals and the Species Divide first 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 col-
leagues who have given me feedback on drafts of this article: Jay
321
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012
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 alve-
olar flap 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 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 nonanimal
addressees. One might more broadly speak of a transontological
pidgin.
5. One finds 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; Enfield 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 Mala-
gasy 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 figure for similar theo-
retical ends). More distally, the origin of this terminology has much
to do with the influence 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 Aymara-
speaking 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 inves-
tigation; and, second, such use allows for claims that are neither
excessively sweeping (pan-Andean) nor particular (community
specific).
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 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 lan-
guage, use French when ordering their cows out for working the rice
fields. 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 peas-
ants, the totally powerful cattle owner addresses his totally pow-
erless 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 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).
322
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 relation-
ships should develop semiotic approaches that do not exclusively
attend 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 theorize
signs in all of their semiotic modalities (regardless of the sign de-
ployers 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, 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 cliffhanger
metaphor.
14. A clue to the meaningfulness of animal-oriented inter-
jections inheres in the forms themselves. They belong to the
category interjection (see Bloomfield 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 linguis-
tic circles, considered to be at the border of the properly linguis-
tic. Early accounts, for example, explicitly considered them to be
the natural expression of emotion itself (DAtri 1995). Although in-
terjections 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 in-
terjections might primarily serve to communicate the speakers af-
fective 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 at-
tempt 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 difficulty explaining
how 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 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 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 1998:406411).
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
 Language and the frontiers of the human
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 ex-
perimental 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 appropri-
ate, as I note throughout.
22. I make reference here to the Silversteins (1987) classic work
on the conceptual domain that underlies the grammatical proper-
ties of noun phrases. The hierarchical character of this conceptual
domain bears some resemblance to the hierarchy of enminded be-
ings sketched out in the current project.
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Benjamin Smith
Center for Latin American Studies
University of Chicago
5736 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
bnjmn99@gmail.com