This chapter focuses on micro encounters engendered by the Yale Peruvian Expedition, exploring via textual and photographic evidence the racial scientific research that shaped encounters in Peru between expedition members and Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, some of whom served as the expedition’s workers and assistants. Reading these sources in relation to the broader context of rural unrest in the Cusco region, the emergence of an urban and university-based indigenista movement that promoted the study of Indigenous peoples, and the rise of American-led expedition science, Warren questions how different groups imagined and contested the moral and ethical dimensions of such work. He argues that when measured and photographed, Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects ultimately subverted the expedition’s efforts to document accurate visual depictions of racial types. Drawing on the concept of ethnographic refusal in Indigenous Studies while also identifying other forms of engagement, Warren criticizes the univocal conception of moral fields as the possession of imperial researchers but not of Indigenous and Mestizo people subjected to their gaze.

This chapter offers an overview of how indigenous Latin American ethics has centered on knowledge about the environment and earth. It proposes that although this is not a new conceptualization, it can be made more visible by examining the long process of imposition of colonial ethical values. With a focus on the centrality of the earth in indigenous ethics and education, this chapter discusses this process, from how early colonial texts like grammars and dictionaries aimed to replace indigenous ethics to bilingual language programs. In conclusion it suggests that indigenous educational practices have persisted through colonization and around the margins of top-down, state-mandated approaches, and are emerging in indigenous pedagogies that foreground the ethical dimensions of relationships with the earth.

While engaged in helping rebuild a post-Napoleonic Prussia and Europe after his Roman years, Humboldt pursued several linguistic projects: a linguistic cartography of Europe applicable to other continents; initial analyses of Nahuatl; grammatical sketches of seven other Mexican languages; a programmatic comparative-contrastive statement of linguistics in “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent;” an in-depth analysis of Quechua of the Andes plus grammatical sketches for Araucano (Mapuche), Guaraní, and Muisca of South America; comparative studies of Aztecan, Mayan, or Tupian language families and linguistic areas; introduction to Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga grammars of eastern North America; noun incorporation versus polysynthesis; growing understanding of verbal morphology, including the zero morpheme; “inner forms” of American languages; attention to language contact and also to extralinguistic, sociocultural scenes and wider contexts as part of comprehensive descriptions and explanations of differences and changes in languages without literary traditions in substitution of historical records.

Over the years, Humboldt repeatedly expressed intentions to write a book on American languages. Although he did not follow through with his plans, we can reconstruct to considerable detail what his book would have looked like by building on his “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent” and other Americanistic writings. Humboldt’s book would accordingly have included the following major sections: an introduction addressing the comparative-contrastive study of American languages; a unit on their sociohistorical embeddings; a part on historical comparisons (with attention to their phonologies); a section on grammar (with attention to its internal analysis); and a unit on linguistic typology. Another topic might have been language contact. Major samples would have come from Nahuatl, other languages of Mexico (Cora, Tarahumara, Huastec, Totonac, Otomí, and perhaps Yucatec), Quechua and other languages of South America (Araucano [Mapuche], Guaraní, and Muisca), plus Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga of northeastern North America.

Chapter 4 focuses on a selection of bestselling genres on the colonial book market in Peru by analysing them in terms of production modes, materiality, and potential users. It exposes how a focus on the colonial market must necessarily include the entire array of print publications and, in particular, the small printing jobs relating to local affairs that penetrated various spheres of urban life. While the many small-format reprints of prayer booklets prove that religion was a popular subject for books, an unpublished calendar enterprise serves as a case study to assess knowledge of religious and scientific nature in print. In line with hypotheses of a Catholic Enlightenment, the chapter turns from religion to practical knowledge with an analysis of manuals and how-to books, revealing a shared canon of reading material within the empire. Depending on local relatedness, titles of each of the genres originated either from local workshops or as imports.

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.

Origins of contact varieties are at the center of language contact research, focusing on the dynamics between the population structure’s social ecology and the linguistic phenomena that emerge. This chapter proposes an alternative hypothesis to the emergence of Andean Spanish, a macro-dialect spoken in several countries in western South America and product of contact between Spanish and Andean languages, particularly Quechua, the most spoken in the Americas. It argues that contrasts between the linguistic evidence present in colonial documents authored by Indigenous individuals and those present in the speech of Andean Spanish speakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal different types of contact phenomena. The colonial data include linguistic evidence of lexical borrowing (primarily cultural) and grammatical phenomena proper of second language speakers (e.g., number and gender agreement, vocalic alternation). The post-colonial data include evidence of grammaticalization phenomena, revealing a case of contra-hierarchical grammatical influence (from the minoritized Indigenous language to the hegemonic language). The contrast between these two historical periods’ internal social ecologies reveals specific (types of) social conditions that help explain the focusing and emergence of the contact (macro-)dialect known as Andean Spanish.

Andean linguistics has underestimated the role of states in the spreading of languages and dialectal fusion processes. This chapter deals with the spread of Quechua in the Inca and colonial eras. It first reconstructs the communicative functions performed by different varieties of this language in the Inca empire and brings to light the factors that determined the formation of koine varieties and their rapid diffusion. Mass migrations led by the Inca state have been the main factor in these processes of koineization. This chapter then shows how the colonial regime drastically intensified the centrifugal dynamics that have been exerted since the Inca era on the Andean communities, making the Spanish economic sphere (cities, mines, and haciendas) the focus of a new expansion and vernacularization of Quechua. Finally, it compares the historical-linguistic evolution of three Andean regions in colonial times (Ecuador, Central Peru and the Ayacucho region of Peru).

As Spain expanded its colonial empire, Spanish language and culture were introduced throughout the colonies. In this contribution, Ithe author explores the socio-historical factors that led to Spanish becoming a global language. From an evolutionary perspective, it is proposed that the arrival of an Old World cultural and linguistic community to the New World was the introduction of an invasive cultural and linguistic community into a new environment not equipped to handle it. This collision of cultures and languages led to an unintended result, the large-scale decimation of the indigenous communities, described by Diamond (1999: 354) as the ‘largest population replacement in the last 13,000 years'. Another, related consequence was that the Spanish language dominated during the colonial period, and since has continued to be the de facto main or exclusive language as the colonies became nation states. It has also been instrumental in a wide variety of political movements, as well as in the development of cultural expression. While being the second most widely spoken world language, Spanish regional varieties have emerged that reflect the local linguistic ecologies of areas where they are spoken.