Brownbag Lunch Series Presentation: Nicholas Emlen (Ph.D. student, University of Michigan) “Trilingualism and Coffee Production on the Andean-Amazonian Agricultural Frontier of Southern Peru”
The Andes and Amazonia are often considered separate and historically distinct geographical regions. However, new linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and archaeological evidence suggests that the highland-lowland boundary is in fact very porous. Today, the burgeoning coffee industry in Southern Peru has brought tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking Andean agricultural colonists into the lowland region traditionally inhabited by the Matsigenka people. In this talk, Nicholas will discuss the social nature of Matsigenka-Quechua-Spanish trilingual communication in a small frontier community formed by the intermarriage of Andean migrant coffee farmers and Matsigenkas from across the agricultural frontier. This case study is part of a broader effort to examine the linguistic, social, and historical nature of the Andean-Amazonian relationship.
Nicholas Emlen is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan, scheduled to finish in March 2014. During his 19 months of fieldwork on the Andean-Amazonian borderland of Southern Peru from 2009-2012, he lived in a small coffee-producing frontier community and collected linguistic and ethnographic data on multilingual interactions in Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish. He is currently planning upcoming projects on the complex Matsigenka noun classification system and the effects of the nascent Southern Peruvian cocaine industry on Matsigenka people. Before graduate school, Nicholas worked as the director of the Endangered Language Fund, a small organization that supports collaborations between scholars and speakers of endangered languages.
