Time for a change?: Aymara horological innovation and the Poetics of Pacha Kuti

• In Event: Precarious Languages, Emerging Norms, and Linguistic Labor in Indigenous Media Part 1

Abstract

This paper examines the construal of time in the Aymara language, its surprising prominence within contemporary debates about decolonization in Bolivia, and, finally, the challenges time reckoning poses to efforts to implement a standard, dehispanicized Aymara for radio broadcast. The particularities of time in Andean languages have long been of interest to linguists and anthropologists. Spatial metaphors for time in Andean languages, for example, are typologically unusual for how their semantics link front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity. ‘Pacha’ in both Quechua and Aymara translates as ‘time,’ but also ‘space,’‘pacha’ being best understood as ‘spacetime.’ This term has become popularized from the widespread use of ‘Pacha Kuti,’ or ‘the turning over of spacetime,’ as one characterization of Bolivia’s indigenous political resurgence. Advancing competing construals of time has become one feature of contemporary Bolivian Aymara cultural activism, from reorienting clock faces on public buildings to run from right to left, to reconciling the Gregorian calendar with the solar, agricultural, Aymara one, to replacing Spanish-loan words for the days of the week with neologisms. These last two initiatives are particularly interesting in the radio context because of the role time and date play in establishing the fact of live, simultaneous broadcast. Broadcasters both oscillate between “Western” and “Aymara” calendric time and also adopt neologisms that paradoxically draw on Latin and Nordic etyma for their derivation.

Author

• Karl F Swinehart, University of Chicago