Dissertation Research: Linguistic Exogamy and Ethnonationalism in Northwestern Amazonia

语言变化是一个民族或社会群体主要语言的变化，在新大陆，语言变化的特点是从土著语言转向英语、西班牙语和葡萄牙语等殖民地语言。在巴西的亚马逊西北部，土著城市化伴随着一种不同的语言变化，整个区域的许多不同的土著语言减少到只有两到三种，与葡萄牙语一起在城市公共领域使用。要理解这种相当不同的语言变化--这里是不同土著语言之间的变化--有助于了解语言差异是该地区种族差异的主要标志。语言异族通婚只发生在说不同语言的人之间，这是亚马逊西北部特有的社会制度，确保了该地区过去(现在仍然是)多种语言的现状。本文以该地区的民族志文献为比较基础，通过一位文化人类学家的研究项目，考察了城市土著社区的社会、空间和语言组织，这些相关的语言和种族意识形态在城市移民的婚姻实践中是统一的。这项研究将集中在圣加布里埃尔·达·卡乔埃拉的三个土著社区，包括参与者观察、集中采访、互动的数字视频记录，以及对居住和婚姻模式的调查。该项目是一个很好的案例研究，反驳了对土著人民“文化适应”的单向理解，认为这种理解是通过与民族国家的制度化接触、融入资本主义网络和城市化而发生的。正如它们在全球各地出现的那样，这种过程通常被认为在一个单一语言的语言社区中有其必要的终点，这个社区将民族国家及其公民与土著人口区分开来，如果有的话，是基于对种族的理解。在亚马逊西北部的土著城市中心，这三个元素--民族国家、资本主义和城市化--都在发挥作用，但多语言主义仍然蓬勃发展，与语言挂钩的种族愿景也是如此。这项研究希望提供一个更细微的描述，说明土著信仰和制度如何影响土著人民成为国家公民和居民的形式。

Language shift, a change in the primary language of an ethnic or social group, has been characterized in the New World by a shift from indigenous languages to colonial vernaculars like English, Spanish and Portuguese. In the Northwest Amazon of Brazil, indigenous urbanization has been accompanied by a different kind of language shift, in which the many different indigenous languages of the region as a whole are reduced to just two or three which, along with Portuguese are spoken in the urban public sphere. To understand this rather different kind of language shift - here a shift between different indigenous languages - it helps to know that linguistic differences are the primary markers of ethnic differences in the region. Linguistic exogamy, where marriage occurs only between speakers of different languages, is the characteristic social institution of the Northwest Amazon, and ensures that multilingualism was (and still is) the status quo in the region. Using the ethnographic literature on the region as a comparative basis, this dissertation research project by a cultural anthropologist examines the social, spatial and linguistic organization of urban indigenous communities in terms of these related ideologies of language and ethnicity as they are united in the marital practices of urban immigrants. The research will be focused on three indigenous neighborhoods of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira, and will involve participant observation, focused interviews, digital video records of interactions, and a survey of residence and marriage patterns. The project serves as a good case study to counter unidirectional understandings of the "acculturation" of indigenous peoples seen to occur through institutionalized contact with the nation-state, integration into capitalist networks and urbanization. Such processes, as they appear across the globe, are often thought to have their necessary endpoint in a monolingual speech community that divides the nation-state and its citizenry from the indigenous population, if at all, by a "race" based understanding of ethnicity. In the indigenous urban centers of the Northwest Amazon these three elements - nationstates, capitalism and urbanization - are all in play and yet multilingualism still thrives, as does a vision of ethnicity linked to language. The study hopes to offer a more nuanced account of how native beliefs and institutions condition the forms in which indigenous peoples become citizens of and residents in the nation.