https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/rainforest-radio

Bernard Perley: You mention how radio as a medium introduced new domains for language use, but also as an affirmation of traditional forms of language use.  The value of radio is in its ability to broadcast across the region so that time (generational) and space (multi-sited) are chronotopically laminated during the course of the broadcast as an unfolding event.  The linguistic forms do double-duty, highlighting difference (language variety) while anchoring solidarity (cultural practices).  You close with a discussion of reweaving and remembering as aspects of reanimation and reclamation.  Can you discuss how the “re” words (meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’) index “recovery” while pointing toward Kichwa language futures?

Georgia Ennis: One of my goals in the book was to use terms that were locally meaningful to describe processes of language oppression and reclamation for Kichwa speakers in Napo. For instance, language activists in Napo often discussed their work as a form of revalorization, which resonates with how Wesley Leonard has describe reclamation (2012) as a community-directed and oriented praxis.

Many of the many concepts of the book hinge around this process of turning ‘again’ to previous sites of animation, memory, thought, mediation, and value. These are also future-oriented projects. Although their indexicality is often towards the past, and the return of prior systems of knowledge, practices, and ways of interacting, they simultaneously point towards the future. For Peirce (1955, 100), sign relationships included not just the ground between sign-vehicle and object, but also the interpretant. Gal and Irvine (2019, 88) recast these as “conjectures” about the meanings of signs, which depend upon pre-existing knowledge and extend knowledge as we interact with signs. It is in the emergence of conjectures that these re-oriented projects—re-weaving, re-membering, re-animating, re-claiming, re-valorizing_—have the potential to generate future meaning and action for language and culture. By bringing signs back into circulation again, they point to possibilities for future engagement with them.

Bernard Perley: You describe in detail the social relations that go into the radio programming and broadcasting of Napo Runa social relationships and cultural practices as a complex ecology of community supported media.  You frame the process as remediation; remediation having two aspects (at least).  You state that “people are also mediums of transmission” (14).  Can you elaborate on how that framing contributes to rethinking the “technologies of remediation” model?

Georgia Ennis: My thinking around remediation brings together linguistic anthropology and media studies. From linguistic anthropology, I combine ideas of linguistic relatively and Peircean semiotics to understand how we apprehend the world. For media scholars Bolter and Grusin, a medium “it is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (1999, 66). The concept of remediation hinges on the embedding of one medium in another medium (McLuhan 1964), which has some overlaps with the focus in linguistic anthropology on decontextualization and recontextualization (Kuipers 1990; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992) .

A common language ideology among English speakers is that face-to-face communication is unmediated in contrast to channels like the radio, which introduce an obvious medium between speakers. However, language and other sign systems do not just label the world but are integral to our interpretations of the content of the world (Sapir 1949 [1933]; Hill and Mannheim 1992). Language and other forms of semiosis are a further site of mediation.

In my framework, people are channels of remediation, who internalize what I think of as the content of other media—be that experience, other people, or their own thoughts. At the most basic level the content people remediate is their qualitative experiences of reality mediated through semiotic systems, which are themselves built from experience. Such qualitative experiences may also be remediated into speech or other sign systems. In our daily lives, we remediate experience through conjectures that build up interpretations of the world. We further remediate experience through multimodal and embodied citations. Like processes of decontextualization and recontextualization, remediation can also generate intertextual gaps or transformations across sites of production. This is one way that I conceive of the semiotics of intergenerational transmission and socialization. Social actors are mediums of transmission across space and time, which allow for further remediations and transformations of the social order.

Bernard Perley: In your introduction, you talk about being a good daughter.  One thing you shared was, “I had even tried to learn to weave shigra.  I remained clumsy, though, while Serafina and her daughters deftly wove knots they described as “daughters” upon “mother” threads to produce shigra…”.  You observe the daily wayusa upina, “was a time when children learned to be Napo Runa and when Napo Runa adults and elders reaffirmed their connections with each other and to the communicative world” (23).  Jumping to your chapter on affect, you discuss spicey speech or joking behavior as cultural intimacy and a form of play that often included you.  Your analysis of one joking account prompted Serafina’s musings on earthquakes.  I am wondering, it seems you acquired deep enough “cultural knowledge and intimacy to be ‘in on’ the joke” (191).  Can you describe how you became a reciprocal thread in the Kichwa lifeways—how did the intimacy you achieved contribute to Serafina’s interpretation and musings?

Georgia Ennis: For Serafina—my elder host in the village of Chaupishungo—I was a wakcha, which shaped my research with her. This is like the concept of orphan in English but also includes those who have lost just one parent, as well as spouses who have lost their partners. Serafina and I had both lost our mothers at relatively young ages. This is one of the reasons we became so close, and she came to see me as a daughter—and I also came to see her as a mother. The mornings that I spent by the fire talking with Serafina and listening to the radio with her family were times in which I was socialized into Serafina’s knowledge about how to live a good life through the life stories she chose to share with me.

This was also intimacy that grew through time. Following my first year of fieldwork, Serafina became more intent about sharing her life history and experiences, particularly the privileged traditional and historical knowledge shared among family. Where she had once told me she did remember her elder’s narratives, she began to share them more openly. I am now analyzing some of our conversations about this transition in terms of “narrative refusal”—moments when knowledge is hidden or silenced for inappropriate audiences (see also Simpson 2007). This is also why I write less explicitly about many Kichwa narratives—I was entrusted with them because of specific relationships, relationships that my readers may not have.

My presence, and my emphasis on speaking with Serafina to learn from her, included other family members, who shaped our discussions. Her daughters often joined us and contributed to our conversations. This approach also unintentionally excluded others, who felt that Serafina was not interested in counseling them like this, and who did not awaken early with us. As a graduate student, my job was to engage with Serafina and other elders; I received financial and social support for it, in ways that were almost completely foreclosed to young people in Napo. These were significant ethnographic moments that invited me to recognize how privileged my position was. I sometimes still wonder, did Serafina give me such intimate access because I paid rent to live in her household? Was our relationship as meaningful to her as it was to me? These are questions surrounding anthropological engagement, intimacy, and the ways our positionality informs our research, which are significant to me as a feminist anthropologist (Behar and Gordon 1995). Our ethnographic intimacy emerged from the relationship we forged and the habitus I developed through our time together. Other members of her family have remained important and close interlocuters, even after her death.

Bernard Perley: In chapter 3, you delve into language ideologies and ontologies.  On ontologies, you state “an ontological approach emphasizes the subjective assumptions of the nature of language for the people with whom we work and decenters the taken-for-granted assumptions about language of linguists and anthropologists trained within our own epistemic traditions” (126).  You describe A New Path program that revalorizes and is responsive to “many of the ontologies and ideological assemblages of language found elsewhere in Napo” (131).  Specifically speaking, what are the decentered language ontologies of Kichwa you once took for granted as an anthropologist trained in your epistemic tradition?

Georgia Ennis: I write about several in the book. One I have continued thinking with regards circulation and accessibility of language. Although my training considered ethical issues in language documentation, as well as the limitations of Boasian salvage ethnography (Boas 1889; Rice 2011; Perley 2012), I was also shaped by ontologies of language as a system available to all. Linguistic documentation is often premised on accessible archiving, making language and knowledge available to wider audiences. There is greater acceptance of community protocols in archival projects (Christen 2012), but the creation of open archives remains a goal for many linguists and funders (Ennis and Debenport 2025).

Yet, for my Kichwa interlocuters, language and narrative were significant sources of knowledge and personal power, which they closely guard. When I started my research, I was eager to record traditional stories that I had read in collections of Amazonian narratives. I was often told that people ‘did not know’ or ‘did not remember’ such stories. I also found that my interlocuters like Serafina shared more about these stories as our relationship deepened. Understanding these ontologies drew me into new relationships of responsibility relative to my data, which is actually the significant cultural knowledge of my interlocuters (Ennis et al. 2024).

Just as some activists have adopted models for revitalization based in language standardization conflicting with local ontologies, others, including A New Path, have turned to broadcast technologies that make knowledge more accessible. This is a site of ontological transformation and debate in Napo. In my recent work, I have developed a greater attitude of refusal (Simpson 2007) out of respect for the knowledge protocols of many of my interlocuters.

Bernard Perley: Your framing of the social entanglements of the Kichwa language as shifting ecologies is a good way to describe the environmental conditions that potentiate mutually influential transformation in diverse ecologies.  You also describe the porousness of those ecologies of new media, new generations, and new ideas as a lived reality of contemporary Napo communities.  You state in your epilogue, “The introduction of new digital technologies involving such media suggest a more hopeful future, in which language and culture are remembered, rather than forgotten, albeit in new modalities and regimes of value.”  (238). This comment struck me for the tension between an implied uncertainty about Kichwa futures and a deus ex machina hope for remediated futures.  Can you discuss the tension and how it relates to language reclamation projects in general?

Georgia Ennis: Reclaiming languages is an uncertain prospect, because it often involves not only reconstituting a code but countering the forms of oppression that have reconfigured how and when language is used (Meek 2010). Uncertainty and hope shape the experience of language reclamation. But what is technology’s role in this hopeful future?

Communication technologies can provide a source of emergent vitalities in language reclamation projects. However, I am no techno-optimist, who imagines that technology will “save” a language. As you (2012) have pointed out, archives can create “zombie languages,” disembodied from their speakers and inaccessible to communities. Perhaps we will soon interact with disembodied AI “zombie speakers” of Indigenous languages. Such a future may not be far off, when marketing firms are already using AI to generate “Indigenous” influencers. Gerald Roche has also written that enthusiasm for AI should be tempered, as “underlying economic, social, and political, relationships” shape the possibilities of many communities to interact with such tools (Roche 2024). Simply creating an AI model that can translate between one code and another does not guarantee that tool will be useful to a language community, and it raises larger questions about the transparent commensurability of translation (Mannheim 2015) or community protocols for data sovereignty (Carroll, Duarte, and Max Liboiron 2024). I am skeptical in many ways about remediated futures.

What is significant about media technologies is that they mediate between people (Askew 2002). Media can become focal points for interaction in and around a language, both in production and reception. Such technologies generate new questions and concerns in language reclamation, which should be clarified on a case-by-case basis. Rather than a deus ex machina hope that remediation into new contexts and communicative modalities will “save” languages, media technologies can provide hopeful, potential avenues for further mediation between people.

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